Forever Young – August 13, 2025

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I still remember the first time someone called me sir. It was a high school student. I was only 19 at the time, but must have exuded an aura of maturity beyond my years.

Today I experienced the other end of the spectrum when an apparently down-and-out guy at a street corner called me old-timer. Ouch!

I’ve heard boss, chief, captain and various other sobriquets in these situations, none of which led me to reach into my pocket for cash I don’t carry, but what could he possibly have been thinking by using the OT moniker that is normally reserved for long-known contemporaries?

Nonetheless, it got me thinking. Should I call Wayne Newton for a referral; go to the dermatologist for a full range of treatments, including dermal fillers, chemical peels, laser resurfacing, microneedling and dermabrasion; and start shopping for clothes at Forever 21 (or perhaps Forever 50, if there is one, as a less startling change)?

Double knee replacement might increase my speed, though I should point out that I already outpace anyone who is simultaneously walking two dogs, pushing a baby cart and talking on the phone, which represents a surprisingly large number of people in my neighborhood.

In lieu of surgery I might opt for a t-shirt that says “My parachute didn’t open but I survived the fall,” which would not only be an excuse for any lack of speed, but also a great conversation starter.

One thing I know for sure, I’m not walking past that corner any more.

That’s What Friends Are For: Gladys, Dionne, and Patti – Black Ensemble Theater (BET) – August 10, 2025

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Another final performance. My way of avoiding any readers saying that they relied upon my “review.”

I hadn’t been to the BET in almost 6 years, but some things never change. Though she has turned a lot of the creative work over to Daryl Brooks, who wrote and directed this production, Jackie Taylor is still the driving force behind the theater. And it was her birthday! Following the performance, the audience joined the cast in a joyful version of Happy Birthday I had never heard before. Unfortunately, no cake was served in the lobby, as had been the last time I was there, for The Other Cinderella.

There was a lot of emotion during the finale – That’s What Friends Are For – as the mature and young versions of the three leading ladies gathered together one last time. All six are good actresses, but they weren’t acting, the tears were real.

The crowd was engaged and enthusiastic throughout, including one woman in the front row doing lot of chair dancing. But the highest energy of the day was provided by Tamara Batiest, as the mature Patti Labelle, pushing both the vocal and physical edges of the envelope in her take on Labelle. Just when you thought she had taken it as far as she could, she would find another layer and milk it for all it was worth.

I won’t be waiting so long to return to the BET, going back in the fall for Blue Heaven, also written and directed by Brooks, which was on display in 2022, when a lot of people, myself included, were not yet back to normal theater-going. I’ll be going out on a limb, attending before the final performance, so I’ll have to stall writing about it for a day or two afterward.

The Emperor’s New Clothes – Millennium Park – August 6, 2025

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This is not a piece about a fashion show, although I did go to one once at an El Crab Catcher restaurant in Kaanapali on Maui in the 1980’s, before blogs were invented.

The Price Quality Heuristic (PQH) suggests that the more expensive something is, the higher quality people will attach to it. I believe I saw this principle in action at the Joshua Bell concert at the Grant Park Music Festival.

The event was not on the original Festival schedule, which, along with higher prices for the paid seating, apparently thrust it into PQH territory.

The seats and lawn were filled by a crowd enormous enough to suggest the possibility of an underlying ploy to set up an immigration raid, but park security was unmasked, so I think not, especially since some potential attendees were turned away.

When Bell completed his playing with the, as always excellent, orchestra (augmented not by an encore, but rather by an endless string of curtain calls that strained credibility), he was given a rousing standing ovation, which I confess may have been people just wanting to stretch their legs, or in some way related to a new Presidential fitness test.

As for my thoughts about Bell’s performance, it was fine, worthing of a sitting ovation. It was not, in my opinion (and some others I spoke with) as good as that of Augustin Hadelich, who earlier in the season had thrilled us with his artistry in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (and played a fun encore).

Bell has been praised and criticized for his body movements while playing. He did remind me a little of the way Elaine Marie Benes dances, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Lunch Theater – State Street – August 5, 2025

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I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my semi-outdoor, express lunch came with entertainment, at no extra charge, in the form of watching a guy try to park his Tesla Cybertruck in front of the restaurant.

It was performance art at its best, a scary presentation with comedic overtones, worthy of the Scream franchise (but without the slashing), and causing me to wait with great anticipation, but no payoff, for Neve Campbell or Courtney Cox to appear.

I was able to eat my entire meal in the time it took him to squeeze into the spot, and was tempted to, but did not, linger in the hope of observing him try to extricate the 18.6 foot monster (approximately six feet longer than a Mini Cooper) at the end of his family’s repast.

He obviously had the advantage of a park assist system, but also had the good sense (not to buy the thing in the first place) to aid and abet it with his own calculations. To that end, halfway through the process, which at that point seemed to be in considerable danger of failing, the truck having already on several occasions come within an inch or two of the car behind, to the thrill of the dining audience, the driver stepped out into the street and accessed his progress, or lack thereof.

I’ve already spoiled the ending – he eventually succeeded, though not until he accidentally started his four-foot long windshield wiper on a day without a cloud in the sky – but I swear that his young daughter, who emerged from the back seat, had grown three inches during the show.

Author Talk: “The Invisible Spy” by Thomas Maier – American Writers Museum – July 29, 2025

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Having enjoyed listening to Thomas Maier at the 2024 Printers Row Lit Fest, I looked forward to hearing about his new book. He did eventually get around to discussing it, but first I had to sit through 20 minutes of the same things I heard about last year.

The Invisible Spy is the moniker he gave to Ernest Cuneo, who played 2 years in the NFL before becoming a lawyer, a congressman and a liaison officer between the OSS, British Security Coordination, FBI, the U.S. State Department and President Franklin Roosevelt.

One of his close connections was with Ian Fleming, who credited Cuneo with the basic plot for Thunderball, which he dedicated to Cuneo as his muse.

Maier discussed the work of Fleming and other Englishmen in the U.S. in 1940 and Cuneo’s interactions with them and Walter Winchell and Drew Person, both of whom he fed stories to.

What wasn’t clear to me was why, other than for marketing reasons, Maier refers to Cuneo as a spy. As far as I could tell, none of the presumably confidential information he leaked was inherently damaging to the U.S. Nonetheless, Maier made it clear that Cuneo led a very interesting life before, during and after the war.

Maxim Lando – Grant Park Music Festival – July 23, 2025

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Maxim Lando is a 22 year-old pianist who started playing when he was three years old and went on to win his first major competition when he was 13. I’m guessing that he didn’t have a normal childhood.

Nevertheless, it gives me hope that I may yet turn the corner in my playing, when I reach ten years of practicing, though I suspect that he put it more hours and didn’t spend time writing blogs.

He has a unique style, sitting very close to his instrument (against everything I have been taught) and hunching over the piano, almost never looking up. I guess he has the music memorized (another difference).

While delighting the audience with Manuel De Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain and Franz Liz Liszt’s Rhapsodie espagnole (arranged for full orchestra), Lando spent much of the time jerking his head all about, while playing, in a manner that suggested a likely future need for chiropractic services. At the end of passages, he would then practically jump up off the bench in dramatic fashion. Definitely a show within a show.

The evening opened joyfully with Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville, which the conductor, Lee Mills, acknowledged first drew his attention in Looney Tunes (as with all of us).

The finale was the ever-popular Bolero by Maurice Ravel, bringing a resounding climax to the evening, even for those of us who did not sit there counting the 18 repetitions of the melodic theme (as mentioned by Mills) or the 169 rhythmic repetitions by the snare drum (repeat after me – carpal tunnel syndrome).

Iraq, But Funny – Lookingglass Theatre – Final Performance July 20, 2025

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The title of this show reminded me of the pool party scene in La La Land where Emma Stone requests a song from the band. It was I Ran (but funny).

As to the play itself, I’d love to take my red pen to the script. It provides a lot of information and has quite a few funny moments, but it tries to do too much and winds up being a little inconsistent, scattered and too long for it’s own good, losing some impact along the way and drifting into nonsense near the end.

There really wasn’t a need for an out-of-place Jennifer Coolidge impression (there never is) and the penis joke scene could easily be snipped.

That said, Atra Asdou, the playwright and lead, is a force. Her character is memorable and her interaction with the audience is first rate.

There was some interesting staging, including the boxing match depicting the battle between Iraq and Iran and the British-devouring quicksand that included an allusion to Dune (also too long) Sandworms, though I thought the lightning sand from The Princess Bride might have been a better reference.

And the show made the best use of video backdrop maps since Spamalot. High praise indeed.

Ian Murrel and Jeremy Vigil – Fourth Presbyterian Church Noonday Concert – July 18, 2025

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Ian Murrel has a strong baritone voice that he put on good display while singing an eclectic selection of pieces (accompanied by Jeremy Vigil on the piano), ranging from some French thing to a sing-a long Take Me Out to the Ballgame, with stops in between for Lerner and Loew, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Elvis Presley..

But I had my issues, or rather he did. How could he not know that his iPad, with his lyrics, would overheat after 30 minutes in the sun? Fortunately, a move to the shade precipitated a fairly quick recovery.

Hasn’t anyone ever told him (I would have but left instead) that the correct lyric in Take Me Out to the Ballgame is “Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack” not cracker jacks? If you don’t believe me, look it up in the Baseball Almanac.

What possessed him to sing “The New Suit (“Zipperfly”) by Marc Blitzstein, which includes the lyric “Racka moochy wicky wachy and a woo haggedy goo,” which is not nearly as meaningful as “A-boogity-boogity-boogity-boogity-shooby-do-wop-she-bop Chang-chang, changity-chang-shoo-bop?”

Get Lit!: Game Changers – American Writers Museum – July 8, 2025

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A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was a trivia star.

I have written about trivia contests in a few different contexts over the last several years – at bars, at New Faces Sing Broadway performances, at the Chicago History Museum and, of course, at my computer as part of my decades-long quest to qualify for Jeopardy (I took the online test again recently), which, if I did, I would, following in the declared footsteps of William Tecumseh Sherman, not accept, in my case for fear that I would totally embarrass myself and possibly become the worst contestant since Cliff Clavin.

In a less pressure-filled atmosphere, I went to the American Writers Museum’s Get Lit!; Game Changers event last week, where sports was the topic. My teammate and I correctly answered 11 out of 15 questions, unfortunately only good enough for third place (perhaps tied) out of six teams, all of which were comprised of at least four people (sour grapes).

I think my responses were ill-served by the three sips of a foul-tasting non-alcoholic beer that I took prior to the contest. Next time I’ll go with the night’s specialty cocktail (this time it was the MVP, described as “a sporty-twist on a ranch water cocktail.”)

Easing the pain of defeat was the evening’s speaker, who discussed three sports-related books related to game changers, one being Kathrine Switzer’s memoir about being the first woman to run the Boston Marathon.

August’s program – Get Lit!: Drawn to Life – is set to “celebrate the colorful world of animated movies and TV” with another “night of trivia, art-making, and nostalgia-packed fun.” I don’t know what the signature drink will be that night, perhaps the Flaming Moe from the Simpson’s or Blue Milk from a galaxy far, far away.

One Night Only: An Evening with Sutton Foster and Kelli O’Hara – Ravinia – July 13, 2025

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For those of you who might be interested in seeing this power coupling, they will be at Tanglewood on Friday with the Boston Pops (and in Utah and Virginia after that). The flight to Boston probably won’t take much longer than the drive to Highland Park.

Foster has seven Tony nominations for Leading Actress in a Musical, as does O’Hara (who also has one for Featured Actress in a Musical), though Foster kiddingly reminded the audience that she has two wins to O’Hara’s one.

Backed by the CSO, the program included only two songs from their nominated performances (I would have liked more), a duet from O’Hara’s turn in Light in the Piazza (which I actually saw in a pre Broadway run at the Goodman Theatre before I, and most anyone else, knew who she was), and, of course, the required Foster, change into her tap shoes, show stopper of Anything Goes.

I was very happy that O’Hara performed her show stopper They Don’t Let You in the Opera (If You’re a Country Star), which is well worth a YouTube visit if you’ve never seen it.

The rest of the show was rather eclectic, with the ladies demonstrating camaraderie and comedic skills to go along with their famed vocals. Personally, I would have rather heard more Broadway tunes instead of their 1990’s Medley, though, as they stated, they were emulating, in this and other ways, the legendary Carol Burnett-Julie Andrews television special that featured a 1960’s Medley. To that end, there was interaction with an audio recording of the latter two until it malfunctioned (oops), but Foster and O’Hara covered and quickly moved on, as professionals do.

I fully expect to see a video of this concert (probably the longer version done in Carnegie Hall in 2023) on some streaming service in the near future.