Shaw vs. Tunney (Staged Reading) – Fourth Presbyterian Church – May 15, 2018

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The play Shaw vs Tunney is based on a book (The Prizefighter and the Playwright), written by one of Tunney’s sons, about the friendship between George Bernard Shaw and world heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney.

I have seen and liked one of the playwright Doug Post’s other efforts (see previous blog regarding Forty-Two Stories). So it pains me to say that this play should have been named Shaw and Tunney vs Audience. Both Shaw and Tunney are fascinating people, but instead of Six Characters in Search of an Author, this seemed like three characters in search of a play (Tunney’s wife Polly is the third character).

This was a Remy Bumppo Theater Company production. The name Remy Bumppo is a combination of the names of one of the founders’ cat (in turn named after Remy Martin cognac) and another’s black Labrador (named for Natty Bumppo, of the Leatherstocking Tales).

The cat theme found its way into the play, when Shaw, in discussing his failing health, said to Tunney: “When the cat leaves the room, he may never see me alive again.” This made me think of Schrödinger’s cat, except, instead of the cat being dead and alive at the same time until the box is opened, it’s Shaw being dead and alive until the cat returns to the room and the play being dead and alive until you see it.

Throughout the play, Shaw refers to himself as GBS. At first, because of his heavy Irish accent, I thought he was saying GPS, which made perfect sense to me as the play seemed to be in need of direction.

My suggestion is that if you’re interested in something Shaw-related, head to New York to see the revival of My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center.

Lincoln Park Zoo – May 15, 2018

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Just as I was about to enter the zoo, I encountered three staff members trying to recycle (see photo of one staffer with a telltale blue container) a snapping turtle that apparently had escaped captivity. He wasn’t hard to run down – he was, after all, a turtle – but bringing him to justice proved to be a little more difficult. I learned two lessons – it’s easier if, unlike in the photo, the open end of the container is facing the deserter and be sure to protect your hands when handling a snapping turtle (the unseen staff were procuring thick gloves to aid in the eventual arrest).

I came across two more handlers having problems, this time in regard to opening a door to let a rhinoceros back inside from his outdoor pen. The animal stood motionless, nose up against the door, until it suddenly butted its head against the door, with great vigor, apparently out of frustration at its exile during what was probably its lunch hour. At that point I decided to move on before we reenacted a scene from Jurassic World.

Speaking of Jurassic World, while I saw recent zoo additions of plains zebras and a female polar bear, I didn’t see any dinosaurs, which, if you believe a recent ad, not only exist, but also have been domesticated, sort of. Make your day by watching the video about a velociraptor being used as a service animal.

On my way out of the zoo, I passed a mother asking her child whether he knew why flamingos were pink. I wanted to interrupt and say, “because they weren’t cooked long enough”, but I resisted the impulse to scar the waif for life. The thought did make me hungry, however, so I stopped for lunch at Cafe Brauer, making sure not to order anything that I might have just seen while wandering around the zoo, so no turtle soup.

Marianne Parker (piano) – Symphony Center (Club 8) – May 3, 2018

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This concert was entitled Treasures of Haitian Piano Music. Marianne has been part of the effort to preserve Haitian music that was lost for many years. As she has said: “Sometimes notes are faded, instructions are faded, things are erased, and it’s not clear what the composer’s final intent was.” But fear not, the music was wonderful and Marianne was terrific. (Full disclosure, I took piano lessons from Marianne for a year.)

The program, sponsored by the African American Network of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, went a few minutes long to allow a woman from the Haitian American Museum of Chicago to give a five minute history of Haiti between pieces. She unfortunately spent half her limited time telling us how little time she had. In college I wrote a history of the world in two pages and got a B+. The instructor thought I should have written three pages to do the topic justice. (It took Mel Brooks one hour and 32 minutes just to tell Part I of the History of the World – he never has told Part 2.)

A friend of Marianne’s, whom I met prior to the start of the concert, is a bass player with the CSO. He stayed for the entire performance, dressed in blue jeans, even though it went a little long because of the Haitian speaker. He seemed totally calm, despite having to get to his dressing room, change clothes, do whatever else one does before a concert (yes, that), and get to the main stage on time, which I thought was less than 25 minutes later. I didn’t know if that was supreme confidence or supreme indifference.

So I looked up that night’s CSO performance and found that the opening piece, the Bruch Concerto for Two Pianos, which is 25 minutes long, does not have a bass listed as one of the orchestral instruments accompanying the pianos. I guess he knew that.

Southern Gothic – Windy City Playhouse – May 6, 2018

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This was my first time at the three-year-old Windy City Playhouse, though I’ve been to the Windy City Fieldhouse to see women’s flat track roller derby, which unfortunately was a couple years before I started writing this blog, because it was interesting being the only one there who wasn’t noticeably tattooed.

This time we weren’t the only ones without tattoos. I know this because we spoke with one of the stage hands (who shepherd people around the set as occasionally necessary during this immersive show) before the show started and she told us she didn’t have any body art (the conversation inevitably went there after starting with her unnaturally tinted hair).

Thirty audience members were served several small drinks (Tom Collins, Champagne, and Whiskey Sour) as the play enfolded around them in the dining room, living room, and kitchen of this house constructed within a theater. There also was a porch, a yard, the hint of a bedroom, and a bathroom that probably wasn’t functional (don’t worry, the theater has its own).

The play will never win a Pulitzer (though Laughing Boy won the prize for fiction in 1930, beating out The Sound and the Fury and A Farewell to Arms, so who knows), but the format was fun and very well-executed by a cast that somehow wasn’t at all distracted by the well-behaved audience (though it was tempting to answer the phone when the cast let it ring several times) standing among them.

It made me think that I was on the Starship Enterprise’s holodeck, in passive mode, where you are an observer who can’t interact, except here the actors were real, not computer-generated, I think. But when the play ended (on a great and unexpected closing line), the lights went out, and the cast left, without so much as taking a bow. Surely, had they been real actors, and not holodeck creations, they would have accepted our applause.  They probably get paid in bitcoin.

Our Great Tchaikovsky – Steppenwolf Theater – May 5, 2018

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Hershey Felder has made a career out of doing one-man shows about famous composers – Gershwin, Berlin, Chopin, Liszt, Beethoven, Bernstein, and Tchaikovsky. Always informative, always entertaining, as actor and musician, he immerses himself in the character’s story.

For me, the most revelatory fact that Felder imparted was Tchaikovsky’s supposed disdain for two of his most popular pieces, the 1812 Overture and the Nutcracker Suite, both of which were clear favorites of the audience. Afterward, I wished I had asked Felder whether he shared Tchaikovsky’s opinion.

Felder played portions of almost all Tchaikovsky’s best known pieces. He didn’t play Marche Slav (a childhood favorite of mine – it was a dark time). He also didn’t play anything from Eugene Onegin (not to be confused with Eugene, Oregon), though he did vocalize a short passage (vocalize is the best description I could find for something that’s not singing, scatting, humming, or mumbling).

In regard to Tchaikovsky’s youth, I remember Victor Borge saying that “Pete” was born in Votkinsk, May 7 1840, but never played out in the streets of Votkinsk like the other little children of Votkinsk because when he was one month old his parents moved to St. Petersburg (it’s funnier when you hear Borge say it, but I couldn’t find an online recording). Actually, as Felder noted, Tchaikovsky was eight years old when his family moved (thereby crushing my adoration of Borge).

Felder joked during the Q and A session at the end of the show that the average audience members were in their 20’s. Maybe 120’s. Okay, not really, as the oldest person alive today is said to be only 117. The audience probably didn’t average a day over 85, the new 84. As the youngsters in the audience, we took the stairs down from the third floor theater after the show, as most of the others circled the two small elevators like piranha.

Macbeth – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – April 28, 2018

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I have waived my no Shakespeare rule a few times over the years. The rule arises from the fact that, when viewing Shakespeare, I want to have an annotation with me to follow the dialogue (too dark in the theater, flashlights frowned upon) or ask the performers to pause so that I can figure out what they just said (also frowned upon in most theaters).

The waivers typically relate to theatrical productions that aren’t straight Shakespeare. So, in 1983, I saw The Flying Karamazov Brothers juggle their way through The Comedy of Errors. In 2004, I saw The Second City’s Romeo and Juliet Musical: The People vs. Friar Laurence, the Man Who Killed Romeo and Juliet. In 2016, I saw Othello: The Remix, the Q Brothers hip hop version of the play, with Othello as a rapper; and Celebrity One-Man Hamlet, a show where David Carl portrayed Gary Busey as Hamlet (as strange as it sounds). Tangentially, I’ve seen Something Rotten twice (one of my all-time favorite shows).

My direct route to this production of Macbeth started in 2015, when I saw The Tempest, for which I waived the rule because it was co-directed by Teller, of Penn and Teller, and he brought his personal touch to the show, including the incorporation of card tricks.

Teller’s influence on this production of Macbeth, where he is again the co-director, was obvious in scenes involving the Weird Sisters and various ghosts, though, unfortunately, none of the murders are accomplished by sawing someone in half.

By the way, the acting was superb. And theater has officially entered a new generation, as six of the cast members include either Chicago P.D. (4) or Chicago Fire (2) in their credits. The Chicago shows have replaced the Law and Order shows (only one actor had that credit) in that regard. One Dick Wolf franchise replaces another.

Glass Blowing – Ignite Glass Studios – April 27, 2018

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It’s not everyday that you get invited to a birthday party at a glass blowing studio (great idea). My uncle had done glass blowing as a hobby for years, but he was a scientist with expertise in combustion, so I took no comfort from his experience.

I learned the following things: You don’t mix red with any other color because it overpowers the other color. You don’t touch certain parts of the blowpipe because it’s really hot (good tip). And you don’t tug on Superman’s cape (okay, I already knew that one).

You wipe the end of the blowpipe off with alcohol to clean it before blowing into it. I don’t like to drink and drive, so I opted for making a paperweight (even though I haven’t used paper in years), for which you don’t have to blow (so I don’t know what to call what I did).

The staff of the studio kept things simple for us (thank you), but I think we used things called pincers, markers, blocks, tweezers, and paddles, based upon my post party investigation (https://www.thehouseofglassinc.com/dictionary.htm). The most important tool, however, was the staff, without whose considerable help we would have wound up with items that looked like they went through the transporter in Jeff Goldblum’s version of The Fly, instead of the very nice pieces we crafted.

There were many conversations at the party, but my favorite (which I gratuitously mention for a couple of my followers) was the one I had, with a guest who knew him, about the eating habits of former St. Louis University Billikens basketball coach Rick Majerus. You just can’t pick that kind of information up on the street.

The only thing missing from the party was background music. Perhaps a nice oldies medley including Ring of Fire, Glass Onion, and Blowin’ in the Wind would have been appropriate.

The Thrill of the Grass: Celebrating Baseball Writing for the Ages – American Writers Museum – April 17, 2018

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When I was young, I read a lot about baseball. I knew all the stories. So I couldn’t pass up this program featuring baseball authors Dan Epstein, Josh Wilker, and Joe Bonomo.

Among other selections, the program included readings by Epstein from his book, Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of 76 and by Wilker from his book, Cardboard Gods: An All American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards. And Bonomo read Roger Angell excerpts to promote Bonomo’s forthcoming book, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell, a Writer’s Life in Baseball.

What did these books (and the program itself) have in common besides baseball? Colons. Remember when book titles didn’t have colons followed by a descriptive phrase? It was War and Peace, not War and Peace: A Russian Tale of Five Families in the Time of Napoleon.

This led me to look for and discover an article about the trend toward “colonization” in book titles, thus proving that there’s an article somewhere online about anything you can imagine.

My examination of colons (colonoscopy?) aside, this was yet another of the American Writers Museum fine programs. But remember when you went to bookstores (remember bookstores?) to hear writers, and celebrities pretending to be writers, talk about their books? For example, I remember seeing Gene Hackman discuss his book (for which he had a cowriter) Wake of the Perdido Star: A Novel (good thing his publisher included the colon and that explanation, otherwise I might have thought it was a painting) in 1999 at the Michigan Avenue Borders (RIP).

Despite my nostalgia for brick and mortar bookstores, I have come to prefer reading ebooks. And here I am writing a blog, for which, it now occurs to me, I may need an expanded title that includes a colon, and phrase to follow, if I want to expand my reach.   I’m thinking about Art Gets Out: A Blog That Has Nothing To Do with Hotels or Facebook (by far the two most searched for keywords according to PageTraffic.

 

Marianna Prjevalskaya (piano) and Tomer Gewirtzman (piano) – Chicago Cultural Center – April 11 and 25, 2018

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As usual, the performances at the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts were excellent. For Prjevalskaya’s performance I was seated behind her and paid particular attention to her movements, partly because I forgot my glasses and therefore couldn’t sit there reading the program or the news alerts on my phone (on silent) while she was playing. In any event, the way she swayed her body and bent her elbows to get her hands into the best position at all times was instructive.

In regard to reading the program, three things jumped out at me at Gewirtzman’s performance (for which I had my glasses). First, there were no program notes. They were replaced by an upcoming concerts page. I like having program notes in front of me during the performance (even when I make fun of them – see my April 4 blog), though I admit I don’t know what’s involved in producing them. Are there canned notes available somewhere for oft-played pieces (that weren’t available for Gewirtzman’s)? Or does someone write them up anew each time (and was that person on vacation)? I can live without a description of the music, but like having information about the composer and the time frame of and backdrop for the composition. Such a reduced note would be easier to produce (I presume) and would still leave room for an upcoming concerts schedule.

The second thing I noticed was that Gewirtzman served in the Israeli Defense Forces “Outstanding Musician” Program. That led me to finding an article about that program (https://www.israel21c.org/making-music-in-the-military/). Interesting stuff.

The third thing had to do with descriptions of movements. One that Gewirtzman played was shown as andante con espressione (at a walking pace, with feeling – why would you ever play without feeling?). There are apparently at least 20 basic tempos, and an greater number of mood markings (https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Tempo.html). It makes my head spin, allegrissimo.

Earth Day (a day early) – Washington Square Park – April 21, 2018

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I raked some lawn; I swept some sidewalk; I talked to Howard, who moved here a month ago from China, and whose English is a lot better than my nonexistent Chinese; I had my picture taken as part of the group, but didn’t stay for the pizza (though I did have two donut holes); and I got some exercise and a t-shirt for my efforts.

This was the third time I’ve helped clean up the park and lived to tell about it (not even any soreness the next day), which is good because I signed a waiver that I didn’t read. (Where was there a lawyer when I needed one?)

My best waiver story is from a race I ran in many years ago. The waiver included a clause that said I would be liable for the race promotor’s attorney’s fees if I were the plaintiff in a suit against the promotor as a result of anything arising out of the race. I added language to the effect that I would not be responsible if I were such a plaintiff as a result of being part of a class action. No one challenged my addition, probably because they didn’t even notice it.

One of the other helpers in the park was a young lady who dances in Hamilton and raked before heading for her Saturday matinee, whereas I raked before taking a nap.

Given that the theme of this year’s Earth Day was End Plastic Pollution, it was odd that they had plastic bottles of water for the helpers and were putting garbage into plastic bags, but we’ve only been celebrating Earth Day since 1970, so maybe they’ll get it right in the 50th year, next year.