Theater

Something in the Game: An All American Musical – Josephine Louis Theater at Northwestern University – August 4, 2018

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One night after Johnny Football threw four interceptions in his first Canadian Football League game, I went to see a musical about famed Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne.

As I sat there watching Notre Dame’s legendary Four Horsemen backfield tap dance across the stage with their lineman and a bevy of chorus girls depicting the invention of the Notre Dame Box variation of the single formation that revolutionized college football (don’t worry, the play doesn’t get that technical), I couldn’t help but think of June Allyson and Peter Lawford, as a college football player, leading a dancing crowd through The Varsity Drag in 1947’s Good News, a movie based on the 1927 Broadway hit musical of the same name, which introduced the song, The Best Things in Life are Free.

Apparently, there also was a 1930 movie based on that play that was taken out of circulation due to its pre motion picture code censorship content, which included sexual innuendo and lewd suggestive humor. Anybody have a copy?

The Four Horsemen tap dance, along with a number of other scenes, takes place in Jimmy the Goat’s, a then South Bend establishment of ill repute frequented by the players for drinking, gambling, and whatever. The ever-present James Earl Jones II plays Jimmy the Goat, in anticipation of which, prior to the show, I tasted the goat at Evanston’s Mt. Everest restaurant (thumbs, or horns, up), which not surprisingly features Nepalese cuisine.

All American status should be conferred on the entire cast, especially the vocal skills of Stef Tovar (Rockne), Dara Cameron (Rockne’s wife Bonnie), and Rashada Dawan (Thelma, the lady of the house at Jimmy the Goat’s).

Also, I loved the theater, which features comfortable seats, plenty of leg room, and ample parking (the best things in life are free).

Support Group for Men – Goodman Theater – July 22, 2018

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In any theater larger than a breadbox, house VIP seats, which you know are the best seats, typically do not start before row five. Yet, when you order tickets for a play online and ask for the best seats, the computer generally starts with the row closest to the stage. This makes me think that the computers are programmed by massage therapists, looking to bring in new customers with stiff necks.

If you buy a ticket close to the date of the show, you might get lucky enough to get a VIP seat that has not been taken. Such was the case for this show, which resulted in me sitting two seats away from chef Rick Bayless, or so I was told, because I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a five-man lineup, even with Lenny Briscoe whispering in my ear to pick suspect number two.

Governor Bruce Rauner also was pointed out to me in the audience. This is only worth mentioning in that my seat was better than his.

If you have read previous blogs, you know that I generally shy away from the Goodman Theater, but I took the word of several friends who had seen this show (including one whose high praise was that she didn’t walk out on it) and thus made a last minute decision to go. I was rewarded, not only with the VIP seat, but also with some laughs. Good enough for me.

The play as a whole made me think of Wild Men (though that was a musical), a 1992 play with George Wendt, Pete Burns (with whom I had improv classes), and Rob Riley (from whom I took an acting class) about the so-called men’s movement, which featured men beating drums in the woods, as opposed to men passing around a baseball bat as a talking stick in Support Group. We’ve come a long way, baby.

The Buddy Holly Story – American Blues Theater at Stage 773 – July 6, 2018

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Spoiler alert – Buddy Holly dies. He does, however, return to play two encores.

Interestingly enough, the big number at the end of this show is a Chuck Berry song, Johnny B. Goode, which is made even more interesting by the fact that the last song Holly actually played at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake Iowa, before his ill-fated decision to fly to the next destination so he could get his laundry done (couldn’t he just turn his underwear inside out?), was a different Berry song, Brown Eyed Handsome Man.

This reminded me of the Chuck Berry Greatest Hits double album I owned in college, from which my roommate, Wasil Pahuchy, Jr., accidentally broke one of the records. Though Wasil could have squashed me like a bug (and could chug a pitcher of beer, for what that’s worth – ah, Friday afternoons at Kam’s), he lived in mortal fear that I would retaliate against him for destroying my most prized possession.

I never saw Buddy Holly in concert (I did see Chuck Berry on three occasions), though I have seen the Gary Busey movie and three different live productions featuring doppelgangers, of which this was my favorite, with the lead at one point playing a guitar while holding it behind behind his neck, which, if you’re interested, you can learn to do on the Guitar Player website.

The Buddy Holly story would be unbelievable if it weren’t true, but the music is the reason to go. I don’t know who had more fun, the performers or the audience.

On the way out, an audience member asked a cast member, who had come back out on stage to put away his guitar, whether the producers of the show had looked for musicians who also were actors, or actors who also were musicians. His answer was “yes.”

The Light Fantastic – Jackalope Theater – June 7, 2018

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Promoted as funny and scary, the show featured good special effects and one moment early on when everyone except me (low blood pressure) jumped out of their seats.

The song Time in a Bottle became an element near the end of the play, which reminded me of the parody about drug testing, Mine in a Bottle, we did in the Bar Show years ago, which then reminded me of the show Urinetown (I would have liked to have been in the room for the discussion about naming that show), which was mentioned at this week’s Porchlight Music Theater New Faces Sing Broadway 1975 event in conjunction with John Cullum, who appeared in Urinetown, and won a 1975 Tony for Shenandoah, which I never knew, as it was only recently that I learned he was a Broadway star for years before appearing on Northern Exposure, like so many other Broadway stars who move to television, which made me think of Jerry Orbach, who starred on and off Broadway (two Tonys and the original El Gallo in the Fantastiks) before becoming Lenny Briscoe on Law and Order, though he never sang or danced on that show, which reminded me that I keep waiting and hoping that Sutton Foster (whose brother Hunter was in Urinetown with Cullum) will break into a tap dance on Younger, which is also how I felt about Dule Hill on West Wing, though they did figure out a way to let him tap dance a couple times on Psych. But I digress.

The Light Fantastic featured a monitor displaying the dialogue (and considerable sound effects), from the written script, which reflected some inconsequential differences from what the actors spoke, although I did notice one time when the reversal of order of a sentence killed a would-be comedic moment.

Other than that, and the moment when an audience member had to be helped from the theater after nearly passing out in the front row, the show seemed to go as planned.

New Faces Sing Broadway 1975 – Porchlight Music Theater – June 6, 2018

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First things first – special thanks to the Arts Club of Chicago, where the event was held, for serving red wine. Are you listening American Writers Museum?

If you like trivia and Broadway musicals (and who doesn’t, except one friend of mine), this was the place to be. We heard I Don’t Want to Go Over to Vietnam, from The Lieutenant, which holds the record for shortest run, nine performances, for a show with a Tony nomination for Best Musical. The show is a rock opera about the court martial of Lieutenant Calle. I prefer I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.

The Magic Show was another play with which I was unfamiliar. But this vehicle for magician Doug Henning ran for four years on Broadway, and the music and lyrics were written by Stephen Schwartz, who, among other things, did okay with Wicked. A bit of trivia I discovered that they didn’t tell us – the show was produced by Edgar Lansbury, Angela’s brother.

My favorite among the songs I hadn’t heard before was Emily Senkowsky’s energetic rendition of Look What Happened to Mabel, from Mack and Mabel.

Among others, we also heard songs from the more well-known Chicago and A Chorus Line, the latter of which won nine Tonys to Chicago’s zero. But, although A Chorus Line also won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and became one of the longest running shows in Broadway history, it still takes a back seat to a show from that year that only lasted one month on Broadway – The Rocky Horror Show, the movie version of which is considered to be the longest-running release in film history. The performers led the audience in the Time Warp, which made sense since we were trapped in 1975.

Grand Hotel – Theater Wit – May 26, 2018

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Help, I’m stuck in 1928! The Front Page, which I blogged about last week, premiered in 1928. Grand Hotel opened on Broadway in 1989, but takes place in 1928. I wonder whether anything significant will happen in 1929.

Tommy Tune won the Tony Award for best choreographer (and best director) of a musical for Grand Hotel, and it was easy to see why when the show’s big dance number rousingly filled the stage with all but one of the 20 cast members, and brought the biggest applause of the night.

The cast was good, across the board (and the boards), with a special shout out to Leryn Turlington as Flaemmchen and Jonathan Schwart as Kringelein, who nailed their juicy roles. It is a testament to either their acting, or my lack of cognitive abilities, that I’ve seen at least four of the show’s actors (including both of the above) in other plays in the last year and a half, and didn’t recognize any of them.

Grand Hotel’s original logo added the words “The Musical.” This got me to wondering when plays first started adding some such designation to their names, presumably so that no one in the audience would be confused when one of the characters started singing. (I have a friend who won’t go to see musicals because he finds it unbelievable that someone would just break into song for no reason. This same friend is an ardent follower of The Avengers. Nothing unbelievable there.)

The oldest Tony-nominated musical I could find with “The Musical” officially listed in its name (not just on the logo) was Cyrano: The Musical, in 1994. In 2018 we have SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical. I’m eagerly anticipating the opening of Musical: The Musical; Drama: The Drama; and, eventually, Drama: The Broadway Musical.

 

Do Re Mi – Porchlight Theater – May 24, 2018

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Thomas Wolfe, not to be confused with the Tom Wolfe who recently shuffled off this mortal coil, was the author of the 1940 posthumously-published book, You Can’t Go Home Again, a catchphrase that has become an essential part of our culture. The Porchlight Theater disdains this advice by producing its Porchlight Revisits series, unearthing musicals that have been laid to rest long ago.

In the past year I have seen Woman of the Year, Merrily We Roll Along, and They’re Playing Our Song, all for the first time, as part of this series, and am looking forward to seeing 1776 in the fall. (Seats will be a lot cheaper than Hamilton, which I understand covers some of the same material.)

The 1960 musical Do Re Mi, which is not to be confused with the song Do Re Mi from the 1959 Broadway show The Sound of Music, or the 1958-1960 television quiz show Dough Re Mi, should be packed back in its box and left to be a footnote, along with many other shows that produced one memorable song. And that song in this case, Make Someone Happy, is best remembered by me for the version by Jimmy Durante at the end of Sleepless in Seattle.

The best thing about this production was the always-interesting, detailed background and historical context of the show that the theater presents prior to the opening act of each revisited play. Also, the actor playing the lead not only looked like Phil Silvers, who created the role on Broadway, but also played the role to the hilt, as if he had been a vaudeville star like Silvers.

But we also had to suffer through songs like What’s New at the Zoo, which had nothing to do with the plot, and made me yearn for If I Could Talk to the Animals. All this after having to change seats because the air conditioning system was dripping on ours. I love the Porchlight Theater, but stay away from seat F20 in warm weather.

Front Page – St. Sebastian Players (at the St. Bonaventure Church) – May 19, 2018

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This was the second play I’ve seen in a church in the past 13 months (see blog on Forty-Two Stories). As with the last one, there were bothersome stairs to navigate, in this case steep ones leading into a basement that, at least based upon the signage, had only one exit (even the No Exit Cafe has two).

The St. Sebastian Players are a membership-based theater company. If you, Mickey Rooney, and Judy Garland have a barn and want to put on a show, there is a handy website with information on how to start a membership-based company.

The League of Chicago Theaters says that it has over 200 members, including the St. Sebastian Players. By my quick count, with this addition, I now have seen shows produced by at least 45 of them.

The beauty of a neighborhood company like St. Sebastian producing a play like Front Page is that the show has a large cast, which can help bring in customers. There were 20 actors, and we may have been the only two audience members who didn’t know any of them personally, although I admit knowing one of the company’s Board members.  In particular, the actor playing Hildy Johnson displayed physical comedy skills, as well as the ability to speak rapid-fire dialogue in the manner we expect from this show (though not in the same league as Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in the 1940 movie adaptation His Girl Friday, or Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien in the 1931 movie version, which, help me, I still recall watching on TV in my unproductive childhood).

The theater had a nice period-evoking set, including (spoiler alert) the iconic roll top desk used in the show to hide Earl Williams after he breaks out of jail (nothing like an escapist show about an escapee). We were very impressed by the actor’s ability to cram himself into the desk for an extended period of time. Apparently many more people suffer from stage fright (up to 80%!) than claustrophobia (perhaps 5-10%), so perhaps the inside of the desk was a welcome relief for him.

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.

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.