5th Wave Collective – Washington Square Park – June 28, 2025

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Wallace Shawn, as Vizzini, in The Princess Bride, reminded us that it’s a classic blunder to “get involved in a land war in Asia.”

I would add “never perform at an outdoor venue without a microphone.”

Inconceivable, yet, that’s exactly what the 5th Wave Collective chose to do. Perhaps that would have been okay in the middle of nowhere, but in Washington Square Park, no more than 30 feet from a street that wasn’t closed off to traffic, it wasn’t a great idea.

It also might be okay for a brass band, but not so much for an ensemble featuring five string and three reed instruments and a lonely French horn.

That said, the crowd could mostly hear well enough to very much enjoy the hour-long tribute to the music of Florence Price.

The song introductions that the group’s members took turns delivering were less audible, but fortunately, for me, I already had some knowledge about the rebirth of Price’s work, thanks to information gathered at other concerts over the last several years.

Perhaps next time the group will use a microphone, as I wish.

Winging It: A Brief History of Humanity’s Relationship with Birds – The Newberry – June 20 – September 27, 2025

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I haven’t been to a movie theater in quite a while, so I was pleased to watch the exhibit’s video – The Best Known Grouse of the Western States, which referred not to my attitude toward many things, but rather to the pinnated grouse, or as many call it, the greater prairie-chicken, or, you prefer, the Tympanuchus cupido.

It’s a tragic tale, or tail, if you wish, that there were 10 million of the birds in Illinois in the 1800s, but only about 200 by 2019. That original number might be taken with a grain a salt, as modern crowd estimation science only traces back to the 1960s, when it was used to count the number of people at University of California campus protests. Of course, placing the salt on the bird’s tails (or tales) might allow them to be captured and then counted.

One could also see poems about birds, miniature oil paintings of birds, the piano sheet music for The Whippoorwills Song and a page showing the Bounty Laws on Birds (1800-1899) from various states, all while being serenaded by bird sounds from above.

The coup de grâce, pouring salt on the wounds of extinction, was the Favorite Indian Recipe book, which includes mouthwatering instructions regarding the preparation of baked woodcock, crow casserole and, moving on from avian treats, roast beaver.

Donna Herula Trio – Old Town Art Fair – June 14, 2025

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I really got my money’s worth – there were four musicians in the Donna Herula Trio.

I’d never heard of the Independent Blues Awards (given out by Making the Scene!, the self-proclaimed #1 resource for the independent artist and the fans who love them), but winning anything is probably better than not winning it, so I figured Herula’s 2022 awards for Best Acoustic Blues Album (Bang at the Door) and Best Traditional Blues Artist might be indicative of someone I’d want to hear.

I was right, though, interestingly, this was not an acoustic performance (still, no earplugs necessary).

I liked all the songs the trio (quartet?) played from the album, starting with the title song, and followed by Can’t Wait to See My Baby, which, we were told, is normally a duet sung by Herula and her husband, Tony Nardiello (but he apparently could wait, because he wasn’t there, and she instead sang both parts herself).

Herula enlisted the audience to repeatedly repeat the hook in I Got No Way Home, a lyric that, perhaps, explained her husband’s absence.

The album contains two versions of Black Ice, a song Herula wrote based on the couple’s survival of a driving mishap. She originally wrote lyrics, but her husband told her that a blues song can’t have a happy ending, so she also recorded an instrumental version, which is what she played for us, even though hubby wasn’t there to know.

The hour and a half set also featured legendary blues songs, including Walkin’ Blues, Give Me Back My Wig and You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Dead and Gone.

The next good opportunity for me to see Herula will be in August at the Navy Pier Beer Garden. I’ll be there. I don’t know if Nardiello will make it.

Grant Park Music Festival – Opening Night – June 11, 2025

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Going in I was somewhat surprised to see that Andrew Litton would not only be conducting, but also playing the piano for Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The double duty seemed like too much to me. Litton assured us, however, before the piece, that, because the pianist and the orchestra play apart from each other during the composition, it wasn’t really a problem.

I think he was wrong. First, there certainly were, unsurprisingly, places in the music where there was overlap. (Did he think we wouldn’t notice?) Second, though it was amusing(?) to watch him sporadically rise from the piano bench for two or three seconds at a time to wave his hands at musicians who probably weren’t watching him before sitting back down and immediately resume his playing, I can’t help but think that it affected his concentration.

So, how did he sound? Next time the festival rolls out Rhapsody in Blue, please bring back Michelle Cann. Her rendition was much more dynamic. I’ll even go so far as to say that I preferred Sean Hayes’s interpretation in the play Good Night, Oscar.

As for the rest of the concert, I had not previously heard either Gabriela Lena Frank’s Three Latin American Dances or Manuel De Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, though I had heard good things about the latter, before going, from a friend in the know, who remains credible, as I enjoyed it.

Kimberly Akimbo – CIBC Theatre – Through June 22, 2025

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Apparently there was a lot of action going on in the streets near the theater, but I was oblivious, lost in 1999 Bergen County, New Jersey, watching actors wearing ice skates glide across a stage coated with a solution of one part glycerin to seven parts water, on blades dipped in the same mixture, but not slipping when back in their regular shoes.

That might have been enough, but, oh yes, this show about a teenager with an extremely rare terminal disease was, amazingly, laugh-out-loud funny, and, of course, heartwarming.

The “kids” (five actors in their twenties playing 16-year-olds, not an uncommon occurrence in the theater) are great, especially, for me, Miguel Gil, who, as Seth, hit me directly in my not so inner nerd.

I wondered as the show progressed whether anything physical would happen between Gil and 62-year-old Carolee Carmello, also playing, with grace and skill, 16, but going on 70 thanks to her illness, in a role with an age gap even greater than 40-year old Mary Martin as Peter Pan. Fear not, there is never a moment of discomfort.

I apparently saw Carmello in 2009 in the pre Broadway run of the Addams Family, but don’t remember her (I will now) or most anything else about that show, except the wonderful Kevin Chamberlain, as Uncle Fester, singing The Moon and Me.

The Strawberry Moon was reaching full as I left the theater last night, which, appropriately, given the underlying cause of the earlier unrest, reminded me that the word “lunatic” derives from Luna, the Roman goddess of the moon.

R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) – City Lit Theater – Through June 15, 2025

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If you’re into science fiction, you know that this 1920 Czech play by Karel Capek introduced the word robot into the vocabulary, and that it’s been a wild ride ever since, with famous examples such as R. Daneel Olivaw, Gort, Robby the Robot and Marvin the Paranoid Android, to name but a few.

As terminology has developed, androids have been designated as a subset of robots that are designed to look like humans, deriving from the Greek andro, for man. Therefore R2-D2, visually, is not really a droid, as in “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” but 3-CPO is. Of course, these entities existed “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” when there was no Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction or Wikipedia to consult.

A cyborg, a portmanteau of cybernetic and organism introduced by a couple scientists in 1960, is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts, like RoboCop, the Borg in Star Trek, and arguably anyone who’s had knee or hip replacement surgery, especially if the new joint comes with microprocessor control.

City Lit’s production, with significant alterations, for better or worse, from the original, has some humor and initiates some interesting discussions, but, in the end, becomes tedious, and would be better as a shorter, one act play. Though it may have been the forefather to much that followed, its themes are addressed more satisfactorily elsewhere, such as in I Robot and in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Measure of a Man, which features a trial to determine whether or not Data is sentient and should have the right to make his own choices.

The best line in the show, “progress is the root of all evil,” was put to better use as a song in L’il Abner in 1956.

Dave Barry: Class Clown – American Writers Museum – Chicago Hope Academy – May 15, 2025

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This program attempted to answer the age-old question – should you really trust a person with two first names?

It was clear from his comments that Barry doesn’t expect to be trusted. He told the audience several times that his readers shouldn’t believe anything he says, that he’s a self-described silly humorist, a liar.

Thus he finds great pleasure in receiving countless letters, correcting him for “errors” in his work, from people who don’t get that he’s kidding. He writes everyone back, often extending the joke (lie) and thereby compounding the correspondent’s misconceptions and fury over the “mistakes”.

Barry says he got his sense of humor from his edgy mother, who, though she suffered from great depression and eventually committed suicide, did not foist her problems upon others.

When asked, Barry doubled down on his chosen career, saying that, although he started out as a newspaper journalist, his first calling had always been comedy, not writing.

Perhaps his best story of the evening related to the day it was announced that he had won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary (1988), which led to a photo of his son (a later Pulitzer winner himself) giving him a big hug, which, in fact, was unrelated to the award, but rather the result of Barry having told the boy seconds earlier that Barry was buying him a Nintendo. As Shakespeare first said in 1599, timing is everything.

Porchlight Music Theatre – Chicago Sings 30 Years of Porchlight- House of Blues – May 12, 2025

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Twenty-one songs, played by a top-notch band and performed by an extraordinary cast of 20, not counting, though I should, the additional eight “Youth Performers” who joined in for They’re Playing Our Song, as a prelude to the irrepressible auctioneer Greg “G-man” Dellinger once again doing his thing by racing around the room to help unburden willing attendees from any up-to-that-point unspent charitable contributions weighing them down.

The room was too cold for my comfort, making me think of the book I’m currently reading – FROSTBITE: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves – but the music was hot, especially, for me, starting right before intermission, when the legendary E. Faye Butler resurrected her award-winning Mama Rose.

First act rabbit hole for me – I had to look up the show Closer Than Ever (and its song – Fathers of Fathers), which apparently came out in 1989, with music by David Shire, who I knew had previously given his name to Talia Shire, née Coppola, but who, I didn’t know, has long been married to Edith Bernstein – Didi Conn of Grease fame.

You know you’re in for a great show when three of the Five Guys Named Moe (Court Theatre – 2017) are in the cast. One of them, Lorenzo Rush Jr. provided one of the evening’s highlights when he used his performance of Honeysuckle Rose, from his award-winning performance in Ain’t Misbehavin’, to further honor the evening’s Guy Adkins Award winner Heidi Kettenring, presenting her with a long-stemmed beauty.

Having thus resurrected the rose theme, Erica Stephan did the same for the mama through line, giving us Don’t Tell Mama from her award-winning performance as Sally Bowles, and making me glad that I hadn’t listened to Randy Newman’s warning in Mama Told Me Not to Come.

The Boogie Woogie Kid – Fourth Presbyterian Church Noonday Concert – May 9, 2025

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As far as I know, Matt Ball, probably when he was much younger, self-proclaimed himself to be the Boogie Woogie Kid, which, I think, is against all the rules of nicknaming, which, by most standards, must come from your peers.

That said, Ball may have the fastest hands this side of Las Vegas magician Shin Lim or the late Sugar Ray Robinson, although Guinness World Records says that Keita Hattori of Japan established the new mark for most piano key hits in one minute, in December 2024, with 1030 keys.

My problem with that record is that Hattori just hit the same key over and over again. And I don’t mean him playing the Rodgers and Hart melody Johnny One Note from Babes in Arms (thank you Judy Garland). Can the guy even carry a tune?

Ball can. And though I thought it was a little doubtful that he could get through his set list of 15 songs (along with introductions) in 50 minutes, it was no problem. He even found a way to boogie woogie-ize some songs that don’t normally fit that mold, such as Amazing Grace. And please note that every song was recognizable.

Hadestown – CIBC Theatre – May 6-18, 2025

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Hadestown is good enough to see at least once. The cast is good, but no one jumped out at me. The music is good, if mostly unmemorable (at least to me), except for the catchy Way Down Hadestown. (Loved the band, however, and agree with reviews that have singled out the trombone player.) Also, I’m not a big fan of recitative shows.

Seeing Hadestown completed a musical triple play of sorts for me, having previously seen Wonderful Town and Urinetown. (I’ve never seen a theatrical version of On the Town, which is a pity, as in a town without.)

As far as Hades, the character, goes, I preferred the devil in Damn Yankees and the devil disguised as the snake in The Diary of Adam and Eve (in the Apple Tree), though the devil in Randy Newman’s Faust, which was so good that I left at intermission, left much to be desired. (The Devil Wears Prada doesn’t count, and is best forgotten.)

At the point in Hadestown when Orpheus is asked by Hades to play a song, I hoped he would break into The Devil Went Down to Georgia, but no such luck, just a lot of la la las.

The show can definitely make you think about serious things going on in the world today, but don’t I go to musicals to get away from that? I thought the song When the Chips Are Down was particularly relevant – “Now that the chips are down, Help yourself, to hell with the rest, Even the one who loves you best”.

The ending of the show differs from the classic versions and is a total sellout. Virgil or Ovid or whoever (other than Tony voters) is turning over in his grave, though, spoiler alert, Orpheus and Eurydice aren’t.