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John Scalzi – The Consuming Fire – American Writers Museum – October 22, 2018

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John Scalzi is one sharp, wacky dude.

He’s won two Hugo awards, and even his cat has a blog, which Scalzi says has 14,000 followers. Another 13,961 and I’ll catch up.

Scalzi rolls a ten-sided die at the beginning of each speaking engagement to decide what to talk about, so that it’s not the same every time and he doesn’t get bored.

Number 1 came up – “Read from an upcoming work.” He read from School for Hostages.

Number 5 came up -“Speak authoritatively and persuasively for several moments on a topic chosen by the audience (even if I don’t know anything about that topic).” Scalzi refers to this as improv mansplaining. Audience members raise their hands as soon as they decide that he’s full of BS. When a majority of the audience has their hands raised, he stops. However, the audience loved his BS so much that they kept their hands down long after he had lost all credibility discussing wombats.

Number 8 came up – “Give a Mini-Clinic on how to write a novel in just (mumble mumble) weeks!” Scalzi wrote The Consuming Fire (80,000 words) in two weeks (though the story was floating around in his head before that), necessitated by his mistake about the manuscript’s due date. He said he locked himself in a room, put a block on social media and the internet, and asked his wife to slip food under the door, but relented to his wife’s demand that he leave the room to use the bathroom when he needed to relieve himself.

Scalzi didn’t say whether the room had a window, but downplayed the saying that a writer is working when he’s staring out the window. He suggested that sometimes he’s just looking at squirrels.

I was hoping zero would come up – “Reveal the Meaning of Life.” I may have to follow his book tour around the country to get that insight.

Gypsy – Porchlight Music Theater – October 20, 2018

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I saw a production of Gypsy years ago where, among other offbeat casting decisions, a 13-year-old boy played the role of Mr. Goldstone. The Porchlight production was appreciably better, with special acknowledgement of the great E. Faye Butler and the strippers who brought the house down with their rendition of You Gotta Get a Gimmick.

The actors also lent their skills to rapid-fire set changes that reminded me of the Keystone Kops in their helter skelter, yet precision ballet that barely avoids collisions, though there was one moment when someone moving the proscenium arch representing the theaters Lousie played in knocked it into a dress rack that then almost went flying into the wings, without, however, anyone missing a beat. Live theater at its best.

Gypsy has an animal slant, what with a dancing cow, Rose’s dog and the song Little Lamb. Parts of the cow spend a lot of time on stage, which may have led to the guy sitting behind me snorting throughout the second act as if he were a bull in heat. Or, he just may have had a nasal problem.

This was the third show I’ve seen in the last few weeks that featured a dog on stage, the others being Legally Blonde and Nell Gwynn. And The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time also is playing in town. So, for now, you don’t have to go to Broadway to make a living as a canine actor. But after Illinois banned circus elephants, can dogs be far behind?

Or children.  Like many states, Illinois has laws regarding minors employed in entertainment-related performances.  The kids in the Porchlight production were great, although, unfortunately, they weren’t around for the curtain call (presumably home in bed) to get their due.  I only wish the kid I saw play Mr. Goldstone, way back when, had been denied a work permit.

 

 

Legally Blonde – Paramount Theater – October 17, 2018

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I’d never been to the Paramount Theater in Aurora before, and I’m not sure it was worth an hour drive each way to get their Bosco Cheddar Cheese-Stuffed Pretzel Breadsticks, but it’s a great venue (built in 1931 and beautifully restored) and I wanted to see the show, which didn’t disappoint.  Also, parking was cheap.

Legally Blonde, the musical, is pretty faithful to the movie, and the differences only make it better. I have this on the best authority, a woman I chatted with in the lobby after the show, who said she’d seen the movie 35 times, a hazard, she said, of having daughters. In turn I assured her that the play was a faithful depiction of law school.

The show’s lyrics are wonderful, from Blood in the Water to There! Right There!, and the Greek Chorus of high energy women inside Elle’s head provides non-stop entertainment.

The exercise guru defendant’s tour de force, Whipped into Shape, as performed by Jenna Coker-Jones, where she sings while jumping rope, exhausted me, but not her, and left me wondering about divas who lip sync during dance routines that aren’t nearly as athletic.

The use of a giant drop-down iPhone screen numerous times throughout the show is brilliant (including the live cast selfie at the end), my only complaint being that I probably missed something, either on the phone or on the stage, because there’s so much going on.  Also, I thought we were told to turn off our phones.

And, the part of the muscular UPS delivery guy from the movie is expanded in the play to provide additional comedy, and filler between scenes to allow costume changes. I know it didn’t advance the plot for him to get down from the stage, parade past and flirt with the women in the front row of seats, and, then, when reentering the stage, pose and announce “I have a package.”

Mystery Writer – American Writers Museum – October 15, 2018

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I was working for free, again, but the investigation was important.

I bogarted my way past the first floor security desk and climbed the stairs to the second floor to avoid getting cornered in an elevator.

I waved as I hurried past the museum staff, trying to look as if I were on an important mission, but not as if I were trying to avoid their attention. My father used to tell me that you could get in anywhere if you wore a suit and carried a clipboard. Now you can do it with blue jeans and an iPad.

I captured my usual seat, which had been left vacant out of good fortune, or perhaps out of some acknowledgement that it was my seat, based upon prior events. While in law school, a friend and I braved sitting in the university president’s box at football games enough times that we became fast friends with the president’s wife and the security guards thought we belonged, kicking others out of the seats when they saw us coming.

Upon entry, the author immediately began reading passages from her latest book. I didn’t find them particularly compelling, which had been my opinion regarding one of her earlier books, but as I seem to be in the minority in this regard, I may need to try another.

She then launched into a Q and A that revealed what brought her to Chicago from Kansas; a PhD in History; her early employment by an insurance company as fodder for her first book; what authors she reads; her morning routine that leads to a theoretical, often ignored, starting time of her writing day; her coffee addiction; and that her husband was a protege of Enrico Fermi.

If Sara Paretsky is a judge again next year at the Printers Row Lit Fest Mystery Writers of America Flash Fiction Contest, I now have lots of tidbits about her personal life to throw into my story to grab her attention.

Little Shop of Horrors – Drury Lane Theater – October 14, 2018

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“Feed me.” That’s all you really need to know about the plot of a show that only runs two hours, including intermission, during which excellent chocolate chip cookies were available for purchase.

The play (based on the 1960 movie) originated Off Off-Broadway in 1982.  I believe there have to be be three Offs before its birth place is considered to be outside the state of New York.

Music and lyrics are by Menken and Ashman (his brilliant dark side) – The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin – that’s all you need to know about that.

Lorenzo Rush, Jr., who is magnificently omnipresent in Chicagoland theater, as Audrey II. You hear, and love, but don’t see him until he comes out for a bow at the end of the show wearing a t-shirt that says Voice of Audrey II. He would make Levi Stubbs proud, although I was disappointed that the play does not include the song Mean Green Mother From Outer Space, written for the 1986 movie version, and sung by Stubbs of The Four Tops. I almost saw Stubbs in concert in 1968, but he was sick so I wound up seeing The Three Tops.

The 1960, very campy original, replete with malapropisms (Does it have a scientific name? Of course, but who can denounce it?), non-musical film of The (later dropped) Little Shop of Horrors was, in part, a Dragnet takeoff, narrated by Sgt. Joe Fink, shot by Roger Corman on a budget of $30,000, in two days, using sets that had been left standing from A Bucket of Blood. And one of the actors was a young Jack Nicholson, in a three and a half minute scene, as the masochistic dental patient played by Bill Murray in the 1986 Frank Oz version of the movie.

I’ve seen people eat people in Sweeney Todd, and plants from outer space kill people in The Day of the Triffids, but none of them leave you smiling like a hungry man-eating plant in a flower shop.

 

Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – Gordon S. Wood – Newberry Library – October 11, 2018

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I knew I was listening to a Pulitzer Prize-winning author because Wood’s talk was littered with a wide range of words like apoplectic, turgid, egalitarian, dissimulation, and implacable, though, when he threw in tumult, I felt like I was back home in the kitchen of my childhood.

According to historian Wood, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had very disparate personalities and held differing opinions on almost everything, but one thing they could agree upon was a hatred of Alexander Hamilton, and that was long before it cost $500 a seat to get to know him.

One of the many things that differentiated Adams and Jefferson was that, whereas Jefferson was reserved, Adams “lacked the gift of silence.” Now I know what to give my friends for the holidays.

In discussing the letters between Adams and Jefferson, Wood deterred from his historical accounts by suggesting that future generations wouldn’t even be able to read their correspondence because cursive writing is no longer taught. I’m not sure that follows. I know the converse isn’t accurate, as I learned cursive in school, but can’t read a lot of people’s handwriting, including my own. In any event, cursive, at least as of a couple years ago, wasn’t dead yet, just as if it were a Monty Python character,

Jefferson also corresponded, and, according to Wood, flirted with Adam’s wife Abigail. In a 1785 letter to her, Jefferson wrote, in reference to some items he was purchasing for her in Paris: “They offered me a fine Venus; but I thought it out of taste to have two at table at the same time.”  Quite the charmer.  If only he’d lose the wig.

Finally, in case you were wondering, Wood, when asked by an audience member, said, given their personalities, he would rather have a drink with John Adams than Thomas Jefferson. Surprisingly, he offered no opinion about Samuel Adams.

Nell Gwynn – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – October 9, 2018

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Nell Gwynn and Tootsie. Almost indistinguishable. Both plays deal with, among other things, plays within plays. The play within Tootsie is a bastardization of Romeo and Juliet (renamed Juliet’s Nurse), changed to accentuate the part of a man, who is posing as a woman unbeknownst to the rest of the actors in, or audience of Juliet’s Nurse.

Several of the plays mentioned within Nell Gwynn are rewritten to accentuate her parts, in more ways than one, as she takes the place previously occupied in the theatrical world of merry old England by men who posed as women, though those men were known to be men by their audiences and fellow actors, unlike in Shakespeare in Love or Victor, Victoria, where women posed as men posing as women on stage.

In any event, David Bedella did a great job as the actor who had always played, if not possessed, the women’s parts. I’m sure Bedella, or do I mean his character, or both(?), would make a great Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, who is always played by a man, because, as explained by creator John Waters, it’s a secret the audience has, that the other characters don’t know. He actually said cast, not characters, but I’ve already made this confusing enough.

Nell Gwynn, the play, is based upon real characters and real events (I’m pretty sure Tootsie isn’t), though extreme liberties are taken to make it an entertaining evening, which leads me to the bubonic plague.

There’s a joke in the play (or was it in the play within the play?) about the plague, which meets with feigned disapproval, whereupon Bedella asks of his compatriots, “too soon?”. Big laugh, unless, perhaps, you know someone who died from the plague. But, as always I provide important research, having found a pseudoscientific inquiry about when a joke is too soon.

 

Tootsie – Cadillac Palace Theater – October 7, 2018

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The Tootsie Roll company was founded in Chicago in 1907 by Leo Hirshfield. This has absolutely nothing to do with the musical Tootsie.

Al Jolson sang Toot, Toot, Tootsie! in The Jazz Singer in 1927. This also has absolutely nothing to do with the musical Tootsie.

Mrs. Doubtfire was a 1993 movie, which has never been turned into a play (although it’s under consideration), starring Robin Williams, in which he pretended to be a woman to get a job as a nannie for his ex-wife. And, although that movie has absolutely nothing to do with the musical Tootsie, an inordinate number of people attending Tootsie seemed to think they had come to see a theatrical version of Mrs. Doubtfire, as evidenced by confused discussions overheard during intermission.

I guess it could have been worse. They could have thought they were watching a revival of the play Sugar, based on the movie Some Like it Hot (more men pretending to be women), or wondered why they weren’t seeing Al Jolson sucking on a Tootsie Roll.

My favorite bits in the show were an x-rated song by Tootsie’s roommate, a rant of a song by Tootsie’s friend Sandy, and some dance instruction by the director of the show within the show that channelled Robin Williams, but still, no, this wasn’t Mrs. Doubtfire.

Santino Fontana was a terrific Tootsie. And no one confused him with Santino Corleone, Carlos Santana, or Fontana, Wisconsin. However, his part of Greg on Crazy ex Girl Friend is being taken over by Skyler Astin, which is sure to produce some confusion.

Tootsie is scheduled to open in previews on Broadway in March 29, 2019. Though its competition in the musical category may include Beetlejuice, Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of the Temptations, The Cher Show, and King Kong, I believe that Tootsie, which is a laugh a minute, will win, at a minimum, some individual Tony awards. But who knows. The part of King Kong hasn’t been cast yet.

1,000 Books to Read Before You Die – James Mustich – American Writers Museum – October 4, 2018

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At the end of the 1960 version of the movie The Time Machine, Mrs. Watchett, the housekeeper of H.G. Wells’s alter ego George, discovers three empty spaces on the book shelves. George’s friend Filby asks what three books Watchett would have taken (to aid the Eloi in the year 802,701 A.D.), a question that goes unanswered.

Also unanswered, at least for me, is whether The Time Machine, or any other Wells work, is included in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. I didn’t think to ask Musitch and the alphabetical by author excerpt on Amazon doesn’t make it to W. Perhaps I should travel back in time and ask Musitch, or, I could buy the book.

Interestingly, Wells’s book doesn’t pose the question about what books to take. And the 2002 movie remake starring Guy Pearce circumvents it by including a photonic librarian in the future who has the knowledge contained in all the books ever published. That’s more memory than my iPhone.

Pearce also plays a character in the movie Memento, suffering from anterograde amnesia, who has short term memory loss approximately every five minutes, so really no point in reading any books. And, while it seems like that would make learning lines difficult, as Marlon Brando demonstrated, memorization is unnecessary as long as you have a fellow actor like Robert Duvall in the Godfather holding up cue cards against his body for your benefit.

Brando said it helped with his spontaneity.  I wonder if I could have used that excuse in order to bring a cheat sheet to an exam. I recall that Woody Allen said he was thrown out of college for cheating on a metaphysics exam when he looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to him.

Musitch demonstrated a healthy memory, rattling off knowledge and opinion about books and authors I’ve never heard of, but I bet I know more about Seinfeld, Law and Order, and The Big Bang Theory episodes than he does.

 

Chicago Shakespeare Theater – Season Preview Party – October 2, 2018

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The Urban Dictionary defines ghost as “to avoid someone until they get the picture and stop contacting you.” If only that worked with robocalls. Americans received 30 billion robocalls last year and a friend of mine insists that all of them were to him. But I digress.

Long before it became a verb, Shakespeare wrote about ghosts in five of his plays. And Dickens famously wrote about several apparitions in “A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.” (How many of you knew the whole name of the novella?)

The Chicago Shakespeare Theater unites with Dickens every year to present “A Q Brothers’ Christmas Carol”. The 2018 production is one of this season’s shows that was highlighted at the preview party. I go every year. Do yourself a big favor and see it (even if you think you don’t like hip-hop).

Barbara Gaines, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Artistic Director, asked the audience how many of them had seen productions of the company in the Ruth Page Auditorium, where it resided for 12 years before moving to its present location in 1999. A smattering of people raised their hands, which inspired me to shout out to Gaines, after only one glass of wine, “What about the Red Lion?”, a pub that is owned by an friend of mine and that also is known for being haunted by ghosts.

Rather than ghosting me or asking staff to remove me from the room, Gaines asked me to repeat myself, and when I did, and she realized that I knew about the company’s birth on the rooftop of the Lincoln Avenue bar in 1986, she rose from her chair, and bowed and raised her hands in praise to me, whereupon Creative Producer Rick Boynton, who was on stage with her, jokingly took it one step further by asking if anyone had been to Barbara’s living room. A woman sitting in front of me raised her hand, thereby unceremoniously putting me in my place.