Beautiful: The Carole King Musical – Marriott Theatre – December 3, 2023

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For those of us of a certain age, Carole King’s music is fundamental. And, for me, seeing a member of the extremely -talented Mueller family playing a part in King’s story is also basic.

In the first national tour I saw Abby Mueller, replacing her Tony award-winning sister Jessie in the part of King, and now I’ve seen brother Andrew as Gerry Goffin, after loving him in the off-beat Ernest Shackleton Loves Me earlier this year.

I also have now seen Erica Stephan, who plays Cynthia Weil, in four shows in just over a year – Clue, Cabaret (Jeff Award as Sally Bowles), Damn Yankees and Beautiful. There’s a reason she’s so in demand.

But, of course, Kaitlyn Davis, who, based on her bio, apparently was born to channel Carole King, is the star. And though the music is what draws people in, as it does in any jukebox musical, the show provides enough story such that the biggest round of applause of the night was when Davis, as King, tells her husband and lyricist Goffin, that she’s through with him and his philandering ways and sends him on his way.

Another appeal of the show for me is the complementary story of Weil and Barry Mann, King’s friends from the start of her career, who also wrote a myriad of hit songs, half a dozen of which are part of the score, and also are in the Songwriters and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame, and who, unlike the other couple, remained married for 62 years, until Weil’s death this year.

Bears vs. Cardinals: The NFL’s Oldest Rivalry – Chicago History Museum – December 2, 2023

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Had I known a few months ago that I would be attending this program, I wouldn’t have thrown out the autographed Charlie Trippi football I’d been saving for most of my life after having determined that it had no intrinsic value and was taking up valuable space that some equally worthless keepsake might be afforded.

I’m pretty sure I could have found a home for it with the speaker/author Joe Ziemba, who brought along some other memorabilia and made reference to the treasured boxes of related materials he had been gifted prior to writing this, his latest book.

Ziemba’s biography noted that, because of his knowledge of the early days of the professional game, he has been a resource for articles or reports in a number of well-known publications, including Sports Illustrated. In regard to that attribution, I can attest that it was, in fact, a real person standing before me, and not the avatar of a computer in the back room.

Ziemba covered the time frame from slightly before the 1920 founding of the NFL through 1959, after which the Cardinals started their westward trek that ultimately led to Arizona, a retirement exurb of Chicago.

The already obviously well-informed audience was treated to numerous interesting and humorous anecdotes, along with digs at Packer fans, player photographs and pictures of contracts and ledgers from the less-affluent days of the NFL, when players might make $75 a game and no one had ever heard of CTE.

Almost End-of-Year Reflections

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Another year gone by (almost – I decided to be the first kid on the block to send out my, now traditional, as in two years in a row, missive, with the anticipation that nothing worth mentioning will happen in the next month, just like in the previous eleven).

For a change, I didn’t need to get an MRI. Instead, I opted for a healthy dose of radiation from a CT scan. I highly recommend the mocha-flavored barium milk shake. (Over 50 years ago I had a summer job in a hospital x-ray department that gave me the opportunity to prepare barium enemas. Those were the days.)

Also back in the 70s, before CT scans became all the rage, I had a precursor EMI scan of my head, which, to quote Dizzy Dean when he had an x-ray of his head in 1934 after getting struck by a thrown ball, “revealed nothing.”

As a protest to the LIV Golf tour, this was my first year not striking a golf ball since before Saudi Arabia even had golf courses (they have 10 now).

I don’t miss it at all, and not having to clean my clubs has left me with more time to not clean other things as well, though I have made some upgrades to my humble abode, including increasing the number of remote controls to seven, that I’m aware of.

I replaced my piano with one that has functional pedals, one of which I’ve actually learned to use. I’m fairly certain that no one uses the middle sostenuto pedal, but the rule of three demands its presence.

I wrote the 6th edition of my arcane book (put your wallet away, it’s not yet on the market), which I believe is no worse than last all time in its category in regard to sales and which is now only 1299 print editions (and perhaps 200 million or so copies sold) behind A Tale of Two Cities, according to the WorldCat network of library content and services.

But, according to a friend of the author, Dickens’s music master gave up teaching him the piano, declaring: “He had no aptitude for music, and it was robbing his parents to continue giving him lessons.” So there!

Young Frankenstein – Mercury Theater – Nov. 12, 2023

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One of my favorite lines from the movie Young Frankenstein is Frau Blücher (pause for sound of horse neighing) saying “He Vas My Boyfriend.” Mel Brooks, genius that he is, took that line and turned it into a whole song for the musical.

This is the second production of YF that I’ve seen. While I have a special attachment to the first one, as I had occasion, through happenstance, to later play golf with the actor who played Igor in it, I thoroughly enjoyed this first-rate version.

Though the entire cast was excellent, I particularly loved the way Andrew MacNaughton inhabited the monster, though I would have been even further amused at an attempt to capture his early efforts at speaking in a captioned performance.

Mary Robin Roth, as Blücher, was once again terrific, as she was in her recent polar-opposite Jeff Award-winning performance as Fraulein Schneider in Porchlight’s Cabaret.

And during the curtain call, even the cast seemed to rejoice in the work done by Sam Shankman, who normally plays the blind hermit, but who, as understudy, flawlessly stepped into the title role.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra – Symphony Center – October 24, 2023

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What a great program, starting with Barber’s The School for Scandal Overture, followed by a short break to raise the grand piano to center stage from below, which for some reason I always get a kick out of. I wouldn’t mind them bringing the whole orchestra up from below, maybe with the aid of a fog machine.

We were then treated to Conrad Tao playing Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, which reminded me of Michelle Cann’s rendition of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue I saw a few months ago in the way that the music seems to enliven the musician. I kept envisioning a Tao bobblehead giveaway day, but the CSO failed me in that regard.

Tao started choking up before his encore when telling the audience how much he appreciated their applause, having grown up going to concerts at Symphony Center. He then favored us with his transcription of the 1953 (as opposed to 1939) Art Tatum recording of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. I love Tatum and Tao did him justice.

After all that, we were just getting started, coming back after intermission with Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, complete with finger snapping, and ending with Sensemaya by Silvestre Revueltas, an enjoyable piece that was new to me.

Airplane! Behind the Scenes of a Comedy Classic – Chicago Humanities Festival – October 21, 2023

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David Zucker was the only one of the three creative forces behind Airplane! to be there is person, his brother Jerry and Jim Abrahams appearing briefly via previously recorded segments. Zucker’s remembrances about the writing and making of the movie were interesting and funny.

I never knew that it was a parody of the 1957 drama Zero Hour! (including the exclamation point in the title). Apparently, though, the Zuckers and Abrahams were told that it was closer to plagiarism than parody and had to get permission from Paramount, the studio for the original, to proceed. Now I need to find Zero Hour! and watch it.

As for funny, the biggest laugh of the program was produced by a clip of Leslie Nielsen from the movie:

Striker: “Surely you can’t be serious.”
Rumack: “I am serious … and don’t call me Shirley.”

In 2005, the American Film Institute ranked this as 79th in all-time movie quotes. Given that one of the criteria was “Cultural impact: Movie quotations that viewers use in their own lives and situations; circulating through popular culture, they become part of the national lexicon” I would have rated it higher, around 50th on the impressive list.

Nowhere on the list, although shown to attendees, was Peter Graves saying “Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?” According to Zucker, Graves originally turned down the part and had to be convinced by his wife and daughter to do it, in part because he was leery about playing what seemed to him like a leering part on the page.

A Wonderful World – Cadillac Palace – October 18, 2023

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The first big dance number gave me great hopes for this pre-Broadway show, but they were dashed.

James Monroe Iglehart does a great Louis Armstrong, though he’s the biggest seven-year-old I’ve ever seen. Dewitt Fleming, Jr. is a terrific tap dancer, whose one scene wasn’t enough. A Wonderful World is too long, too talky and has too many endings – I counted three.

I was fine with the show depicting Armstrong’s four wives, who represented different phases of his life, but did we really have to suffer through his courtships and marital spats, when all we wanted was his music. And how many times did we have to see a motion picture assistant director tell Armstrong the same thing? No times would have worked for me.

To help keep it from becoming a four hour show, Armstrong’s gangster manager goes from tough guy to wimp in about two seconds. And, thankfully, all of Armstrong’s alleged hundreds of extra-martial affairs aren’t itemized.

Despite all the problems, it might still have been an okay, if not wonderful world, if the guy sitting behind me hadn’t insisted on singing along with every song, even though his name was not in the cast list in the program.

The Lehman Trilogy – Broadway Playhouse – October 12, 2023

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I know The Lehman Trilogy won the Tony award for best play but I have a lot of problems with it. And I’m not the only one.

The Washington Post suggested that “an American playwright [the playwright was Italian], confronted on a daily basis with the economic, cultural and historical ramifications of slavery,” would not have made the same decision to remain silent on the issue.

We’ve all become somewhat inured to the cavalier insertion of historical inaccuracies for the sake of artistic license, though I, for one, believe such liberties often make the vehicle less, not more engaging. So I won’t go into great detail regarding the ironic changes in the timeline  of events in a play produced by the TimeLine Theatre Company, as admitted in the play book itself, but can’t help but object to the reiteration of the myth that there were numerous suicides on Wall Street on Black Thursday in 1929. It’s just not true.

At least the acting was good, and I didn’t have to sit though the original five hours of the play, only three, which could have been reduced even further but for the author’s or adapter’s insistence on repeatedly using repetition until that poor horse died from a concussion.

Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key – Chicago Humanities Festival – October 5, 2023

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Before Keegan-Michael and Elle Key even stepped out on stage, we were reminded by a member of the host committee that there was still an actors strike going on, so the guests wouldn’t be able to discuss any of the TV shows or movies they had worked on.

This could have been deflating, but I looked upon it as an opportunity, given that the topic of the presentation related to their new book, The History of Sketch Comedy, and they had the chance, unfortunately not taken, to create a sketch right before our eyes wherein they portrayed two people dancing around mention of their work.

She did most of the talking at the event, and I believe, most of the writing in the book, which made me wonder whether Danny Kaye was mentioned in the book. Huh? In fact, there is the briefest of references to him as being in White Christmas. My connection is that Kaye’s wife, Sylvia Fine, wrote songs for him for at least five of his movies, the writing spouse behind the comic.

Upon request from his wife, Keegan did a mean impression of Tracy Morgan, but otherwise pretty much just sat back, smiled and enjoyed her storytelling. Clearly, the key to a happy marriage.

The Nacirema Society – Goodman Theatre – October 8, 2023

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The last time I saw E. Faye Butler she was starring as Rose in Gypsy for Porchlight Music Theatre. Her turn in The Nacirema Society as Grace DuBose Dunbar, the matriarch of quite a different family from the . . . , wait a second, do Rose and her kids even have last names in Gypsy? Unlike the real people upon whom those characters were based, I don’t think so.

Grace does.  It’s the prestigious one of an upper class family in Montgomery, Alabama in 1964, and one that she overbearingly, like Rose, wants her, in this case granddaughter, to do proud.

Instead of the part being a vehicle for Butler to highlight her substantial singing skills, it’s one for her to demonstrate her considerable comedic chops. There was great music, however, in the form of partial Motown recordings played during each scene change. I know at least one critic complained that it made the play too long. I liked it, couldn’t stop bobbing my head.

The first act brought a lot of setup and some laughs, but, more noticeable to me, were the many times that the audience reacted with something between an ooh and an oy when confronted with conversations featuring uncomfortable humor. This isn’t a criticism, just an observation of the presence of shock value. I liked it and everyone else seemed to also.

The second act brought the house down. One guffaw after another, and not just from the dialogue, as Shariba Rivers, in the role of Jessie, the maid, was given license to do a lot of upstaging, literally and figuratively, via comedic facial expressions and body language. I left with a smile on my face.