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Jailbreak! Update!

On December 22, I read the essay below at a performance of my favorite Chicago reading series right now, The Paper Machete. Four days earlier, two inmates from Chicago’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) staged a daring escape, only the second time in its history that the building has been compromised like that. The picture to the right (credit: Associated Press and Chicago Reader) should give you a hint why. This picture actually makes it look more inviting than it is. The windows are about 6 inches wide.

The story of how the two inmates escaped is actually pretty ingenious (you can read about it here at the Chicago Tribune). For the week before Christmas, the city was wondering what was going on. Frankly, despite the fact that the inmates were considered dangerous, most people weren’t taking it very seriously. It was a welcome diversion from fiscal cliff discussions and the memory of the Newtown massacre. My daughter actually goes to school about four blocks from the MCC, but I wasn’t really worried about her safety. These guys couldn’t be dumb enough to hang around the jail, could they?

No, but they weren’t much more ambitious. The flashier inmate was captured on Dec. 21, in the apartment of an acquaintance. Now, we get word that the other inmate — the one I call “The Escapee Without a Nickname” — has been caught, too, in the vicinity of an old apartment of his. A rather disappointing ending. Their escape held such promise, but these guys never planned for Act II.

Anyway, the essay is here, below the fold. Often, the Paper Machete will post audio files of some of its performers, but for about two weeks, this hasn’t been the case.

Continue reading “Jailbreak! Update!”

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“Prairie Home Companion” at Interlochen

Yesterday I drove up to northern Michigan, to drop off Number One Son at Interlochen for his week of sketching, drawing, painting and all around visual excitement. For those who haven’t been up to that school, it’s a campus-like feeling in the pines there, less like a camp than the boarding school it is. Spiffy and new, a mecca for tasteful patrons of the arts.

In their bandshell, the first concert of the season was “A Prairie Home Companion”. Some part of me resisted buying a ticket to this show until the last minute, but I finally decided to stick around and watch. I bought the ticket 3 days before the concert, and there were all of 4 tickets left. They were in Row G, and were more than I intended to spend, but I’m grateful it worked out. I was about 30 feet from the stage, and it was an awesome evening. If I’d had my honey and my daughter with me, it would have been perfect.

Doing some math, I realize I’ve seen Garrison Keillor now four times, in four different locales: St. Paul and Chicago in the 80s, New York (or Brooklyn?) in the early 90s, and now Interlochen. He’s planning on retiring, I had heard, so I figured it would be worthwhile to see him one last time. The setting was gorgeous, the evening weather was perfect, and all of the musical acts were sublime (except for Robin & Linda Williams, who had all the presence of margarine and looked like a couple people who repped pet toys at conventions, though Keillor’s comfort with them was unmistakeable).

Most of all, it was supremely enjoyable to watch Keillor perform. His stage demeanor was much warmer than I ever remember it. He was having a great time, and did a good job interacting with the audience and the young musical performers. Pacing back and forth as he told the news from Lake Woebegon, it was like he was telling a story at a cocktail party. A highlight (as you might expect for me) was watching him try and stump Fred Newman, his sound FX guy, with ever-more-elaborate vocalizations. I didn’t realize the subtle labial variations required for sounds of an outboard motor, a chainsaw, and embarrassing stomach noises. (I still can’t figure out how he made the dead-on sound of a truck backing up.) The other actors were great fun, too, especially when they performed highlights from movies filmed in northern Michigan (“Muskie Man” and “The Buddy System”). I listened to the repeat of the show today, by accident, and got the fuller effect of seeing it all in my mind. Coupling the sound with the memories of last night were a real charge to the imagination. In fact, listening to the whole show, I forced myself to remember everything I could–what performers were wearing, what the harpist’s brown hands looked like on the strings, when performers laughed, the signs in the background for Guy’s Shoes and the Catchup Advisory Board. It felt like flexing a strong muscle, warm and enjoyable.

With a career as long as Keillor’s, it’s easy to focus on a few faults. Sure, he’s corny. He coasts a lot of the time (I never have to hear “Da Doo Ron Ron” again please — I can’t stand any more boomers and plus-boomers trying to clap to the beat). He panders a little to his liberal, educated, arts-patron crowd. But he’s also crafty and entertaining and knows what he’s doing. More importantly, we won’t see the like of him again very soon, so I’m very thankful I went. The drive home in the dark was worth every minute. Thank you for your many years of creativity, Mr. Keillor.

For this show from Interlochen, check out videos and information here.

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Big Food = Big Laffs

I’ve been trying to convince the drama teacher at my daughter’s school of this irrefutable equation for two years now, with no success. One need only point to Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” for evidence of its veracity, with the giant banana peel and the aggressive instant pudding. Maybe she’s been swayed by the wave of recent articles about American obesity, and pictures of gargantuan hamburgers that people actually try and eat.

A few years ago at another school, I worked on props for a version of “Jack and the Beanstalk”, which included a lot of material about eating. (The kids thought that material was hilarious, BTW. You can always trust kids to laugh at food, poop and any combination thereof.) For that play, I made chicken legs out of 2-liter bottles and papier mache, hams out of detergent bottles, and bowls of spaghetti out of clothesline, paint and brown styrofoam balls. The giant cheeseburger has had a place of importance in our TV room ever since.

For Liesel’s play this year (which will be held this weekend at the fabulous Portage Theater in Portage Park), I only had one food prop to make, but thankfully it was to be a little larger than life. A character had to get in trouble with the police for smuggling cheese into Russia, so I needed to create a wheel of cheese that was big enough to see but not so big that a grade schooler couldn’t wave it around.

I started with a plastic tray for under flower pots. I cut a pie-shaped slice out of it, filled it with newspaper, and sealed it all up with a couple pieces of cardboard. Then, we covered it with a few layers of papier mache. When you apply papier mache as thickly as we do around here, it’s going to dry very tightly and cause the object to buckle and crease a little bit. Thankfully, cheese is not always a symmetrical delicacy.

Then a base of white paint, which makes it look like brie, a food funny in some situations but much too runny to be believable in our scenario:

Then some yellow paint, and a few holes drawn on:

And Wooola! It’s not very large. In fact, it’s actually life-sized. But I take any assignments I can get these days.

Bonus Prop: Here’s my version of an iPad that I created for the play. These are available now, so you don’t have to wait for Apple to enjoy their little masochistic waiting period. Pencil not included.

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“Addams Family Musical”: Just a pinch more hemlock in the yak stew, please

Back in October, in anticipation of the holiday season, I went on a little binge with the internet and the credit card. The newspapers were running ads about the new “Broadway in Chicago” shows, and who was I to Scrooge things up and refrain from supporting live theater in town that was destined to move on to NYC and earn silos full of cash?

So, as a final Christmas treat for the kids — after Cirque de Soleil’s “Banana Shpeel,” Goodman’s “A Christmas Carol” and a little skiing jaunt to Breckenridge in Colorado — I took the fam to see “The Addams Family Musical”, which is wrapping up its fun at the Oriental Theater this upcoming weekend. And the final verdict: really pretty good. As good as I expected.

It’s hard to imagine that someone hadn’t thought of adapting these characters for Broadway before. I mean, c’mon — Batman and Spider-Man musicals have been talked about for almost a decade. Can you imagine a guy in red spandex breaking out in heartfelt song? Well, sure you can, it’s musical theater, you droll thing! But aside from Spidey swinging on a tether and singing “Watch Out, Dr. Octopus,” it’s hard to imagine any reason to pay $85 to see such crap.

But Gomez, Morticia and Uncle Fester are a different matter. They’ve been covered in comics, television and a couple of movies, and yet they still seem very consistent and intriguing. Hell, I’ll say it: for those of us who watched the TV show as kids, they are like old friends. A house with a trampoline in the living room? Filet of yak for dinner? Exploding model train sets? Who wouldn’t want to visit there?

Playing the Addams patriarch, Nathan Lane was a little too subdued, but he can throw off a funny line with as little effort as someone brushes off lint. His accent teetered between Spanish and Transylvanian frequently, but after a while, it didn’t matter. At least there was no way for him to channel Lou Costello and Ralph Kramden, as I’ve seen him do too many times.

Bebe Neuwirth has been in the role of Morticia, but she apparently wanted to watch the final Bears game Sunday and left us with her understudy. Rachel De Benedet was fine, I guess, but having never seen Bebe Neuwirth live, I wanted to see what all the fuss has been about all these years.

The big news last week was the importing of Jerry Zaks as a show doctor. His presence is a welcome development, I think, because while the show is pretty good, it could be great. The story line is flexible and serviceable: Wednesday has finally grown up and wants to marry a boy she met in school, and the boys’ parents come in from Ohio to meet the Addamses. (Kind of a switcheroo on having a normal member of the family, like Marilyn Munster.)

Unfortunately, Gomez and Morticia are only sort of interesting, hobbled by their concerns about growing old. In fact, one of Morticia’s big musical numbers is a lament about how she doesn’t control the spotlight anymore. The most endearing qualities of Gomez and Morticia, as I see it, are their self-confidence, their passion for each other, and their acceptance of the weird. Contemplating change and age with these two is a difficult task: They are ageless, in a way, and wedded to a mildewy past of family mansions, old clothes, and torture chambers in the basement. I’m not saying they CAN’T contemplate these issues, but the characters have to come alive first. They’re a little languid at the beginning, and despite Morticia lopping the heads off a bouquet and Gomez playing with swords, the energy of young Wednesday, her lover, Fester and even the Ohio couple makes them pale in comparison. Hell, even Grandmama comes off with consistently funnier lines. A little spark of genuine joie de vivre weirdness from Morticia and Gomez at the beginning (maybe even before the opening number, “Clandango”, which adds a complicated new facet to the family dynamic) would give the show a very solid footing.

I hope the musical does well in NYC. I have great affection for these characters, and think they will survive well the necessary volume and energy that Broadway requires. (It’s a lot closer to success than “Banana Shpeel” was when we saw it in November.) The Addams’ individuality and optimism always strikes me as truly American, so much so that I can completely believe that their mansion (a wonderful use of staging, BTW) is located in the middle of Central Park. And to see a musical celebrating genuine, deep-rooted eccentricity and be successful at it would be one of the coolest things to happen onstage since “Urinetown.”

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Some Mushy Spots in “Banana Shpeel”

Last night the family and I took in the new Cirque de Soleil show at the Chicago Theater, “Banana Shpeel.” I bought the tix months ago, on a whim, when I first heard about it. Worth a gamble, it seemed.

The verdict: Still worth a gamble.

A friend in town–a PR pro in the arts–said last week on Facebook that the show wasn’t worth going to, even if someone gave you the tix for free. This was a refreshing honesty about the source of ducats, I thought, but it aroused fear and dread about what I’d really see for my hard-earned dollars. (And this being Cirque de Soleil, you KNOW there’s a pile of dollars involved.)

All in all, the show was pretty good. Stupid in a lot of parts, but often the good kind of stupid. Some performers were great, but some were basically expendable. (The big story of the show is how it jettisoned a couple of characters last month because their parts were written out. Well, one player was given credit in the program for appearing as a Pierrot. There were even pictures of him, in his whiteface and baggy white pajamas, trying to get all zany with a butterfly net. A Pierrot in vaudeville? Now THERE’S a shoot that needed clipping a long time ago.) Unfortunately, the question that remained after seeing it was, what were they doing for so many months of rehearsal (and actually years of planning)?

It seems like the problem lies in the vaudeville format itself. A variety show strung together by a flimsy storyline–sounds familiar. Sounds doable. Sounds like a platform to take things to the next level, like the troupe says it intends to do in all its promos. To fault it for that seems churlish. But when intermission arrived after 60 minutes, a slight twinge of unsatisfaction arose in me. Not DISsatisfaction, which is a real word. UNsatisfaction. Like being promised a sandwich, and being served some turkey loaf on Pepperidge Farm bread.

Luckily, the second act was better than the first, with a couple of superb circus acts: A woman who juggled large fabrics on all of her limbs, and a gymnast who twisted and writhed around what looked like a simple lamppost. These were acts that brought wondrous smiles to a spectator’s face, and brought the show up a notch.

For all the people who are curious to see it because they have an abiding interest in vaudeville, clowning and variety acts of all kinds, I say go ahead and see it. The dancing and music was very good, the circus acts were great, and the clowns in general were very good. Could it gel more, or is it doomed to be three shows in one? Time will tell.

I haven’t seen a Cirque show in more than a decade. I remember seeing three in a row, starting with “Saltimbanco”, which blew me away. Then, like Mel Brooks movies, each new one was exactly half as entertaining as the preceding one. With all the smoke machines, annoying new-age music, and ponderous and pompous pacing, the whole thing became tedious. Kind of like Doug Henning once again telling his audience to believe in **wonder!**, the Cirque began to pale against real circus shows, where the players didn’t believe in their own artistic ambitions but just got on with the business of being showmen.

Make no mistake, the circus relies on ballyhoo and hokum, but those are distinct from bombast and hype.

I wish the company lots of luck with “Banana Shpeel.” It’s always good for clowning to have exposure in legit venues. In these tight economic times, however, audiences might start to grumble that they’re not getting their **Wonder Quotient**. It was like years ago, when I ushered at the Goodman Theater’s production of “The Comedy of Errors,” starring the zany jugglers The Flying Karamazov Brothers. One old lady at the matinee came up to me at intermission and angrily complained, “That’s nothing but vaudeville in there!” Hey, no one said it was anything but.

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Me and the Berlin Wall

What an inspiring anniversary to celebrate this week. The crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the symbolic division between the vibrant, free West and the state-run, concrete-sculpted East. When the fall of the wall was covered on TV, my reaction was multifold:

1. They’re doing WHAT with sledgehammers? Yay!
2. Why is this happening now?
3. What in the world took so long?
4. Does this really mean the end of the Cold War, or will Germany be the sole beneficiary of this boldness?

And then the most important question of all:

5. How can I joke about it?

This month in 1989 was the third month I had been doing a weekly cabaret called “Theater of the Bizarre”, in the lower level of the Elbo Room (which somehow is still there at Lincoln and George, hosting musicians I’ll never learn about in my middle-aged life). The show needed a little time to find an identity, but Nick the owner was a very good guy, liked what we were doing and open to using the lower level of the restaurant in different ways. My friend Steve Ginensky had asked me to help him get this show going, the only time anyone had ever outright asked me to perform onstage. So, for that compliment, I was grateful.

“Theater of the Bizarre” was hosted by a black-clad Euro-trash art casualty named Armando von Shtuppenvald, accompanied on piano by his lacky Pepe. We smoked, wore berets and wrap-around sunglasses, had bored German accents — think of Mike Myers’ Dieter character, but actually funny. For a while Steve and I swapped these roles — usually during the show — by swapping Armando’s iconic chin beard. After a few months, though, the novelty of this wore thin, as did the amusement of me trying to play anything on piano. (My lousy piano-playing did, however, give us our theme music. Butcher the song “Konnen Sie Der Muffinmeister” well enough and it takes people a while to realize you’re singing “Do You Know The Muffin Man”.)

And with the fortuitous Fall of the Berlin Wall, we were propelled into a two-year run of the show.

The fall of the wall and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t happen overnight, we sometimes forget. It took about 20 months for the latter to occur, and in that time, we were able to milk people’s attention to Germany for all it was worth.

One of my bits was a box of “Cut-out Dolls of the Communist Party”, a kit that allowed you to dress up Deng Xiao Peng as Jobba the Hut and Fidel Castro as a Cuban infielder and a big-band leader. For the president of East Germany (a position that went through a lot of occupants before disappearing completely), instead of changing clothes, I rotated the head, from Erik Honneker to whoever replaced him, to Werner Klemperer, to Arte Johnson in his “Verrrry interestink” outfit. In the picture below, you can see me with the cutouts, while Pepe reads from our book “Kafka fur Kinder.”

And when the rest of Europe began to fear the power of a unified Germany (yeah, it had been a rough century whenever Germany got rambunctious), Steve as Pepe penned one of our best song parodies, to the tune of “We Are The World”:

There comes a time, when you have to forge ahead,
Even though, you don’t know, what you’re doin’…
You’ve got Roseanne und E.T., Disneyland und MTV,
But WE’VE GOT FAHRFERGNUGEN!

We are the World! We are the Germans!
Our men are strong, our women look like Edgar Bergen!
Uber alles said and done, we just want to have some fun….

At which point, Armando would always interrupt from offstage and go into a tirade about his going off the leash, only to be soothed when Pepe began to tinkle “Alley Cat” on the keyboard. It was a grand good silly time, and during “Theater of the Bizarre” I made a lot of good friends. I also got the idea for “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories”, but we can’t blame the Germans for that.

So, you know, it’s great that 20 years ago, millions of people began to throw Communism and their oppressive leaders out the window. Kudos. But much more importantly, it gave us lots of topical material. For that, Steve and I will be forever grateful.

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“Politically Correct Bedtime Stories” Onstage in Toronto Fringe Festival

Earlier this year, I received a request from a theater group in Ontario, the Pheasant Pluckers Mates, about adapting my PCBS stories for the stage. After a little paperwork, they went ahead with it, and I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. I read their treatment, and it was very funny.

Now there’s a set of photos on the web by one Jen Grantham, showing the members of the Pheasant Pluckers onstage, ready to assault their audiences’ funny bones. Again, it looks like a hoot, if you can judge these types of things from pictures.

The Pheasant Pluckers’ Mates will be performing their adaptation at the Toronto Fringe Festival from July 1 through July 11. Looks like there’s a performance just about every day, both early and late, to suit all schedules. If you’re in the area, please check them out. They’ve been top drawer with me, and I’m bettin’ the show will be a hoot.

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“Whatsis, a Dagger I See Before Me Here or Whaaat?”

Today was William Shakespeare’s birthday, and there were festivities throughout the cultural landscape. You might have had some thespians traipsing through your downtown spouting iambic pentameter while wearing baggy shirts and tight hose, all nonny and such. But here in Chicago, Da Mare (give Chuckie his due) went everyone one better: He made today in Chicago Talk Like Shakespeare Day. While many of you may have thought Chicagoans possess mellifluous speaking voices anyway–full, resonant, with nary an “A” held too long or nasally–the proclamation should put to rest any lingering doubts that The City That Works is also The City That Iambs, and the average cop on the street sounds like Sir Ralph Richardson.

But those cadences don’t satisfy me. I had the idea last week, after watching “The Ten Commandments”, that we need to talk more like Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner did in that movie. You know, full of metaphors, ominous portents, and ageless prophecies.

For example, when a waitress asks you if you’d like coffee, you’d respond, “It would take a river of coffee to rouse me from contemplation of your beauty.”

If a cop pulls you over and asks you if you knew how fast you were going, you’d answer, “Fast or slow, someday we must face our maker with the deeds of our existence.”

If your friends ask you out for a beer, you’d say, “I respect jollity and comradeship. The night is long that contains no laughter.”

Try it yourself, but I think it would be good to wait until next Passover/Easter season, or else no one’s going to get the joke. Unless you already shave your head but leave that goofy ponytail on the side, “like a true prince of Egypt.”

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“Marooned” with North Park Elementary

When we switched my daughter’s grade schools last year, one of the enticements we held out to her was that the new school would, like the old one, put on a student play every year. This little lure, along with the help of some new kindhearted friends, helped her transition from a little place she’d been attending since pre-school to a much larger and more demanding grade school.

Anyway, I thought the schoolwork was demanding until I saw the school play this past weekend! It was a huge production, all on the stage of the rented Portage Theater in Portage Park. There were 104 kids in the production, but that number counts the K-first graders and second and third graders, who came out in separate groups and sang “You Gotta Have Heart” and “Consider Yourself at Home”, respectively. Still, it was a HUGE cast to put on a stage.

Liesel played the co-host of a game show called “Marooned,” which suspiciously resembled “Survivor,” where groups of favorite childhood characters–from fairy tales, classic stories and video games–had signed up to compete. Apparently, everyone needed the publicity to keep their personal franchises profitable. Man, are we raising a bunch of market-savvy, world-weary kids around here!

Anyway, it was a terrific time, with seven original songs, plus choreography. The kids rehearsed long and hard, and it showed in some very spot-on performances. That’s Liesel in the front in white.

And this year, as in years past, I accepted the assignment to create or locate the props needed for this tropical showdown. (Thankfully there were a lot of other people working on the set itself.) The job ended up being a lot of banners and picket signs–no giant food like other years, drat the luck–but it was still fun. The pictures below show some papier mache skulls I made to top some flagpoles, plus large pieces of a puzzle emblazoned with the tiki icon for the winning team. I didn’t strictly freehand the puzzle pieces, but I was still pretty impressed with myself for getting them to look good.

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“Rod Blagojevich, Superstar”

Whenever I’m tempted to ditch this city and go live in a yurt somewhere, I think of nights like I had last night, during which I saw history being made, and I realize that quiet and peace of mind aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Last night I was lucky enough to attend the press preview of a new show at Second City e.t.c. that was ripped out of today’s papers. “Rod Blagojevich, Superstar” was one of the funniest nights I have ever spent in the theater. When it finds its permanent slot in the schedule, you absolutely have to go see it. You will be amazed at how effortlessly one man’s life provided the grist for a ridiculous 60 minutes of lampoonery.

I don’t mean to imply that the people behind the show didn’t work their butts off to get it up on stage. Ed Furman, the book writer, is an old friend from performing days. He told me their first email with the idea was dated January 5. That was only a month after the Senate Seat Sale Scandal broke, and a couple weeks before Blago’s media blitz and impeachment. Who knows how they’ll be able to amend the show in the future?

Ed’s writing did a terrific job capturing Blago’s strange combination of Willie Stark and Astro Boy. Getting the psychology right was more important than crafting an impersonation (although Joey Bland was greatly entertaining in the role, as was his wig). My favorite line of the night was Blago shouting at Roland Burris in all sincerity, “All great leaders have criminal charges filed against them!” (Burris’ reply: “Um, no they don’t.”)

The truly amazing part of the show was how little everyone had to gin up the characters to maximize the laughs. The only character pushed really far into caricature was a toilet-mouthed Patti Blagojevich (and for all I know, it may have been an accurate portrayal). By laying out Blago’s gall, ego and blindness in very clear and simple scenes (with a few terrific songs thrown in), Furman and the cast captured perfectly the strange, pathetic, puny life of the would-be Populist Scrapper.

In the audience I saw at least three veteran reporters from the papers and TV, so there were certainly more there that I didn’t recognize. I got to see WSJ reporter Bryan Gruley, who went to my high school and has a new mystery novel coming out next month. Also in attendance was Ill Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who laughed through the whole show, even at Lauren Dowden’s pinched-mouth impersonation of her. Madigan shook hands all around and hung out with the cast and writers for a very long time, posing for pictures and the like. (There’ll probably be some pics up for that eventually at Second City’s website here.)

The whispers beforehand, though, were whether the ex-Governor was going to show up for the event. He’d been invited, of course, and everyone agreed he had the gall to attend (and nothing left to lose, obviously). He didn’t show up last night, but I’m betting he eventually shows up. His ego would allow nothing less.

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“Adventures of a Comic Book Artist”

The spring operetta at St. James School has come and gone, and if you missed it, you’re probably kicking yourself just like you did when Steppenwolf was practically begging you to come see “August: Osage County” when it first opened and you were too busy to bother. The operetta didn’t get nominated for a Tony, an Obie, a Jeff, an Off-Jeff, a Wedgie, or a Shmegege, but that’s fine because those are all about “who you know.” But this operetta will be remembered as the swansong for Liesel in her starring roles there, and for me in building the sets.

Liesel will be changing schools next year so that she’ll be able to count her classmates on more than one hand. She’s not too happy about it, since she’s been there since she was three, but she’s going into the fifth grade, and it’s a good time to make a change. One of the carrots we held out for her was that her new school does a student musical every spring, because such events are the highlight of her year. The competition for roles, of course, will be a little tougher, but she’s pretty good and is bound to get better. In “Adventures of a Comic Book Artist,” she played the hero Blossom, who has a magic flower that can put villains to sleep. Kind of a benevolent Poison Ivy. I took the picture below with the last little bit of charge on my camera. I’m very mad that I didn’t get one of her alone in front of my kinetic backdrop.

This year, I did for the sets what I do every year, mainly paint dropcloths from Home Depot to serve as backdrop curtains. One was a view of Times Square, the other was a smattering of comic book onomatopoeias, which I was pretty proud of. I also had to create the headquarters of Wonder Comics, whose slogan of course is “If it’s a GOOD comic, it’s a WONDER.” I don’t know if anyone got the joke, but that one was for the boys in the back room. I probably spent 30 hours or so on the sets, maybe more, but I just love doing them. The kids can get so excited when they show up for rehearsal and the stage has taken one more step toward the look of a real show. Last year I got to make a lot of oversized food for a “Jack and the Beanstalk” type story, which was even more fun. I kept the cheeseburger I made (picture here). It sits in our TV room, which is turning into a sort of Batcave displaying artifacts and mementos from the kids’ various stage productions from church and school.


It will be sad to leave a school into which we’ve poured so much time, energy and money, but many of the resources that first attracted us are no longer there, and we couldn’t bear the idea of Liesel staying with the same five kids all the way through eighth grade, then enrolling her in a school with 300 freshmen. Plus, overarching concerns like the lack of a school board, a domineering pastor and an ineffectual principal will not be changed anytime soon. (The place also had a recent exodus of 4 teachers, which will add to chaos next year.) This operetta will be our send-off, but it was a terrific show with lots of energy and talent. And all the best shows eventually come to an end.

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Art Imitating Life, Only Not as Fat

This year for their annual spring “operetta,” my daughter’s school decided to stage a musical called “Kate & the Giant.” (Alternative casting aside, this change to a Jack and the Beanstalk production was necessitated by the fact that there are only four kids in the fourth grade, one of whom would have to be the star.) The kids (this year, Grades 1 through 4) work hard on the show for weeks, and then are able to perform it only twice, which causes a lot of post-show letdown in our house.

Over the years I’ve helped in painting and assembling sets, and by now, I’m the default guy for planning the whole job. I don’t mind–it’s a lot of fun trying to make everything functional yet lively, trying to make a backdrop of a stand-alone prop serve more than one purpose in several scenes, etc. Since the writers of this play had some kind of food obsession and had the Giant at one point stuff himself comically with food, I had to devise supersize portions of various tasty treats. Papier mache did the trick, turning 2-liter pop bottles into chicken legs, an old detergent bottle into a baked ham, and balloons into fruit and vegetables. But one of my proudest creations was a nice big juicy cheeseburger. For some reason, I just couldn’t see the play going on WITHOUT a cheeseburger. I even brought it to school once to show the kids at dismissal, and their enthusiasm for the play spiked to new heights.

Here’s what the fabulous cheeseburger looked like:

Now that’s a damn tasty burger, as Jules Winnfield might say. The pieces were made and painted separately, then glued together. My plan was to make a burger so hugely humongous that people would split their sides laughing as soon as they saw it. But when I glued all the pieces together, I had a nauseating revelation: As big as this burger was, there will be a countless number of REAL EDIBLE burgers at least this big being served all over America this summer, either at a beef festival or at some Texas roadhouse with a money-back guarantee deal attached to it.

The very next day, as I was thumbing through Smithsonian Magazine, I found a pic of a guy wrestling a platter-busting burger for a festival in North Carolina.

Once again, no matter how big you can make something for comedic/satiric effect, real life will always outstrip it.

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Go See “Virginia Woolf”, Baby

If you have any interest at all in seeing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” while it’s in Chicago, drop everything and go. You will not see the likes of the performances in that show within your lifetime. My ever-lovin’ wife and I went last night, and it was a dang treat. Kathleen Turner was perfect as the venom-spewing Martha, all the years of booze and cigarettes nearly clogging her ability to speak. It’s hard to imagine any actress from the Hollywood system–you know, the type that signs on to a Broadway show because she has a break in her schedule and really misses the restaurants in the Village–throwing herself so completely into an awful character.

Better than that was Bill Irwin, who won the Tony for his role in 2005. This morning the Tribune compared his portrayal to an “overachieving, Beckettian hamster,” and the reviewer meant it as a compliment. The clown had such control of every inch of his body, his slightest hunch displayed his years of torture living with his wife. He had such control, I watched his FOOTWORK! His FOOTWORK conveyed more emotion than most actors’ complete performances. And this was in a play where almost the entire action consisted of swilling drinks and sitting on the couch.

This isn’t a review. If you want a review, go to the Tribune or the Sun-Times. (And if you read the S-T review, explain to me why our exposure to the mundane garbage on “Jerry Springer” numbs us to the fireworks in this play.) This is an exhortation. If you want to see what theater is really capable of, buy tickets for this play and go. You won’t see anything this superb in a long time.