Porchlight Music Theatre

Broadway in your Backyard – Porchlight Music Theatre – Washington Square Park – July 18, 2021

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If you don’t count Piff the Magic Dragon, and I don’t, the last in-person, no scientist involved, theatrical event (as opposed to instrumental concert, by my definition, which is the only one that counts, as it’s my blog), I had attended before last Sunday was on February 25, 2020. I’m still waiting for the first indoor one, but not until at least the fall, and not anxiously.

In the park I’m surrounded by grass and trees and feel a gentle breeze on my back. In the Ruth Page Auditorium, where Porchlight normally performs, I’m surrounded by the walls of a 1927 building that may or may not have a ventilation system.

At the park event I sat in my own folding chair, which is far more comfortable than any seat at Ruth Page, and placed it so that I didn’t have to rub elbows with strangers exhaling in my immediate vicinity. My view was somewhat limited by overhanging tree foliage, but that’s still better than sitting behind Andre the Giant, which I always wind up doing at the theater, even though he died in 1993.

So, like the groupie I am, I’m looking forward to attending three future Backyard programs in three different parks in August. Have chair will travel.

The Theory of Nothing

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Just because the world has ground to a halt doesn’t mean that I should stop writing, or does it? Have I misinterpreted the signs? Anyway, to help us all pass the time, here are some notes about some of the things I’m not doing.

Speaking of signs, and the stealing thereof, I’m not watching baseball games. I wouldn’t anyway, but my class on the Literature of Baseball at Northwestern’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute will be held online, instead of in person, which means I don’t get to indulge in the delicious home-made brownies that a member of the class, who is a baker, brings each week.

I’m not watching March Madness or running my pool, which is a shame because I concocted some bizarre rules this year in the hope that no one else would understand them. In that vein, in the absence of games, I have declared myself the winner of the pool.

Despite having been the Wizard of Oz in Wicked on Broadway, Joel Grey apparently does not have the power to make everything right and so is not going to the 25th Anniversary Porchlight Music Theatre Icons Gala honoring him and neither is anyone else, including me, at least until it gets rescheduled.

I’m not going to the postponed Newberry Library Associates Night, where I was hoping to cop some free wine and cheese and then sneak out before the staff droned on about research that would have bored me to tears.

I’m not going to the American Writers Museum to listen to Gene Luen Yang talk about his new graphic novel Dragon Hoops, as he cancelled his in-person book tour, and instead, according to his website, is touring as a cartoon.

I’m not going to the Civic Orchestra of Chicago’s 100th Anniversary Concert, which was to feature Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, which also was performed at the orchestra’s first-ever concert on March 29, 1920. I missed that one too.

New Faces Sing Broadway Now – Arts Club of Chicago – February 25, 2020

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As usual, Porchlight Music Theatre’s New Faces event showcased a host of talent, and a host with talent, Cory Goodrich, five-time Jeff Award nominee, and two-time winner, who is soon to star in Porchlight’s production of Freaky Friday, opening April 10th.

There were songs from recent arrivals and entrenched hits, including four of the five longest-running shows in Broadway history – The Phantom of the Opera, Chicago, The Lion King, and Wicked – but none from non-musicals.

One song was from a show that just opened on Broadway, but is familiar to Chicago audiences – Six. Six’s Porchlight connection is strong, as four of the six stars of the show have been featured in the past in the New Faces series.

What’s more, four of the six women in the cast have first names that start with the letter A, and the two who don’t replaced two from the original West End cast who did. Coincidence, or enemy action?

New Faces makes me think of people who literally have a new face, say for example the characters played by John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in the movie Face/Off. I wonder if they would have titled the 1997 movie Trading Faces if not for the 1983 movie Trading Places.

Speaking of John Travolta, he appeared on Broadway in 1974’s Over Here, in the role of Misfit, singing a two-song medley with the Andrews Sisters. Over Here, which I never heard of before despite it having been nominated for best musical, also included the song Don’t Shoot the Hooey to Me, Louie (gotta love the title), sung by Samuel E. Wright, who sang Under the Sea in the animated film The Little Mermaid. With that kind of trivia, Over Here sounds like a candidate for a Porchlight Revisits production.

Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies – Porchlight Music Theatre – January 31, 2020

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Edward Moore “Ted’ Kennedy, known for his oratorical skills, served in Washington D.C. as a United States Senator for 47 years. Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, known for his eloquence and charisma, was born in Washington, D.C. and led a jazz orchestra for 51 years.

Sophisticated Ladies is a musical revue based on Ellington’s music that ran for 767 performances on Broadway (1981 – 1983). As far as I know, there never has been a musical about Kennedy’s politics, but there was a 2018 movie, Chappaquiddick, about a rather infamous event in his life.

Sophisticated Ladies is not quite a concert, there being a whisper of a couple plot lines that don’t mean a thing, but it’s all about the music, cause it’s got that swing, accompanied by great singing and dancing, including a lot of tap. I have often expressed my love for tap dancing, but seeing this show inspired me to find an informative entry online from the Library of Congress entitled Tap Dance in America: A Short History.

Lorenzo Rush, Jr., who, when I first saw him a show, wasn’t misbehavin’, kind of is in Ladies, but you still love him, as he struts around the stage, capturing you with his playfulness and powerful voice, expressing all the emotion behind Ellington’s music, even though musical director Jermaine Hill, stationed at the piano and conducting the onstage band, is the physical embodiment of Ellington in the show.

The band and all the singers are excellent, but it’s the dancing that raises the temperature in the room, with kicks, splits, and leaps, and smack talking between the tappers that adds a layer of syncopation to the already animated beat of the music.

Sophisticated is defined as “having, revealing, or proceeding from a great deal of worldly experience and knowledge of fashion and culture”. In a nutshell, not me, but I sure enjoyed the show.

Burning Bluebeard – Porchlight Music Theatre – December 15, 2019

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Remember the scene in Animal House when John Belushi grabs the guitar out of the hands of the guy playing on the stairs and smashes it against the wall. I wanted to grab the entire cast of the Ruffians’ production of Burning Bluebeard, a show about the tragic December 30, 1903 Iroquois Theater fire, and smash them against the wall, gently of course, as I’m not a violent person.

On the other hand, a ruffian is defined as a violent person, especially one involved in crime, which seems fair, because, as far as I’m concerned, this play is a crime. But, just as no one was ever convicted in connection with the Iroquois fire, Burning Bluebeard has received great reviews over the years in which it has become a December tradition, and, based on the applause, was found innocent by many of those in attendance the night I saw it, in a clear case of audience nullification (see jury nullification if you haven’t watched enough Law and Order).

The Ruffians say that they use a “multi-disciplined creative process [that] fuses acrobatics, story-telling, and pop culture styling into a joyful anarchy that gives voice to the eerily beautiful harmonic hum of magical-realism.” I would agree with all of that, except the joyful part.

I’m not a big fan of avant-garde theater, the closest I have come to liking it before being the time I saw a production of Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow about Welles’s production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. But, if avant-garde is your thing, then knock yourself out, as opposed to the cast, and see this production. Just don’t sit in the front rows, or the fog, representing smoke, may knock you out.

The play is informative. But, personally, I would recommend, instead, reading the Smithsonian Magazine article about the fire and the reforms that resulted from it.

Porchlight Revisits Call Me Madam – Porchlight Music Theatre – November 20, 2019

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When Irving Berlin first played the counterpoint song You’re Just in Love for Ethel Merman, her reaction was “We’ll never get off the stage.” For those of us who are musically challenged, counterpoint is the relationship between voices that are harmonically interdependent (polyphony) yet independent in rhythm and contour. Whatever the hell that means, Merman was right. It’s a great song.

Donica Lynn, in the Merman role, is the headliner for this three-performance run, and doesn’t disappoint, but Laura Savage stands out for me, as she has done before, this time not only for her acting, singing, and dancing, but also for her gymnastic skills, demonstrated by her forward and backward flips across the stage that earned her a perfect ten from the audience.

The woman behind me, whom I wouldn’t call madam, coughed throughout the show, her emanations unfortunately not blending in like white noise, but rather more like the black plague. At intermission I was going to offer to pay for her ticket if she would leave, but thought better of it out of fear that she might let loose a torrent of invisible fury directly into my face should I confront her.

Michael Weber’s always entertaining Behind The Show Backstory included frequent mention of the show’s authors Russell Crouse and Howard Lindsey, but, surprisingly, didn’t mention, for us trivia buffs, that Crouse named his daughter, the actress we came to know as Lindsey Crouse, after his long-time writing partner. So I was compelled to grab him at intermission to show off my grasp of useless information.

Weber’s half-hour piece, which he flew through without taking a breath, also included mention of George Sanders as General Cosmo Constantine in the movie version, which leads me to remind people that Sanders is not to be confused with his actor-brother Tom Conway, or with actor John Williams, as can easily happen when half-comatose, watching old movies late at night.

New Faces Sing Broadway 1956 – Porchlight Music Theater, at Arts Club of Chicago – October 30, 2019

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When I saw Angela Ingersoll (who made me a most happy fella as the fair lady hosting New Faces Sing Broadway 1956) as Judy Garland in Porchlight’s production of End of the Rainbow a few years ago, I thought she was great (she won the Jefferson Award for her performance) but I had no idea she was the energizer bunny in disguise, given that the Garland we see in that show is drug addicted and near death.

She didn’t wear a rabbit costume and bang a drum for Porchlight’s New Faces Halloween-adjacent show, but, her monster singing talent aside, Ingersoll’s enthusiasm, energy, and electricity made me think of When Harry Met Sally, as I definitely would like to have what she’s having, and need to add her to my growing list of theater obsessions.

As for the new faces themselves, Porchlight once again pulled off the trick of treating the audience to a frighteningly excellent array of talented artists, none of whom, this time, I had ever seen before. Thus, my impressions were fittingly written on a blank slate, as a couple of the performers will be appearing in an upcoming production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, put on by the Blank Theater Company, which is only a couple years old, and previously unknown to me, though I was at the comfortable, though fairly bare-bones space they inhabit at The Edge Theater for the Hell in a Handbag production of Poseidon: An Upside Down Musical.

As amazing as the never-ending parade of wonderful singers who grace these Porchlight programs is, there also is new blood to be found behind the scenes. This show marked the directorial debut of Brianna Borger, whom I saw perform in Southern Gothic.  Next up in the series, New Faces Sing Broadway Now and New Faces Sing Broadway 1987.

Sunset Boulevard – Porchlight Music Theatre- October 18, 2019

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You get a taste of Norma Desmond’s storied fictional career by seeing the various posters and pictures projected on the walls of the set during Porchlight’s Sunset Boulevard, but it occurred to me while watching Hollis Resnik inhabit the role of Desmond that she was seemingly born to play, that a collage of posters representing Resnik’s real 12 Jefferson Award-winning parts would be even more impressive.

Resnik’s tour de force performance of As If We Never Said Goodbye in the second act could be the impetus for award number 13. The other second act highlight worth mentioning is the bathing suit entrance of Billy Rude, as Joe Gillis, which evoked a bobby soxer reaction from a young lady in the balcony, causing Rude to ever so slightly, and amusingly, break character by giving an almost imperceptible wink to the audience.

Clearly, Mr. DeMille, Rude was ready for his close-up, which leads me to inform that the line made famous by Gloria Swanson in the original screen version came in at number seven on the American Film Institute’s 2005 list of 100 movie quotes. And her “I am big! It’s the pictures that got small” was number 24, which puts Desmond in a very select company of characters with multiple attributions, equaled by the iconic Dorothy Gale, Scarlett O’Hara, James Bond, Harry Callahan and the Terminator, and bested only by the immortal Rick Blaine.

As with other Porchlight productions, I left impressed with creative touches that enhanced the experience. In particular, although there isn’t a lot of dancing in the show, the choreographed movements of a couple of the group scenes have a silent era, controlled Keystone Kops feel that fits perfectly with Norma’s hunger for those past days of movie-making and stardom. She never says it, but she could have inspired the Terminator’s “I’ll be back.”

Upcoming Events

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Normally I don’t take up my extremely valuable time, which could be better spent working on my hip flexors, publishing information about upcoming events, but the website has been acting up lately, causing several problems, like no one receiving newly published posts.  So, after two days of chatting with my new best friends in two different tech departments in two different countries, I feel the need to test the system to see if it’s working properly again, and what better way than to annoy my subscribers with unnecessary, verbose emails.

So, without revealing too much information about my clandestine movements, here’s some things you might consider attending.

Arts in the Dark Parade at 6:00 pm on October 19 on State Street.  You can dress up like your favorite movie character or just watch from the sidelines and admire the total lack of shame of the participants.

Sunset Boulevard just opened at the Porchlight Music Theatre, featuring Chicago legend Hollis Resnik as Norma Desmond.   Having attended an invitational rehearsal, I can tell you that the cast is great and the music is wonderful, but I did catch Resnik smoking in the parking lot during a break, which calls for detention.

The Art Institute is opening its Andy Warhol exhibit for member previews this week, which makes me want to look for clues as to whether he was really an undercover agent spying on extraterrestrial aliens as depicted in Men in Black III.

The Chicago Humanities Festival presents dozens of programs the last week of October.  Just like your insurance company, the festival has been furtively raising prices the last few years, but, unlike your insurer, there’s no competition, so suck it up and treat yourself.

And though I receive no commission for my continuing promotion of her (but should I?), don’t miss Meghan Murphy in Spamalot at the Mercury Theater.

 

 

 

 

 

Chicago Sings 25 Years of Porchlight – Museum of Contemporary Art – August 5, 2019

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The first Porchlight production I ever saw was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in the 2014-15 season. Portentous perhaps, as a funny thing happened to me on the way to their 25-year celebration – my “good” knee collapsed 5 days in advance.

But, on the hope that the pre-show hor d’oeuvres would be comforting, I decided not to let a little thing like another grade whatever sprained ligament deter me from attending, though I decided to forego the cocktails given how wobbly I already was on two bad knees and a single vintage 1968 wooden crutch that made me look like I was there to audition for the role of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.

There were luminaries in the audience and the performances were great, but the highlight of the evening for me was very slowly and carefully making it down and up the stairs to my seat and back twice without further injury, which leads me to my one complaint about the evening – NO DESSERT at intermission, even though it had been promised.

Among the performers, I’ll mention two Five Guys Named Moe alumni, Lorenzo Rush, Jr., and James Earl Jones II, who is back in town with the touring company of Come From Away; the wacky Bill Larkin, whose one-man show I recently wrote about; and triple threat Laura Savage, whom I’ve had the good fortune to see recently in Sweet Charity, Holiday Inn, A Chorus Line, and The Music Man.

The evening also included the presentation of the Guy Adkins Award for Excellence in the Advancement of Music Theater in Chicago to Gary Griffin. Having seen nine productions directed by Griffin, I can attest to his results, but listening to his choppy, rambling, somewhat incoherent acceptance speech (he assured us he was only drinking water), I wondered how he communicates with his actors. Perhaps, as in The Music Man, it’s the think system.