Pacifica Quartet – Mandel Hall – January 27, 2024

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The last time I saw a concert at Mandel Hall, over fifty years ago, it was Chuck Berry singing and playing his guitar for three straight hours, while throwing in an impressive display of duckwalking across the stage.

The old place looked much the same to me, only nicer, and more comfortable. Sure enough, I found that it had been renovated in 2013.

The Pacifica Quartet, the 2023-24 Ensemble in Residence, stayed in their chairs and didn’t sing about school days, but, like Berry, they probably have something Beethoven in their repertoire, and sure can pluck those strings, though they only deal with four each, while Berry had six.

Behind the quartet, the University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra barely squeezed onto the stage, leaving no room for duckwalking even if they wanted to. They probably had to pick pieces with short bow strokes to avoid hitting each other.

The two groups combined beautifully for Paulus’s Three Places of Enlightenment, while the orchestra nicely opened with Montgomery’s Starburst and closed with Suk’s Scherzo fantastique, Op.25.

I didn’t leave with an earworm of Berry’s double-stop licks, unison bends, and major-minor modal shifts, but felt very entertained, relaxed and satisfied.

Decision Week in Review – Jan. 26, 2024

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I am so tired of hearing that Greta Gerwig was “snubbed” by not getting nominated for the Oscar for Best Director. Excuse me, but there were four other directors of Best Picture-nominated movies who also didn’t make the cut. Ten nominees in one category and only five in the other – I can do the math.

The easiest solution would be to even it out. Ten and ten. The directors of all Best Picture-nominated pictures, and only those directors, are automatically nominated for Best Director. But then some of those people writing the articles about the snubs might be out of work, which, they might be anyway, based on the L.A. Times staff reductions this week.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists left the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight. In explaining their decision to not move the clock, the organization nevertheless expressed concern about “a new nuclear arms race,” the “lack of action on climate change [that] threatens billions of lives and livelihoods,” biological research that presents the risk of causing a future pandemic, “and recent advances in artificial intelligence . . . that could . . . threaten civilization in countless ways.”

I wonder what kind of news would have been required to move the clock forward – Alex Rodriguez getting elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame despite his admissions about using steroids during his career? Or perhaps Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce breaking up.

Anything Goes – Porchlight Music Theatre – January 18, 2024

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In Porchlight’s aptly-named production of Cole Porter’s hit-filled Anything Goes, it does.

Meghan Murphy (aka Big Red) doesn’t just enter a stage, she commands it, as is only right in a broad comedy. And her fans in the audience, which now is all of them, hooted and hollered in acknowledgement every time.

Original book writers, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (and subsequent revisers Timothy Crouse and John Weidman) and lyricist Porter throw everything and then some against the wall, and most of it sticks. Am I the only one who thinks the character name Elisha (Eli) J. Whitney somehow relates to his constant consumption of alcohol, which I assumed to be gin.

In a bizarre way, related to his manipulation of the English language, Yale graduate Porter reminds me of Harvard graduate Tom Lehrer (who, coincidentally, had a roommate named Crouse – no kidding, no relation). And then throw in the fact that I last saw Jackson Evans, who plays Lord Evelyn Oakleigh, when he portrayed Princeton in Avenue Q in 2014, and you’ve got more ivy than the outfield walls at Wrigley.

Speaking of Evans, his limb-splaying comedic dance moves reminded me of Squidward’s dancing in The SpongeBob Square Pants Musical, only Evans only needed two legs, not ten.

And speaking of dancing, watching tap dancers strut their stuff on a big Broadway stage is one thing, but watching the same number of them fly across the compact Ruth Page space in a synchronized frenzy of fun is a whole different level of entertainment.

And then there are the beautiful singing voices of Luke Nowakowski (Billy Crocker) and Emma Ogea (Hope Harcourt), who, ridiculously, is still in college.

But back to Murphy, who held her pose and smile for so long every time the crowd gave her an extended ovation at the end of her songs that I thought her face would freeze in that position like that of Mr Sardonicus in the 1961 William Castle film.

If all that isn’t enough for you to run out and buy a ticket, one last thought, the band alone, nailing the memorable Porter tunes, is worth the price of admission.

Boop! The Musical – CIBC Theatre – December 17, 2023

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There are 25 cast members in Boop!, if you don’t count the character Pudgy (real name unknown), the dog marionette, but you should. It’s a star (as is its marionettist, Philip Huber).

There could have been no better way, on a Sunday afternoon, to avoid watching the Bears tie the NFL record for the most 10+ point 4th quarter leads blown in one season (three and counting).

Twenty-three year-old Jasmine Amy Rogers, as Betty Boop, is a star. And her 16-year-old accomplice Angelica Hale, as Trisha, has a singing voice beyond her years.

Neither of them was even born when castmate Faith Prince won her Tony in Guys and Dolls, but she’s still got it (not the cold).

As in any pre-Broadway run, tinkering continues, even after rave reviews, and cast members perform flawlessly as if nothing has changed.

One song, She Knocks Me Out, has been added since the program was printed (as evidenced in the insert), and I imagine some dialogue has been altered. What probably hasn’t been touched is the great choreography and dancing and the bonanza of technical aspects of the show.

The cost of the costumes alone probably exceeds the GNP of several small countries.

And even someone with cataracts might be blinded by the palette of colors once Betty enters the real world.

As a further bonus, one song even gives us a little captioning, ala Mitch Miller, with the aid of a bouncing ball, which never hits the ground (unlike the tragically-comedic Hail Mary pass at the end of the Bears game).

The Hip Hop Nutcracker – Cadillac Palace – Dec. 13, 2023

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While Tchaikovsky waited in the wings, and I let my mind wander, the show opened with special guest emcee Kurtis Blow doing a bit of an opening act, as if we were in Las Vegas.

Then Marissa Licata walked out, violin in hand, and got things going in a direction more to my tastes, the first act culminating, as stated in the program, when the “Nutcracker, aided by a magic pair of sneakers, defeats the Mouse King.” As Mars Blackmon told us in 1989, as if he were watching the dancing on the stage, “it’s gotta be the shoes.”

The beginning of the second act goes back in time to a nightclub, in 1984, using cool video effects that convinced me that time travel, via a very fast subway train, apparently is possible.

That setting provided the opportunity for the cast to show off their acrobatic dance skills, one-by-one, as if they were competing in an Olympics gymnastic floor exercise. I awarded each and every one of them a ten. Simone Biles would have been hard-pressed to keep up with this crew.

There were lots of moves that should be physically impossible, demonstrating remarkable strength and flexibility, all to the beat of the music, but I was most intrigued by Jessie Smith’s ability to move six or seven body parts simultaneously in different directions.

Charles Troy: PORTER VS. SONDHEIM – Porchlight Music Theatre – December 4, 2023

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I went in thinking it would be a knockout, Porter over Sondheim, in four rounds, out of the seven, but then I thought that the particular selection of competitive categories that musical theatre historian Troy used put Porter at a disadvantage, as if he were only allowed to punch with one hand.

The composers felt each other in the first round, Sondheim taunting and jabbing away with Comedy Tonight, and Porter dancing around the ring, or rather having Fred Astaire and George Murphy do it to the tune of Please Don’t Monkey with Broadway, in Broadway Melody of 1940, 25 years before Murphy was elected to the U.S. Senate.

And then the roundabout hook of Getting Married Today caught me off guard, comparing favorably to Porter’s They Couldn’t Compare to You, and causing me to award Sondheim the round.

It turned into an MMA fight when Porter floored Sondheim for an 8-count with I Get a Kick out of You.

Sondheim rose from the mat and decked Porter with Together Wherever We Go, but Sondheim was penalized by the referee for only being the lyricist on that song.

Then both fighters symbolically went down (Porter’s Down in the Depths and Sondheim’s Uptown-Downtown).

The next round was drawn from the start – Never, Never Be An Artist versus Finishing the Hat.

Finally, just when it looked like Sondheim might win the bout with America (even though, again, only the lyricist), he acknowledged that he hated what he had written (and told CBS News in 2020 that he was embarrassed by the lyrics he wrote for West Side Story, though acknowledging that the audiences might think differently), which left Porter standing over him, flag in hand ala George Foreman at the 1968 Summer Olympics, to the tune of I Still Love the Red, White and Blue.

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical – Marriott Theatre – December 3, 2023

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For those of us of a certain age, Carole King’s music is fundamental. And, for me, seeing a member of the extremely -talented Mueller family playing a part in King’s story is also basic.

In the first national tour I saw Abby Mueller, replacing her Tony award-winning sister Jessie in the part of King, and now I’ve seen brother Andrew as Gerry Goffin, after loving him in the off-beat Ernest Shackleton Loves Me earlier this year.

I also have now seen Erica Stephan, who plays Cynthia Weil, in four shows in just over a year – Clue, Cabaret (Jeff Award as Sally Bowles), Damn Yankees and Beautiful. There’s a reason she’s so in demand.

But, of course, Kaitlyn Davis, who, based on her bio, apparently was born to channel Carole King, is the star. And though the music is what draws people in, as it does in any jukebox musical, the show provides enough story such that the biggest round of applause of the night was when Davis, as King, tells her husband and lyricist Goffin, that she’s through with him and his philandering ways and sends him on his way.

Another appeal of the show for me is the complementary story of Weil and Barry Mann, King’s friends from the start of her career, who also wrote a myriad of hit songs, half a dozen of which are part of the score, and also are in the Songwriters and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame, and who, unlike the other couple, remained married for 62 years, until Weil’s death this year.

Bears vs. Cardinals: The NFL’s Oldest Rivalry – Chicago History Museum – December 2, 2023

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Had I known a few months ago that I would be attending this program, I wouldn’t have thrown out the autographed Charlie Trippi football I’d been saving for most of my life after having determined that it had no intrinsic value and was taking up valuable space that some equally worthless keepsake might be afforded.

I’m pretty sure I could have found a home for it with the speaker/author Joe Ziemba, who brought along some other memorabilia and made reference to the treasured boxes of related materials he had been gifted prior to writing this, his latest book.

Ziemba’s biography noted that, because of his knowledge of the early days of the professional game, he has been a resource for articles or reports in a number of well-known publications, including Sports Illustrated. In regard to that attribution, I can attest that it was, in fact, a real person standing before me, and not the avatar of a computer in the back room.

Ziemba covered the time frame from slightly before the 1920 founding of the NFL through 1959, after which the Cardinals started their westward trek that ultimately led to Arizona, a retirement exurb of Chicago.

The already obviously well-informed audience was treated to numerous interesting and humorous anecdotes, along with digs at Packer fans, player photographs and pictures of contracts and ledgers from the less-affluent days of the NFL, when players might make $75 a game and no one had ever heard of CTE.

Almost End-of-Year Reflections

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Another year gone by (almost – I decided to be the first kid on the block to send out my, now traditional, as in two years in a row, missive, with the anticipation that nothing worth mentioning will happen in the next month, just like in the previous eleven).

For a change, I didn’t need to get an MRI. Instead, I opted for a healthy dose of radiation from a CT scan. I highly recommend the mocha-flavored barium milk shake. (Over 50 years ago I had a summer job in a hospital x-ray department that gave me the opportunity to prepare barium enemas. Those were the days.)

Also back in the 70s, before CT scans became all the rage, I had a precursor EMI scan of my head, which, to quote Dizzy Dean when he had an x-ray of his head in 1934 after getting struck by a thrown ball, “revealed nothing.”

As a protest to the LIV Golf tour, this was my first year not striking a golf ball since before Saudi Arabia even had golf courses (they have 10 now).

I don’t miss it at all, and not having to clean my clubs has left me with more time to not clean other things as well, though I have made some upgrades to my humble abode, including increasing the number of remote controls to seven, that I’m aware of.

I replaced my piano with one that has functional pedals, one of which I’ve actually learned to use. I’m fairly certain that no one uses the middle sostenuto pedal, but the rule of three demands its presence.

I wrote the 6th edition of my arcane book (put your wallet away, it’s not yet on the market), which I believe is no worse than last all time in its category in regard to sales and which is now only 1299 print editions (and perhaps 200 million or so copies sold) behind A Tale of Two Cities, according to the WorldCat network of library content and services.

But, according to a friend of the author, Dickens’s music master gave up teaching him the piano, declaring: “He had no aptitude for music, and it was robbing his parents to continue giving him lessons.” So there!

Young Frankenstein – Mercury Theater – Nov. 12, 2023

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One of my favorite lines from the movie Young Frankenstein is Frau Blücher (pause for sound of horse neighing) saying “He Vas My Boyfriend.” Mel Brooks, genius that he is, took that line and turned it into a whole song for the musical.

This is the second production of YF that I’ve seen. While I have a special attachment to the first one, as I had occasion, through happenstance, to later play golf with the actor who played Igor in it, I thoroughly enjoyed this first-rate version.

Though the entire cast was excellent, I particularly loved the way Andrew MacNaughton inhabited the monster, though I would have been even further amused at an attempt to capture his early efforts at speaking in a captioned performance.

Mary Robin Roth, as Blücher, was once again terrific, as she was in her recent polar-opposite Jeff Award-winning performance as Fraulein Schneider in Porchlight’s Cabaret.

And during the curtain call, even the cast seemed to rejoice in the work done by Sam Shankman, who normally plays the blind hermit, but who, as understudy, flawlessly stepped into the title role.