Performance

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).

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.

Tap Dogs – Nederlander Theater – April 21, 2019

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What better thing to do on Easter than see Tap Dogs, as Easter reminds me of the movie Easter Parade, which reminds me of Fred Astaire tap dancing to Stepping Out With My Baby. But more on him later.

My love of tap dancing has been well-documented in my blogs about Aladdin, Something in the Game, 42nd Street, The Book of Mormon, Anything Goes, and Holiday Inn, and by the numerous times (like this one) I have gratuitously mentioned Sutton Foster.

But Tap Dogs takes the obsession to a whole new level. No, there aren’t actually dogs tap dancing (darn), though that was about the only thing missing. Think Stomp meets The Nicholas Brothers, except the Tap Dogs were in t-shirts, not tuxedos, and didn’t do painful-to-look-at splits down a staircase.

Backed by a couple of ferocious women drummers, the six male dancers did everything from splash dancing on a construction site set (think Singing in the Rain meets the Village People) to tap dancing upside down while hoisted up wearing a harness and dangling just below a fake ceiling, which reminded me of Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling in Royal Wedding, except here there were no special effects.

And the action was nonstop (these guys are in shape!) – 90 minutes with no intermission. My legs are sore just from watching, but my heart rate should be back to normal in no more than a day or two.

There was some comic relief scattered throughout, and one of the dancers incorporated several famous nontap dance steps. And, while I admit that I prefer that my tap dancing include mixed chorus lines in more traditional dance costumes, and a little lower decibel level, my hearing appears to be unharmed and my feet are still keeping the beat hours later. Dance on!

Blood, Sweat & Tears -The Villages – March 1, 2019

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The lead singer did a decent David Clayton-Thomas impression and the musicians were excellent, especially the drummer, whose featured solo was a showpiece for his lightening-fast hands. But I wondered how the front man for the band calling itself Blood, Sweat & Tears (pursuant, I assume, to an array of legal agreements) could keep a straight face talking about “we” when referring to the band’s hits and accomplishments, including winning the 1970 Grammys Album of the Year over Abbey Road.

What made this braggadocio cringe-worthy for me is that only one of the current members of the band joined it before 2010, and even he joined 10 years after the last of the original members left. Did they really think the elderly audience was so senile that they would believe that these clones were the real thing?

Or perhaps the band was counting on an audience that had indulged in one too many of the omnipresent happy hours in The Villages. The local paper is filled with notices about them, right before the pages filled with notices about AA and Al-Anon meetings.

In The Villages’ three town squares, happy hours are accompanied by local bands playing golden oldies for free for the resident golden oldies, which begs the question as to why the residents pay to see a faux Blood, Sweat & Tears. Maybe it’s for the uncomfortable folding chairs in the Savannah Center.

Or maybe it’s for the chance to see surprise guest performers, like sports commentator and interviewer Roy Firestone, who was there plugging his book and forthcoming show, telling anecdotes, and doing speaking and singing impressions. I have to admit he wasn’t bad, but his act seemed so out of place that a lot of people sat and squirmed until the band appeared to do its impressions.  At least that was my impression.

The Paper Machete – Green Mill – February 16, 2019

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It’d been a little over a year since I first went to see The Paper Machete live magazine at the Green Mill on a Saturday afternoon. I learned from that experience that seats are hard to come by (the Wednesday evening show, at least the one time I went, isn’t as crowded), and so arrived an hour and a half before show time, which was only 15 minutes earlier than necessary to avoid unintentionally making lots of new friends among a crowd of people standing around, pressing their bodies into an insufficient amount of space.

Getting there early also affords one the opportunity to watch emcee Christopher Piatt, standing behind the bar, trying to not so subtly rehearse his frenetic Danny Kaye court jester lip-synching routine.

Piatt is a constant, but the rest of the cast of The Paper Machete changes from show to show, so it was an amazing coincidence that Becca Brown, whom I saw perform there a year ago, was again on stage, showing off her strong singing voice.

The comedy also was good, as before, but I was there primarily to see Big Red, that is Meghan Murphy, do her thing, as I have done at Theater Wit, Steppenwolf, and Venus Cabaret.

She didn’t disappoint, capping off her performance by holding the last note of her set long enough that I could have read a couple chapters of a book, had I brought a book.

Piatt, in thanking Murphy and expressing his admiration of her talents, referred to her as the personification of Jessica Rabbit, which seemed to please Murphy.

Fanboy that I am, I couldn’t resist approaching Murphy after the show as she sat at the bar drinking with friends. I introduced myself and fawned over her for a respectable, but not creepy, amount of time before going on my way.

The Beatles: Love – Cirque du Soleil – Mirage Theater, Las Vegas – January 24, 2019

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All You Need is Love, and I got 90 minutes of it, attacking my visual and auditory cortices from every direction (not to mention those parts of my brain related to long-term memory, as it has been over 50 years since the Beatles first gained our attention). The problem with the show is that, if you focus too much on one thing, you don’t notice five other things that are happening at the same time. There’s no pause, rewind, or instant replay. I’m sure there must have been a kitchen sink thrown in somewhere that I missed.

The varied and spectacular exhibitions of strength, grace, and agility by the show’s performer/athletes, as they danced, twisted, stretched, and threw their bodies around, made me think of Katelyn Ohashi, the UCLA gymnast who is the current queen of YouTube because of her amazing routine at the recent Collegiate Challenge at the Anaheim Convention Center, which undoubtedly will lead her to the greatest reward a gymnast can attain, no not being awarded a gold medal at the Olympics, or getting a job with Cirque du Soleil, but rather winning the mirror ball on Dancing With the Stars.

I first saw Cirque du Soleil when it was performing Saltimbanco under a tent in the early 1990s. For some bizarre reason my most vivid memory of that show is the guy who climbed up chairs that he piled on top of each other. I always wondered what his mother thought as she grounded him, literarily and figuratively, sending him to his room, in the hopes of interrupting him as he went about wrecking furniture in pursuit of a career in the lost art of hand balancing.

In addition to the music, special effects, and huge cast, Love features hundreds of garish costumes, not unlike what you see on the street in front of the hotel.

Moby-Dick Read-a-Thon – Newberry Library – January 19-20, 2019

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The closest I had ever come before to reading past the first three words of Moby-Dick was to see the Gregory Peck movie and the Star Trek movie First Contact, wherein Captain Picard is accused of being like Captain Ahab.

In case you were wondering, Moby-Dick, the novel, is 206,052 words long. It took over 150 of us a little over 24 hours, taking turns, to read the whole thing aloud. I was assigned the last 1158 words of Chapter 134.

In case you were further wondering, the Smithsonian tells us there appears to be absolutely no good reason why the title is hyphenated (the name of the whale is not hyphenated inside the book, except, mysteriously, in one place), it possibly being a typographical error or the result of a long-obsolete custom. Melville originally titled the book simply, The Whale, but then apparently changed it for marketing purposes, which didn’t really work as it had “tepid reviews and miserable initial sales.”

Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Why Read Moby-Dick and the introductory speaker leading into the read-a-thon (or as the lead staff person for the occasion called it, the Moby-Dickapalooza), advised us that, back in the day, “if you liked Moby-Dick you had literary cred”, that Faulkner said it was the one book by another author he wish he had written, and that Hemingway, in writing The Old Man and the Sea, admitted that he was trying to best Moby-Dick.

Along with the unwashed masses, such as myself, reading from the book, there were quite a few ringers – Sara Paretsky, for one, and Dave Catlin, who directed Moby-Dick at Lookingglass Theater, for another. I mention him because he introduced himself to me in the ready room after I impressed him by knowing my left from my right.

Upon conclusion of the event, it was determined that three people (plus the staff person in charge) had stayed for the whole thing (giving more meaning to the unwashed masses). Their presence throughout made moot my intellectual curiosity as to whether, like that tree in the forest, if no one had been there to listen to the readers in the middle of the night, they would have made a sound.

The Nutcracker – Joffrey Ballet – Auditorium Theater – December 14, 2018

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I broke my coat’s zipper while getting ready to leave for the theater. Coincidentally, though the term zipper didn’t come into use until 1923, Whitcomb Judson, who is sometimes given credit as the inventor of the zipper, debuted his clasp locker at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which provides the background for the Joffrey’s production.

“Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?”

How times have changed. Plastic is now the devil (subtle reference to the Devil in the White City, which also is set at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair).

Chicago voters have expressed their desire to ban plastic straws. What about plastic wrappings at cultural events? I had to give the woman behind me my best death stare during the second act of The Nutcracker to get her to stop playing with her candy packaging. I wonder how Tchaikovsky felt about people eating M&Ms and checking their cell phones (woman in front of me) during performances.

He supposedly didn’t care that much for the Nutcracker story as adapted for the ballet. Picking up on that in the biography Tchaikovsky, David Brown writes “The Nutcracker is meaningless in the profoundest sense.” Nice juxtaposition.

And, as I agree, it’s not surprising that I enjoyed the second act a lot more than the first (during which I would have rather watched a Charlie Chaplin silent film synched to the music) because the second act was almost all about the wonderful music and, at times flexibility-defying, dancing.

But enough culture for one weekend. I’m planning on spending the next two days watching the ballet that is football. Also meaningless.

Big Red and the Boys – Venus Cabaret – December 9, 2018

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Secretariat, widely considered the greatest race horse of all time, was nicknamed Big Red. He wasn’t part of the show at the Venus Cabaret.

But Meghan Murphy, also nicknamed Big Red, was. This was the first stop on what Murphy described as the act’s world tour – Chicago, Philadelphia and New York.

I love the Venus Cabaret, which opened this year adjoining the Mercury Theater (get it?). It’s an attractive space, with its own bar, and without a bad seat in the house, though there was some glare off the screens behind the stage, which I didn’t hesitate to tell management about when they sent me a survey after the show.

In honor of Big Red, the bar offered a couple of red drinks, one with vodka, one with whiskey. I wonder what they’d have at the bar if Michael Lee Aday (Meatloaf) were performing there.

Though there was some new material in this, their eighth annual show, Big Red and the Boys pleased the crowd by performing the group’s “standards”, like Get Your Holiday On, often encouraging the audience to sing along.

Big Red also broke out her holiday costume, complete with well-placed lights outlining her physical assets. The costume, along with the boys’ flashing bow ties, came in handy when Murphy occasionally had a hard time finding her spotlight, which just served as another excuse for some of her off-the-cuff, contagious humor. Murphy, whose website describes her as actor, singer, dancer, and badass, always seems to be having a good time on stage.

I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of perverse show could be created by combining Big Red’s with the play next door, Avenue Q, having Murphy as Lucy, who is described as “a vixenish vamp with a dangerous edge.”

1968: Song by Song – Chicago Humanities Festival – November 5, 2018

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The good news – the program featured great performances by the singers and musicians and, for those of us who were of a certain age in 1968, was a very nostalgic evening, complete with covers and quotes from The Chicago Seed, the underground newspaper of the day, which was edited by Abe Peck (who was in attendance), the father of Doug Peck, the musical director of the program. They even added an Aretha Franklin tribute at the end that extended the program well past its scheduled finish time, to the delight of the audience.

The bad news – what the hell were they thinking by including MacArthur Park as the song representing August, 1968?! Miami Herald readers polled by Dave Barry in 1992 voted the 1968 recording as the worst song of all time. The only redeeming thing about it is the instrumental interlude. If not for all the horrible things that happened in 1968, Richard Harris’s singing and the nonsensical lyrics of this song would take the cake, whether or not it was left out in the rain.

A much better choice would have been People Got to be Free by The Rascals, which was a chart topper that August and was a far more representative song of the feeling of the times that this program was trying to convey.

But if MacArthur Park it had to be in some fashion, why not Al Yankovic’s 1983 parody of it, with his far better lyrics, which included, “Jurassic Park is frightening in the dark/All the dinosaurs are running wild/Someone shut the fence off in the rain/I admit it’s kind of eerie/But this proves my chaos theory.”

After all, chaos abounded in 1968.