The Mushroom Cure – Greenhouse Theater – June 2, 2019

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Adam Strauss’s one man show opens with a portrayal of him trying to decide between an iPod and an iriver (a South Korean MP3 player I never heard of before). His well-timed, articulate, and frenzied conversation with himself artfully sets the stage for the show’s comedic inspection of his obsessive compulsive disorder.

Because the show is in a theater, not a club, and is not billed as a standup routine, though it certainly has elements of one, it is sometimes difficult for the audience to know how it should react to Strauss’s abuse of the fourth wall. I found this troublesome only in the sense that there were moments when I felt like the audience didn’t give him the interaction he sought or appreciation he deserved, perhaps debating with themselves as to whether it was appropriate to respond.

Strauss has an engaging personality that makes it easy to sympathize, and frequently emphasize, with his story, for, although most of us probably have not spent 11 hours trying to cook up a foul-tasting psychedelic hallucinogen from mail-order cacti, who hasn’t double or triple-checked that they locked a door or berated themselves at times for indecisively failing to act.

For me, rejecting his offer to the audience to try the concoction he said was cactus juice, which he stirred up on stage, was not one of those times, as he gave no indication that there might be chocolate syrup available to add to it.

At the end of the show, Strauss asks that anyone in the audience who, after listening to him, thinks they have OCD, raise their hand six times, eliciting a nice laugh. But, as with trying the cactus juice, no one did. In the lobby afterward, however, I told him I had been tempted to raise my hand twice. I only told him once.

MSI After Hours – Wired to Wear – Museum of Science and Industry – May 31, 2019

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I was hoping to see the museum’s exhibits come alive as in one of the Night at the Museum movies, but, upon second thought, the simulated tornado in the Science Storms exhibit, for example, might have brought the party to a crashing halt, and the adventure just wouldn’t be the same without Robin Williams.

The museum’s new Wired to Wear exhibit is fascinating. It’s described as “smart clothing and devices designed to extend the human body’s capabilities and make us healthier, stronger and safer.” Although I have my doubts that the dress that barks like a dog when someone gets too close to the wearer will catch on, there are a lot of interesting innovations that are likely to result in useful options for the disabled, the professional athlete, and the idle rich searching for a Halloween costume.

In addition to the new exhibit and access to all the others at the museum without having to fight off busloads of school children, this adults-only party offered microscopic veggie sliders, generous-pour bartenders, and access to a live podcast of WBEZ’s Nerdette, featuring two of the Wired to Wear inventors.

If you listen to the podcast once they post it, you’ll likely get a digitally-cleansed version, so you won’t be able to appreciate the fact that the guest tech nerds couldn’t figure out that you have to hold the microphone near your mouth when you’re talking so that the audience can hear you, and you probably won’t hear me yelling from the audience “can’t hear you”, an act that didn’t get me kicked out, brought a murmur of appreciation from a part of the audience, and caused one of the guests to use the microphone properly for two seconds, before once again holding it as far away from his mouth as humanly possible.

Perhaps clothing with a built-in amplifier would be more useful than clothing that barks like a dog.

Chicago Philharmonic & Cirque de la Symphonie – Harris Theater for Music and Dance – May 26, 2019

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If you suffer from coulrophobia, this performance was not for you. But Vladimir Tsarkov Jr. is more than a clown. He’s also a juggler, able to keep numerous balls moving in numerous directions, which led me to discover that there is a system of notation for juggling called siteswap. I always thought it was called accounting.

Tsarkov also aided Alina Sergeeva perform her quick-change costume routine, which is a mildly entertaining trick, but a potentially very useful skill if you’re running late, or if you’re trying to avoid airline baggage fees by wearing all your clothes.

On the other hand, the strap aerialist and the members of the strength and balancing act wore very little clothing in order to show off their ridiculous abs, which were more like cases than six packs.

Watching the Cirque de la Symphonie perform, after having also seen the Cirque du Soleil recently, made me wonder whether Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey could have survived if it had renamed itself to sound more French. After all, the Cirque de la Symphonie is based in Georgia, the one in the United States, not the one that used to be part of the Russian empire, even though three of the six performers I saw are Russian.

All the routines are performed in front of the Philharmonic and synchronized to its music. If any of the acts aren’t your thing, you can always just close your eyes and listen to the music, which, if you are at all squeamish, you might want to do anyway during the aerial stunts, especially when Christine Van Loo is letting herself drop from near the ceiling, protected from hitting the floor only by the suspended silk she is clutching and her incredibly strong, sinewy (49 year-old!) muscles, unaided by ever having been bitten by a radioactive spider (as far as I know).

A Chorus Line – Porchlight Music Theatre – May 24, 2019

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Here’s a multiple-choice quiz. A triple threat is a football player skilled in running, passing, and kicking; a 2019 movie described on Rotten Tomatoes as an “adrenaline fueled and gritty action thriller”; or a performer who can act, sing, and dance.

Of course it’s all three, but the changes in football over the years have eliminated that triple threat and there’s no chance of me ever seeing a mixed martial arts movie. But the Porchlight MusicTheatre’s stage is filled with theatrical triple threats for its production of A Chorus Line, where the adrenaline is flowing and the dancers do a lot of kicking, albeit without a football, because, after all, they are part of a chorus line.

I was at a Porchlight reception two days earlier where I was told by a Board member that the show was sold out for the rest of the run. except for one seat on one night. I’m thrilled to say that that one seat turned out to be right in front of me, a cosmic apology for having placed the tall guy in front of me at West Side Story three nights earlier.

As a result, my biggest problem was deciding where to focus my attention throughout the show, given that there are often 16 people on stage. So I did the only thing that made sense. I spent a lot of time watching Taylor Lane, as Judy Turner, because she’s the granddaughter of a friend of mine.

She didn’t disappoint, and demonstrated even more acting skills after the show by pretending to be excited when I introduced myself and a couple friends to her, going so far as to request that we have a photograph taken with her to show her grandfather, though perhaps she’s really just a secret fan of my blog.

Louder Than Words: Rock, Power & Politics – Museum of Broadcast Communications – May 24, 2019

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I didn’t know that Neil Young wrote Ohio in an hour or ever think that I would see his handwritten lyrics for that anthem on a scrap of paper, but now I have, along with a lot of other interesting memorabilia and historical insights.

Going the morning of opening day, I was the first paying customer (there had been an invitation-only preview to which I wasn’t invited – I must be slipping) to see the museum’s new exhibit, on loan from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

I had a nice chat with a museum curator who approached me to ask me if I was enjoying the exhibit. I assured him I was (I really was – it’s great), but, me being me, I led him to one of the didactic wall panels on which there are a couple statements that I thought were inconsistent and confusing, though not of sufficient importance to shut down the exhibit. He assured me that he understood my concern and would discuss it with higher powers.

I couldn’t tell whether he was just being polite, but he did inform that I wasn’t the first person to point out an issue. At the preview (again, to which I wasn’t invited) someone noticed that the reed on the Bill Clinton saxophone on exhibit was improperly attached to the mouthpiece (insert own joke here). The curator, without the authority to change anything, had sent a message, with a picture of the saxophone, to the Rock & Roll Museum and was awaiting word as to whether they would be sending a swat team to correct the error.

The exhibit is arranged chronologically, with reference to the President of the time, starting with Eisenhower. Interestingly, there is a photograph of Clinton with Lou Reed, who did not appear to be improperly attached.

West Side Story – Lyric Opera of Chicago – May 21, 2019

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that the Lyric Opera’s production of West Side Story has been getting rave reviews. I won’t disagree, even though, with all that dancing, not a single tap is heard.

And, even though, according to the program, the lyrics Stephen Sondheim wrote for West Side Story (at age 25) are not among his favorite accomplishments. He has said “There aren’t any fantastic rhymes.” He has some knowledge in this area. He’s the one who rhymed “personable” with “coercin’ a bull” in You Could Drive a Person Crazy from Company.

In particular, Mikaela Bennett, as Maria, is tremendous. Her clear, crisp, booming voice fills the room. I think she received a deserved, long ovation, but I was sprinting, or at least my version of sprinting, for the exit as I didn’t want to be too late to fill out my evening by seeing the Art on theMart’s current nighttime spectacle, which I will call the River West Side Story.

Interestingly, a substantial number of people hurried up the aisles to the lobby at intermission, only to reverse direction after realizing that it wasn’t yet intermission, that the lights had dimmed to signal a scene change, and that there was, in fact, one song and one rather crucial moment left before the break.

Spoiler alert – I think Tony dies at the end of the show because Maria is crying uncontrollably and shouting out “Tony” over and over again as the lights go out, but the tall guy sitting in front of me blocked my view of that part of the stage, so Maria instead might have been lamenting the fact that The Music Man beat out West Side Story for the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1958. Tony, Tony, Tony!

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.