Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – Lookingglass Theater – May 17, 2019

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For those of you who may be wondering whether the Lookingglass production of Frankenstein answers the question of whether Dr. Victor Frankenstein or the creature he created is the true monster, the answer is neither. The monster is the Lookingglass adaptation of the Mary Shelley book.

The book contains a forward wherein Shelley discusses the first telling of the story at a gathering of friends, including Lord Byron and her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. But as the play’s director says in the playbill, the play doesn’t stop there – “I’m fascinated by the blur between Mary’s novel of creation, rejection, and destruction and her own life of love, loss, and abandonment.”

Blur is the right word. The play’s intertwining of the story of Shelley’s life with the plot of the book leaves one spending more time trying to catch the moments when the story is flipping than on the substance itself. At least the writer/director didn’t try to incorporate a third story line about his own life, at least as far as I could tell.

And at least we can always rely on Lookingglass to create fascinating design features . . . except this time. The intricacies attempted in this production demand that the actors spend half their time walking around the set pulling cords, straightening out see-through sheets of materials, and cleaning up the stage floor, pulling all the focus away from the words being spoken.

The actors also do a lot of walking around off the stage in an effort to create a sense of travel, time, and distance, but it just seemed like they were trying to get their steps in for their Fitbits, which, to be fair, I didn’t spot any of them wearing.

The woman two seats over from me fell asleep less than a half hour into the play. Enough said.

Miracle – Royal George Theatre – May 12, 2019

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I saw the Organic Theater Company’s original production of Bleacher Bums in 1977. This world premiere celebration of Cub fans is a much different animal. It’s a musical (promoted as 108 years in the making), there’s no gambling, and no one takes their shirt off in the bleachers, although one of the actors forgot to button up his shirt for one scene, creating quite the pink elephant in the room for an entire song.

Spoiler alert – the Cubs win the 2016 World Series. Diehard Cubs fans who want to relive that moment (that would be all of them) will love this multimedia production and would no matter what got slapped on the stage. But what about the rest of us?

Surprise! I liked it. I’d like it more if the ending had a twist, like Cleveland winning game seven. Maybe save that miracle (currently 71 years in the making) for the national touring company.

I liked the score, with the exception of one song, which I think could be fixed, not that anyone is asking me.  The script is pretty tight, although I spotted an error that can’t easily be fixed, but that shouldn’t be something that would prevent the run from being a hit. I liked the use of the visuals, although the amount of them is a little too much for those of us who would rather not be distracted from the live performances on stage, which are excellent.

Randomly singling out a couple of the actors, I need to see more of Allison Sill, whom I previously loved as Inga in Young Frankenstein at Drury Lane. And I’m looking forward to seeing Jonathan Butler-Duplessis, whose Jeff Award-winning performance in Parade I saw at the Writers Theater, in Goodman Theater’s production of The Music Man, as a warm up for me for the highly-anticipated Broadway revival of the same show next year starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster.

Two Days in Court: A Double-Header of Classic One Acts – City Lit Theater – May 5, 2019

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Old lawyers don’t die, they just go to productions of one act plays dealing with trials. Just like small claims court, if you don’t like the first trial, it’s almost time for the second. I figured I could tolerate anything for 45 minutes, although I’ve never experienced waterboarding.

The Devil and Daniel Webster came first. Scratch carries a black box (which looks a lot like the ones I use to hide my cables) that contains a lost soul in the form of a moth that cries out for help, much in the way that David Hedison did in The Fly before he had his head crushed in a mechanical press.

The moth’s existence does not end well either, but, of course, Daniel Webster’s eloquent closing statement convinces a group of damned souls to find for the defendant Jabez Stone despite his written contract with Scratch, and save his soul, in perhaps the greatest example of jury nullification in literature.

The oral contract being contested in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial By Jury deals with a promise to marry, so, once again, a man’s soul is at stake.

There’s no dialogue in Trial by Jury, which caused the audience to be unsure about applauding after each song because the music kept going and the audience didn’t want to applaud over the start of the next song, which was always seconds away, or maybe they, like me, just didn’t want the show to run long.

It occurred to me that I’d never actually sat through a Gilbert & Sullivan show before, and likely never will again, the closest thing being the two times I’ve seen Hot Mikado. As with that show, perhaps if here they had jazzed up the songs and added some tap dancing, I would have ruled in favor of the production.

Chicago Humanities Festival – David Brooks, David Wooten, and Maude Maggart – May 4, 2019

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Commentator David Brooks was very funny for the first part of his appearance at the packed Harris Theater. Then he got to the topic of his new book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life and receded into preachiness reminiscent of a Sunday morning TV sermon, citing examples of others’, but not his own, humane behavior, discussing how his discovery of the moral life had led him out of a dark place, while failing to mention  that during that time period he got divorced from his wife of 27 years and married his former research assistant, 23 years his junior, and without making a case for there being anything in his book that hasn’t been said before in a basic psychology class in regard to character development.

Professor David Wooten, speaking on virtue at the SAIC Ballroom of the School of the Art Institute, was even more disappointing to his much more meager audience, because he wasn’t even funny, just droningly pompous, as evidenced by the sleep-inducing effect he had on several audience members. He basically gave a short shrift overview of philosophies of Aristotle, Hume, Hobbes, Machiavelli and a few others, all as background leading up to his criticism of a modern day philosopher, whose name, unfortunately, escapes me (as I’d like to create my own objective view of her thoughts), who wrote about the fragility of courage.

Fortunately the day was saved by Maude Maggart, a wonderful cabaret singer from New York who presented material from the Great American Songbook, demonstrating a silvery voice with an engaging personality to a full house at Venue Six10. At the end of the hour, the crowd applauded on and on, hoping to encourage her to come back for an encore, but, alas, the Humanities Festival runs on a tight schedule and she did not reappear, the only disappointing part of her performance.

Bright Star – BoHo Theater – May 2, 2019

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It’s the same old story – (spoiler alert) boy meets girl, girl gets pregnant, someone throws the baby off a train.

I didn’t know going in that that last key element of Bright Star was based on the true story of the Iron Mountain Baby (though the other 99% of the play isn’t). I just knew that Steve Martin wrote the book of the play and that there would be bluegrass music by him and Edie Brickell.

I’ve seen Martin’s plays The Underpants and Picasso at the Lapin Agile. I haven’t see his Meteor Shower (or a real one for that matter), but it’s enough just to know that one critic wrote: “Meteor Shower plunges into the absurd without establishing a philosophical grounding for the mania. It’s sitcom Ionesco crossed with a Saturday Night Live parody of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

Following that train of thought (pun intended), I’ve seen Orson Welles’s Shadow, which is a play by Austin Pendleton about Welles directing Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. And Pendleton played in the 1989 Broadway revival of Grand Hotel, which is coincidental to the fact that three of the actors in Bright Star, the scene-stealing Rachel Whyte, Jennifer Ledesma, and Jeff Pierpoint, were in the version of Grand Hotel I saw last year at Theater Wit.

And Pierpoint, who plays Billy in Bright Star, was once the understudy for the character J. Pierrepont Finch in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at the Marriott Lincolnshire Theater. Pierpoint, plays Pierrepont, a match made in theatrical heaven.

This was BoHo’s (Bohemian Theater Ensemble) first production at the Greenhouse Theater Center. I ate once at the BoHo (Bohemian House) restaurant in Chicago, and thankfully will never have to again, as it closed last year after four years of operation. Based on Bright Star, I have higher hopes for the theater company.

New Faces Sing Broadway Now – Arts Club of Chicago – April 30, 2019

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This was the fourth Porchlight Sings event I’ve gone to in the past year and they’ve all been great. Hosted by local favorite Lorenzo Rush, Jr., it featured an extremely talented group of ten young performers. Three of them, Chloe Nadon-Enriquez, Kaiman Neil, and Drew Tanabe, are in the current Porchlight production of A Chorus Line.

Nick Druzbanski was clearly a favorite of his fellow performers, bringing hoots and hollers from them even before he opened his mouth. I’m looking forward to seeing him in Drunk Shakespeare. And Cecelia Iole. in singing Phantom of the Opera, hit a note so high that it hasn’t been named yet.

But the highlight of the evening was the Broadway trivia game. Often the audience members selected to play have an impressive knowledge of Broadway. Not this time. The two contestants were right out of a Saturday Night Live skit. It would be kind to say they were pathetic.

They were presented with three questions dealing with Disney productions, none of which either of them came close to answering correctly, either standing there dumbfounded or making unimaginably ridiculous guesses, which I would have written down if I weren’t laughing so hard.

Though everyone else somehow restrained themselves from shouting out the answers, even as the level of ineptitude reached epic proportions, it was clear that the organizers had managed to draw the names of the two least knowledgable people in the room to participate in the game.

And keep in mind, this wasn’t Jay Leno picking people off the street. This was a room full of people who theoretically were big theater fans, even though that wasn’t really necessary. One question asked the name of the play based on a book by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Shouldn’t that be enough? The lead character was raised by apes. They still had no idea.

Poseidon! An Upside Down Musical – The Edge Theater – April 28, 2019

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This was my first time at The Edge Theater. I like it. It has about 100 seats, very comfortable, with lots of leg room, and cup holders to help you take advantage of the bar, where, appropriately enough for a show about a disaster that disrupts a New Year’s Eve party on a cruise ship, you can preorder drinks for the second act before the show starts.

The show had men in drag playing the parts made famous by Shelley Winters and Carol Lynley in the movie, an ensemble doing double duty in the play as people watching the movie from the front row of the theater and secondary characters acting in the movie, and actors ad-libbing beautifully when a prop misbehaved.

Unfortunately, however, I had trouble hearing the lyrics in several songs, which I confirmed was not about me upon speaking with another attendee after the show. A small theater shouldn’t have this problem.

I also must object to the serious, heartfelt soliloquy in the middle of the first act that discussed the author’s childhood and why the movie was important to him. I didn’t care. I was there to have fun, and, for most of the show, had a smile on my face. But the speech was too long, too slow, too boring, and more appropriate for the playbill.

That said, slow can be good. I was delighted by the slow motion ballet of furniture being moved and people falling this way and that all over the stage to simulate the capsizing of the ship, although it made me wonder whether, if The Windy City Playhouse, with its affinity for untraditional staging, had been putting on this production, would it have left the stage as is and found a way to turn the audience upside down.

International Museum of Surgical Science – April 23, 2019

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Dr. Robert Liston (1794-1847) was renowned for his ability to quickly amputate a limb, a skill that was highly valued in the days before anesthesia. He was nicknamed the Fastest Knife in the West End (London), but apparently sometimes was a little too quick, there being stories about him cutting off more than he was supposed to (like his assistant’s fingers in one instance). He died before the days of Jack the Ripper. I double-checked out of curiosity.

The International Museum of Surgical Science includes medical exhibits that go beyond surgery, including a Hall of Immortals, containing full length sculptures of people like Hippocrates. But, it occurred to me, if they were immortal, why couldn’t they be there in person? Perhaps it should be called the Hall of Physicians of Enduring Fame. Not catchy enough?

On display were Patent Medicine Trade Cards, which were used for advertising, though I couldn’t find mention of whether people traded them, or if there were things like rookie cards for new patents.

There’s a collection of gall, kidney, and bladder stones, a few of which are disturbingly large.

There’s a shoe-fitting fluoroscope in the Medical Imaging and X-Ray room. I remember those machines from when I was growing up. They seemed cool at the time, until, like so many other things, we discovered that they were hazardous to your health.  Not like in the movie Sleeper, where things like deep fat turn out to be good for you.

The ophthalmology exhibit includes a wide variety of eyeglasses. Extending the theme of the day, I looked for, but couldn’t find the broken glasses that H.G. Welles replaces from a museum exhibit in Time After Time while chasing after Jack the Ripper.  Admittedly, that was in San Francisco.  As was the antique shop where Captain Kirk pawned his glasses in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I couldn’t find them either.

Earth Day Work Release – Washington Square Park – April 27, 2019

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In case you remember the Pogo catchphrase, “we have met the enemy and he is us” but not the 1971 Earth Day poster wherein it gained its fame, here it is.

Earth Day originally was proposed to be on the first day of spring, March 21, in 1970, but then, for reasons beyond my ken (though I suspect it was so that a politician could claim credit over the peace activist who actually originally proposed it), was changed to April 22. Perhaps the later date was to ensure good weather. Surprise. Snow storm today!

This was my fourth year helping out in Washington Square Park, spreading mulch around a dozen of its trees (but who’s counting), as others did much the same, wheelbarrowed in the mulch, swept up debris, performed administrative duties, or drank coffee and chatted while attempting to look engaged.

As in the past, I didn’t read the waiver I signed (don’t do this at home) or ask for a copy of it, so I don’t know if it said anything about the effects of breathing in mulch fumes. I’m not suggesting that there was any particular reason for concern, but, after all, it was mulch, complete with wood chips, and I can’t help but think about the movie Fargo.

I tried to stay upwind as much as possible and avoid deep breathing. I also brought my own gloves and wore them at all times, though now it occurs to me that I should throw them out to be consistent. Hopefully the complimentary donut holes weren’t in any way infected.

Maybe next time I shouldn’t spend the days leading into Earth Day reading The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul.

 

 

 

 

Real People – March, 2019

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I’ve been paid to “act” twice in my life – once playing a member of a bank’s board of directors in an industrial film (no lines) and once as King Arthur for a weekend at a renaissance fair. My total take for those two gigs was $40, not including the value of the giant turkey leg I walked around eating at the fair.

So I was excited by the prospect of a new experience and a decent payday to be a real person in a television commercial if I could make it through the audition process. Once again there would be no lines to learn, and thus no lines to forget.  And, I had experience as a real person.

I was told that I should react to a voiceover with subtle facial expressions. Practicing in front of the mirror, I had a hard time differentiating between subtle and nonexistent, but, as they say, everything looks bigger on camera.

Apparently I do subtle better than I thought, or my left ear was just what the director was looking for, as I managed to get a callback, which I almost missed out on when I didn’t answer my cell phone as it vibrated in my pocket in the middle of a concert I was attending. But that left ear must have been so alluring that they called again and we connected.

At the callback I was told to do just what I had done at the first audition, to which I responded that I had no idea what that was, but, nevertheless, afterward, someone in authority at the casting agency told me I had done a great job for the half-dozen twenty-somethings representing the client, a senior living community.

Alas, I didn’t get the part, perhaps because of my inability to tell them my hat size on the form I had to fill out. Or maybe my left ear just wasn’t that great.