Chicago Shakespeare Theater

The Enigmatist – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – June 23, 2024

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I have seen, in person, an actual enigma machine, at the terrific Spy Museum, in Washington D.C. This has absolutely nothing to do with The Enigmatist, though I suspect that Alan Turing and all the other codebreakers at Bletchley Park would have been fun people to have in the audience at this show.

Even without them, this was a nerd-filled group, which I say with great admiration and respect. I was in my element, but humbled, though I managed to have my two seconds in the limelight when I shouted out the correct answer to the first clue in a giant crossword puzzle.

David Kwong, the Enigmatist, is a Harvard graduate and veteran cruciverbalist, and a talented, charming entertainer, who bills his show as an immersive evening of puzzles, cryptology and illusions, during which he employs playing cards, dollar bills, a locked box, a cell phone, and a kiwi in a series of tricks that come together in unexpected ways.

Kwong demonstrated rapid processing skills, fueled by an impressive memory and an encyclopedic knowledge of words. But, even as he was throwing out definitions of words he was using in a Scrabble trick, it seemed like he was making them up. Not exactly everyday vocabulary.

I had a similar reaction to his crossword puzzle construction, which incorporated some rather esoteric answers. I prefer clever, but I’m just nitpicking about a fun show.

Judgment Day – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – May 22, 2024

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Part Defending Your Life, part Here Comes Mr. Jordan/Heaven Can Wait and part Michael, Judgment Day (not to be confused with the Terminator movie) gives Jason Alexander free rein to ham it up comedically on stage and he doesn’t disappoint, though I wondered whether the flap at the back of his toupee was on purpose. Even when you see the joke coming, he hits a home run.

As does the whole cast, in particular Candy Buckley as an Angel with an attitude.

With great humor, the play presents the audience with profound things to think about, but the only message I chose to take from it related to sleeping on your stomach.

Right near the end of the show, it occurred to me that the trajectory of Alexander’s character, Sammy Campo, reminded me in a way of Sky Masterson’s journey in Guys and Dolls, though Masterson was never the low-life that Campo was.

In terms of sleaze per square foot, Campo, through much of the play, more closely resembles the lawyer Alexander played in Pretty Woman. By the end, however, speaking of home runs, (spoiler alert) he’s more like Roy Hobbs in The Natural returning home to play catch with the son he never knew about.

It Came From Outer Space – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – July 24, 2022

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This world premiere musical, based on the 1953 movie of the same name, which, in turn, was based on a film treatment by Ray Bradbury (and not on a William Shakespeare play), will probably never play Broadway, but I would not at all be surprised if it turned into a long-running Off-Broadway sensation, where audience members come dressed as aliens.

Of course, the musical Little Shop of Horrors, also based on a low budget science fiction movie, started off Off-Off-Broadway, then went Off-Broadway for five years, before eventually making it to Broadway and becoming a staple of theaters everywhere.

This show was written by the same two people, Joe Kinosian and Kellen Blair, who won the 2011 Jeff Award for writing the musical Murder for Two, which I loved. As is necessary to fully exploit the delightful silliness of the show, the cast played it straight, although I imagine that there were numerous breakdowns in rehearsals.

In particular I would like to mention Jaye Ladymore, whom I never had seen on stage before (unlike the other players), but who caught my attention last year on the ill-fated tv series 4400. Today I often found myself looking to see her movements and facial reactions, even when the focus of the action was elsewhere, like in outer space.

As You Like It – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – November 30, 2021

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I’m bad with names, but better with faces. What I didn’t know until I saw Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s As You Like It last night, is that I’m good with thighs (and not just those on the Thanksgiving turkey), or rather quadriceps, as that sounds better, until I recognized the actor playing Orlando as having the same ridiculously muscular legs as I saw when he played the lead in the production of Memphis I saw three-and-a-half years ago at Porchlight Music Theatre.

I don’t go to a lot of Shakespeare, but this show is as I like it, in that it incorporates 23 Beatles songs into the script, along with some off-hand jokes that undoubtedly rile true Bard of Avon aficionados, and starts with a band and a modern-day wrestling match (more riling), even before the obsolete, often unintelligible English dialogue that is Shakespeare jumps in (wouldn’t supertitles be great?), with the match acting as a prologue and a way of entertaining those of us who get there early to avoid the proof-of-vaccination backup at the door, the sight of which made me wonder whether there were similar lines during the 1665 Great Plague of London.

Q Brothers Christmas Carol – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – December 14, 2019

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Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was first published in 1843. Though the underlying spirit (or spirits, if you will) remains the same, the Q Brothers have made more than a few changes. Bless them, everyone.

This makes six years in a row I’ve seen the Q Brothers ply their trade in this must-see show. I’d call it a tradition, but that implies a handing down between generations. I can’t even get most of my same-generation friends to go because they’re afraid of hip-hop, as if it were some kind of communicable disease. Bah, humbug, Those who have gone, thank me.

Since I’ve written about the show the last two years, there’s not much left to say, except to wonder when the cast will get too old to dance around the stage, and when that happens, will they allow a younger set of performers to replace them in the tradition of some road-weary 60s rock band that has reached its limit and sold their name (see Blood, Sweat, and Tears).

Nonetheless, I’ll mention a few things. Scrooge asking a young girl in the audience whether he’s using the word hashtag correctly. Her hands-up response suggested she didn’t know, which made me feel better. Scrooge’s childhood friend once again going off on a tangent, not one considered by Leibniz or Euclid, but different than last year’s, cracking up not only the other actors and the audience, but also himself, and thereby answering my question as to whether his random departure is part of the show. The Tarik Cohen joke added last year to show currency. The newly-inserted visual marijuana reference to the Illinois law about to take effect. Tiny Tim’s song that matter-of-factly lists all his ailments, none of which, I’m pretty sure, are transmitted by attending a hip-hop show. Just saying.

Six – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – June 29, 2019

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“I’m Henry the eighth I am, Henry the eighth I am I am, I got married to the widow next door, She’s been married seven times before, And everyone was a Henry.” Turns out that’s not the real story about England’s King Henry VIII.

I’ve never seen the musical Nine, which won the 1982 Tony for best musical, but I bet it isn’t 50% better than Six, the part herstory lesson, part rock concert, part dance party, part comedic musical retelling of the stories of the six wives of Henry VIII, which I’m guessing will make its way to Broadway, with awards in its future.

All but one of the very talented performers were new to me, the exception being Abby Mueller, who was Carole King in Beautiful last time I saw her. Now she’s Jane Seymour, not the English actress (who has been married four times in her own right), but rather Henry’s third wife in the chain of “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived, but just for you tonight, we’re divorced, beheaded, live.”

Don’t worry about the list’s suggestion of violent deaths. No one actually loses their head on stage, though a majority of the audience lost their minds, whooping and hollering in reaction to the creative, illuminating, high-energy songs, which, as I learned from reading the playbill, were “queenspired” by a dozen pop stars, ranging from Adele to Beyonce to Rihanna (but, thankfully, not Herman’s Hermits).

My only regret upon leaving the theater was that Henry didn’t have more wives to entertain and educate the audience. I don’t know what the authors have in mind for their next project, but Elizabeth Taylor had seven husbands (eight marriages counting Richard Burton twice).

Q Brothers Christmas Carol – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – November 27, 2018

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I keep coming back for more of this hip-hop interpretation of the Dickens classic. But, after seeing it several years in a row, what could still surprise me? This time it was the brief interlude when JQ seemed to lose his train of thought for a moment and go into an improvised description of a dream he had. Scripted or not, it had not only the audience, but also one of his fellow cast members in hysterics.

Everyone knows the Dickens story, but it occurred to me that not everyone may have considered what the Q brothers and their Christmas Carol have in common with the character Q from Star Trek.

Patrick Stewart, who, as Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, had several encounters with Q, also for many years performed a one-man, award-winning show of A Christmas Carol, playing more than 30 characters. Coincidence? I think not.

Q, in Star Trek, is of unknown origin. The Q brothers are of known origin, the northern suburbs of Chicago. I know this because a couple years ago I met an usher at the show who was their high school drama teacher. She was very proud.

Q, in Star Trek, is an extra-dimensional being. The Q brothers are multidimensional, namely writing, singing, dancing, and acting.

Q, in Star Trek, possesses immeasurable power over time and space. The Q brothers, as the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future in their Christmas Carol, possess power over time and space, constrained only by the music the live DJ spins and the 75-minute duration of the show.

Q, in Star Trek, used his powers to pass judgment on humanity.

The Q brothers use their powers in Christmas Carol to pass judgment on Scrooge and get him to have some humanity. Spoiler alert – it works.

Nell Gwynn – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – October 9, 2018

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Nell Gwynn and Tootsie. Almost indistinguishable. Both plays deal with, among other things, plays within plays. The play within Tootsie is a bastardization of Romeo and Juliet (renamed Juliet’s Nurse), changed to accentuate the part of a man, who is posing as a woman unbeknownst to the rest of the actors in, or audience of Juliet’s Nurse.

Several of the plays mentioned within Nell Gwynn are rewritten to accentuate her parts, in more ways than one, as she takes the place previously occupied in the theatrical world of merry old England by men who posed as women, though those men were known to be men by their audiences and fellow actors, unlike in Shakespeare in Love or Victor, Victoria, where women posed as men posing as women on stage.

In any event, David Bedella did a great job as the actor who had always played, if not possessed, the women’s parts. I’m sure Bedella, or do I mean his character, or both(?), would make a great Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, who is always played by a man, because, as explained by creator John Waters, it’s a secret the audience has, that the other characters don’t know. He actually said cast, not characters, but I’ve already made this confusing enough.

Nell Gwynn, the play, is based upon real characters and real events (I’m pretty sure Tootsie isn’t), though extreme liberties are taken to make it an entertaining evening, which leads me to the bubonic plague.

There’s a joke in the play (or was it in the play within the play?) about the plague, which meets with feigned disapproval, whereupon Bedella asks of his compatriots, “too soon?”. Big laugh, unless, perhaps, you know someone who died from the plague. But, as always I provide important research, having found a pseudoscientific inquiry about when a joke is too soon.

 

Chicago Shakespeare Theater – Season Preview Party – October 2, 2018

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The Urban Dictionary defines ghost as “to avoid someone until they get the picture and stop contacting you.” If only that worked with robocalls. Americans received 30 billion robocalls last year and a friend of mine insists that all of them were to him. But I digress.

Long before it became a verb, Shakespeare wrote about ghosts in five of his plays. And Dickens famously wrote about several apparitions in “A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.” (How many of you knew the whole name of the novella?)

The Chicago Shakespeare Theater unites with Dickens every year to present “A Q Brothers’ Christmas Carol”. The 2018 production is one of this season’s shows that was highlighted at the preview party. I go every year. Do yourself a big favor and see it (even if you think you don’t like hip-hop).

Barbara Gaines, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Artistic Director, asked the audience how many of them had seen productions of the company in the Ruth Page Auditorium, where it resided for 12 years before moving to its present location in 1999. A smattering of people raised their hands, which inspired me to shout out to Gaines, after only one glass of wine, “What about the Red Lion?”, a pub that is owned by an friend of mine and that also is known for being haunted by ghosts.

Rather than ghosting me or asking staff to remove me from the room, Gaines asked me to repeat myself, and when I did, and she realized that I knew about the company’s birth on the rooftop of the Lincoln Avenue bar in 1986, she rose from her chair, and bowed and raised her hands in praise to me, whereupon Creative Producer Rick Boynton, who was on stage with her, jokingly took it one step further by asking if anyone had been to Barbara’s living room. A woman sitting in front of me raised her hand, thereby unceremoniously putting me in my place.

 

 

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.