What’s New

Read More

The Chicago Blackhawks are putting together a nice start in a season in which they were projected to be amongst the worst in the National Hockey League. They still could end up being that bad but right now it doesn’t look like that is going to be the case.

They came in as underdogs against a great Los Angeles Kings team that believes they can make it to the playoffs this year. The Hawks got off to a good start when Jason Dickinson tipped one past Jonathan Quick to give them a 1-0 lead. This came just after the halfway point of the game.

About four minutes later, the Kings scored to tie the game at one and it would remain that way for the rest of the regulation time. As we know for sure, anything can happen in overtime of a hockey game when you get there.

Luckily, it went the way of the Blackhawks in this one as Jake McCabe found Jonathan Toews in front of the Los Angeles net and he didn’t miss. Toews’ seventh goal of the season was a much-needed game-winner for the Hawks.

The Chicago Blackhawks earned a quality overtime win against a great team.

This was a quality win as it was a close victory over a team that is considered to be better than them on paper. We are seeing lots of great things from them so far this year.

For one, Jonathan Toews’s seventh of the season is now only four shy of the 12 that he had a year prior. He hasn’t scored more than 18 sincere the 2018-19 season when he had 35. At 34 years old, he still has plenty of hockey left in the tank so it is really nice to see this resurgence.

Another notable player in the game is the Chicago Blackhawks goaltender Arvid Soderblom. He made 32 saves on 33 shots which is very nice. He gave his team a chance to win and they barely did. There is a lot of hope for Soderblom going forward.

It is nice to see different players stepping up to help this team. Again, we don’t know how this season is going to go but there are reasons to be optimistic now. That wasn’t easy to say even a few months ago but they have made good decisions off the ice and played hard on the ice.

Their next chance to get a win will come on Saturday afternoon when they take on the Winnipeg Jets in Manitoba. That should be a great matchup with a division foe on the road. Hopefully, Toews and the guys continue to play above expectations.

Read More

The Chicago White Sox were not in the postseason but that doesn’t mean we aren’t watching. After winning their first six games in this year’s postseason, the 2022 Houston Astros stand at 9-2. If they win two more, they will end up 11-2.

They can also end up 9-4, 10-4, or 11-3. These numbers, respectively, assume they could lose two more and lose the series 4-2, win one but lose two to lose the series 4-3, or lose one but lose two and win the series 4 games to 3.

We bring up Houston because the Astros had a chance to match the White Sox’s 11-1 record. And that 2005 run through the postseason often seems to not be talked about as much as it probably should be.

I think there are a few reasons for this. Reason number one is that it’s harder now to have four dominant starting pitchers that will work deep into games in this era.

Reason number two is that as dominant as the pitching was, the games weren’t necessarily always blowouts. The Sox blew out Boston in one game in the first round but most games were close. The A.J. Pierzynski dropped third strike game was close, for example.

All four World Series games were close as well. The Sox didn’t look as dominant on the scoreboard as the win-loss record would.

The Chicago White Sox record of 11-5 in the 2005 postseason won’t be broken.

Also, while many Sox players were and are local stars, few seemed to have a spot on the national stage. The one player who did, Frank Thomas, was nearing his career’s end and barely played in 2005 due to injury.

There may also be a perception that the 2005 Sox, which won 99 regular season games, was also merely a very good team that got hot at the right time, as opposed to an all-time great team.

99 wins is nice but there are more than a few teams that have won over 100 games in the regular season and gotten attention for it. Some of these teams are also star-studded.

Finally, I think there was more focus on the Sox breaking an 88-year drought than there was on how many games they won in the postseason.

The same happened with the Chicago Cubs 11 years later — the focus was on breaking the infamous curse, not the team’s win-loss record in the playoffs.

Still, it’s a shame that the 2005 White Sox don’t get a bit more attention for a record that will be hard to beat.

Read More

The surrealist, sometimes anarchic style of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s prose invites a lot of directorial interpretation and creativity from the theater artists who’ve been drawn to her mesmerizing work for the better half of a century. And yet, I don’t think I’ve witnessed a more seamless marriage of her words and a thematic overlay than what’s on display in director Clare Brennan’s 90s riot grrrl-inspired take on Vinegar Tom with Red Theater.       

Vinegar Tom Through 11/20: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Edge Theater Off Broadway, 1133 W. Catalpa, redtheater.org, pay what you can

Punk, for all its thrown elbows and sharp accessories and associations with sexual and social-political fringes, is a deeply vulnerable art form that provides stark tonal contrast with hushed 17th-century austerity while essentially mirroring the era’s gothic extremity. English peasants Alice (Sarah Wisterman) and her alcoholic widow mother (Madeline Bernhard) fall under the suspicion of their comparatively wealthy neighbors (Josh Razavi and Mindy Shore) after the latter are beset by a series of financial misfortunes. 

There are accused witches and subsequent trials, but it would be misleading to lump Vinegar Tom into the subgenre of Witch Trial paranoia plays, as the persecution story serves mostly as a melody to riff on to the tune of 70s feminism, made pointedly and discomfortingly relevant again post-Roe. Traditional scenes of realism are interwoven with soliloquies (including a particularly haunting passage by Hannah Antman) and original Guttersluts–inspired music by Max Cohen (bass) and Roy Gonzalez (guitar), performed alongside Tom Ronningen on drums, with each actor stepping out of character to take their hand at the mike.  

That’s a big ask of even the most multidisciplinary artists, and the vocals sometimes have a more Battle of the Bands feel than those of the hardcore shows they’re referencing, but the youthful, DIY-ness of it only adds to the crusty authenticity of it all. And given how overtly Churchill’s work touches on aging, a broader diversity of ages among the ensemble would probably drive the impact in harder, but that doesn’t take away from the cleverness and visceral punch of Red Theater’s production. A big part of its success lies with the band itself, which brings the gnarly enthusiasm of a garage show (Cohen whipping her hair around, Ronningen sporting a relentless ear-to-ear grin, Gonzalez playing guitar like he’s firing off an M60) to a traditional blackbox venue like The Edge Off Broadway.

Read More

In Boeing-Boeing, the 1960 French sex comedy by Marc Camoletti (translated by Beverly Cross and Francis Evans) that’s now being mounted by Saint Sebastian Players, protagonist Bernard (Garrett Wiegel), an expat American in Paris, is juggling three different “fiancees.” He explains to friend Robert (Joshua Paul Wright), who is visiting from Wisconsin, the one central tenet behind maintaining his lascivious lifestyle: order. 

Boeing-Boeing Through 11/20: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Saint Bonaventure Church, 1625 W. Diversey, saintsebastianplayers.org, $30 (seniors, children under 12, and students with valid ID $25)

Bernard tracks the comings-and-goings of his paramours, all flight attendants, thanks to their airlines’ timetables. Three, he has determined, is the number of women that most effectively defies monotony without overwhelming the order allowing him to preserve this arrangement. Keeping each relegated to the status of “fiancee” keeps them interested enough to stick around without anyone crossing the line into full-time commitment. He doesn’t need to get to know them too well, since he’s confident the airlines—with their strict standards of appearance and acuity—have done the work for him already.  

But this is a French sex comedy. Six doors flank the stage; you don’t need to be especially clairvoyant to determine those wouldn’t be there—ready to be slammed open and shut—unless Bernard’s carefully thought-out order was not about to be disrupted.

Bernard fails to accurately emphasize the outsized role that his housekeeper, Berthe (Lauren Miller), plays in all this. The ultimate expression of what happens when you mix indolence and passive-aggression with a heaping helping of martyr complex, Berthe’s the one who really keeps this setup afloat, and the jet-age precision Bernard congratulates himself for is really just Berthe staying three steps ahead of his paramours even as she picks up the messes he leaves behind. Miller commands your focus even as she comes in and surveys the antics happening across the stage. 

Each of Bernard’s fiancees is based on archetype, and thanks to a storm in the North Atlantic and changes in schedule, they all—who’d have thought it?—happen to show up on the same day.

The no-nonsense American, Gloria (Claire Rutkowski), seems to travel with the least amount of emotional baggage, though she continuously disgusts Berthe by her choices in food toppings. Gabriella (Allison Zanolli) is an Italian spitfire based more on archetypes created by Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren in movies more than actual observations of real Italian women.

Then there’s Gretchen (Valerie Gerlock), Bernard’s self-proclaimed “little fiancee from beyond the Rhine,” whose arrival motivates much of act two. Exuding the energy of a Valkyrie throughout, Gerlock brilliantly contrasts Gretchen’s need for love with her need for order; Robert is alternately terrified and turned on, and it doesn’t take long for all these arrivals to usurp Bernard’s oh-so carefully curated love life.      

I’ll hand it to Saint Sebastian Players for tackling Boeing-Boeing (directed by Sean Michael Barrett), a show that closed quickly on Broadway but played for years in the West End. They don’t make them much like this anymore, as the saying goes, and I’m a sucker for stuff with slamming doors, funny shower caps, and wisecracking domestics. 

But, even if this is for the sake of laughs, there might be more viewers nowadays who will be made queasy by the gender politics of the script. Bernard refers to his fiancees as if they have the interchangeability of Barbie dolls, and there are weird references to his “friend from Orly” who brokers a meeting with a new woman whenever Bernard gets dumped. Bernard’s deceptions are motivated by the same misogyny the first Austin Powers movie parodied back in 1997. 

It feels like Robert takes center stage trying to do damage control more than Bernard does. Wright is excellent depicting Robert’s country-boy naïveté, which threatens to give in to the continual temptations offered by Bernard’s excesses. Wright is elastic in his performance too—he has the most physical role of the cast and handles the slapstick and a few pratfalls deftly. (I’m not sure how anyone who grew up in Wisconsin in the 50s and 60s would be so mystified by Gretchen’s German-ness, though!)

The production smartly transformed the Saint Bonaventure fellowship hall into a mod Parisian bachelor pad, thanks to set designer Emil Zbella, and the costumes by Robert-Eric West look great. Boeing-Boeing’s script drags a bit (the entrances and exits likely defy cuts), but the performances here more than anything take the show to cruising altitude. 

Read More

The surrealist, sometimes anarchic style of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s prose invites a lot of directorial interpretation and creativity from the theater artists who’ve been drawn to her mesmerizing work for the better half of a century. And yet, I don’t think I’ve witnessed a more seamless marriage of her words and a thematic overlay than what’s on display in director Clare Brennan’s 90s riot grrrl-inspired take on Vinegar Tom with Red Theater.       

Vinegar Tom Through 11/20: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Edge Theater Off Broadway, 1133 W. Catalpa, redtheater.org, pay what you can

Punk, for all its thrown elbows and sharp accessories and associations with sexual and social-political fringes, is a deeply vulnerable art form that provides stark tonal contrast with hushed 17th-century austerity while essentially mirroring the era’s gothic extremity. English peasants Alice (Sarah Wisterman) and her alcoholic widow mother (Madeline Bernhard) fall under the suspicion of their comparatively wealthy neighbors (Josh Razavi and Mindy Shore) after the latter are beset by a series of financial misfortunes. 

There are accused witches and subsequent trials, but it would be misleading to lump Vinegar Tom into the subgenre of Witch Trial paranoia plays, as the persecution story serves mostly as a melody to riff on to the tune of 70s feminism, made pointedly and discomfortingly relevant again post-Roe. Traditional scenes of realism are interwoven with soliloquies (including a particularly haunting passage by Hannah Antman) and original Guttersluts–inspired music by Max Cohen (bass) and Roy Gonzalez (guitar), performed alongside Tom Ronningen on drums, with each actor stepping out of character to take their hand at the mike.  

That’s a big ask of even the most multidisciplinary artists, and the vocals sometimes have a more Battle of the Bands feel than those of the hardcore shows they’re referencing, but the youthful, DIY-ness of it only adds to the crusty authenticity of it all. And given how overtly Churchill’s work touches on aging, a broader diversity of ages among the ensemble would probably drive the impact in harder, but that doesn’t take away from the cleverness and visceral punch of Red Theater’s production. A big part of its success lies with the band itself, which brings the gnarly enthusiasm of a garage show (Cohen whipping her hair around, Ronningen sporting a relentless ear-to-ear grin, Gonzalez playing guitar like he’s firing off an M60) to a traditional blackbox venue like The Edge Off Broadway.

Read More

When it comes to bold and audacious stagings of Measure for Measure (for my money, the most unpleasant of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”), it’s hard to top Robert Falls’s dark take-no-prisoners 2013 production at the Goodman, which reimagined Vienna as Times Square, circa the late 1970s. (Think David Simon’s The Deuce on HBO.) But Henry Godinez’s streamlined (about 100 intermissionless minutes) and vibrant production at Chicago Shakespeare comes pretty damn close.

Measure for Measure Through 11/27: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Tue 11/15 7:30 PM and Tue 11/22 1 and 7:30 PM; no shows Wed 11/23 or Thu 11/24; open caption Wed 11/16 1 and 7:30 PM, ASL interpretation Fri 11/18, audio description Sun 11/20; Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312-595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, $49-$92

Godinez (a resident artistic associate at the Goodman) sets the action in Havana on the brink of the Castro revolution. Mistress Overdone (Ana Santos), described as a “bawd,” actually runs the festivities at Cabaret La Trucha, where showgirls, singers, and emcee/clown Pompey (Elizabeth Ledo) cater to the whims of the decadent (including a tourist in comically small striped swim briefs and a sombrero, played with Ugly American panache by Joe Foust).

The Duke of Havana (Kevin Gudahl) has his doubts about what’s going on around him. So of course he decides the best thing to do is to go undercover as a monk, leaving the city in the hands not of his chief judge, Escalus (Lanise Antoine Shelley), a Black woman, but in those of his deputy, Angelo (Adam Poss), a lighter-skinned man whose revolutionary bent doesn’t hide his contempt for the debauchery around him. (Among other things, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were both famously homophobic, considering LGBTQ+ people bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, as the horrific experiences of gay writer Reinaldo Arenas, highlighted in the 2000 film Before Night Falls, made clear.)

In an interview in the program, Godinez (who was born in Cuba around the time of the revolution and came to the U.S. as a young child) highlights the sexism and racism/colorism that pervades even the most publicly high-minded of revolutionary movements. Caught up in Angelo’s new insistence on enforcing Havana’s harsh laws is Claudio (Andrés Enriquez) and his pregnant fiancée, Julietta (Felicia Oduh). Is the fact that Julietta is darker than Claudio one of the factors prompting Angelo’s righteous fury toward their out-of-wedlock union? It’s not stated directly, but it definitely hangs as a possibility in Angelo’s decision to enforce the death penalty on Claudio.

The only thing that might dissuade him is Claudio’s sister Isabel (Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel), who visits him to beg mercy for her brother, only to find herself on the receiving end of an indecent proposal. (Hypocrisy? From revolutionaries? I’m shocked. SHOCKED!) With the help of Gudahl’s Duke, Isabel is able to work a typical Shakespearean “bed trick” on Angelo, expose his own secret, and save Claudio’s life. Further trickery involving the prison Provost (Robert Schleifer, who delivers his lines in sign language translated by others onstage—a suitable choice for someone who works quietly but efficiently against the injustice of the state) also throws Angelo off the scent of the counterplotters.

The production moves with frightening speed from the brightness of the cabaret (where Raquel Adorno’s costumes highlight feathery glitzy glamour) to the dankness of the prison, both worlds captured equally well by Rasean Davonté Johnson’s scenic and projection designs and María-Christina Fusté’s lighting.The most sobering interlude involves prisoner Barnardine (Ajax Dontavius). A lifer, his jailers believe he’d take the deal to die rather than continue his time in a living hell. But instead, Barnardine essentially tells the authorities to go to hell, while he continues to inscribe “You, 59, Me, 2020” on the walls of his cell—an anachronistic tip of the hat to Cuba’s San Isidro Movement, a contemporary group of nonconformist artists fighting for free expression on the island.

Unlike other Shakespearean comedies and even other “problem plays” like All’s Well That Ends Well, nothing really ends well for anyone in Measure for Measure (except maybe Claudio and Julietta). And perhaps that’s one reason setting it in Cuba around the time of the revolution is such an inspired choice by Godinez (well, that and the fact that it allows for fantastic Latin jazz under the direction of legendary Chicago trumpeter Orbert Davis). Scratch a purist like Angelo, and you’ll find a nihilist, or at least someone who uses their revolutionary ideals as a fig leaf for their own unsavory behavior. At least in Godinez’s production (whose lively and responsive ensemble is a sheer delight to watch in action throughout), we can believe that Isabel may have found the will to fight the patriarchy another day.

Read More

If you’re an adult of a certain age, hearing the name “Peabody” in conjunction with science may make you think of a polymath anthropomorphic cartoon dog, companion to young lad Sherman. But in Glen Berger and Morgan Taylor’s quirky new musical, now in a world premiere with Young People’s Theatre of Chicago at the Greenhouse Theater Center, the title is a play on words. Young Alyssa Peabody (Eileen Doan) is determined to win her middle-school science fair with a project that focuses on patterns of, um, micturition: noticing how much her stepbrother pees after guzzling sports drinks, she wants to see if there’s a connection between what goes in, and what comes out. Of course, when word of her bathroom experiment gets out, her last name leads to a predictable rise in teasing from her classmates.

Peabody, a Musical Comedy for Intrepid Young Scientists Through 11/20: Fri 7 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM and 1 PM; 1 PM only Sun 11/6; Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, yptchi.org, $25 ($19 under 12), ages 5+

If you think a musical built around bodily fluids is a recipe for disaster, may I remind you that Urinetown! (created by former Chicagoans Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis) won several Tony Awards and has become a perennial favorite across the country? But Berger (a writer for the animated kids’s show Arthur, as well as the author of several adult plays, such as Underneath the Lintel) and Taylor (the creator of the popular kids’ multimedia character Gustafer Yellowgold, who sadly died in August at age 52) are actually raising some cogent questions about how we approach scientific inquiry. A lot of science deals with things that we’re trained to think of as “gross.” But finding solutions to global problems (like, say, water shortages) depends on scientists being willing to dive into murky research streams.

Directed by YPT artistic director Randy White, the 90-minute show (geared for ages five and over) touches on scientific competition and sabotage as Alyssa’s classmate, Philip (Sam Linda) teams up with her stepbrother (Jonathan Shaboo) to steal her samples. Along the way, the script shoehorns in (sometimes awkwardly) snippets about famous women in science, including Mary Anning, whose work collecting fossils took the stage in Laura Schellhardt’s Digging Up Dessa at Theatre Above the Law earlier this year. We also meet more-famous male scientists such as Isaac Newton and Galileo (most of them played with amusing bewigged panache by Jonathan Schwart).

When Philip and Alyssa’s principal (Sabrina Edwards) insists that they put aside their differences and work together, they really find the groove for their research. Similarly, White’s ensemble works together smoothly, playing multiple roles that require them to shift from adults to tweens quickly. The music is recorded, not live, which is perhaps a bit of a disappointment, but judging from the reactions of the kids at the show I attended, Peabody held their interest and, one hopes, sparked some curiosity about the scientific process—even amid the sometimes groan-worthy scatological humor. 

Read More

In Boeing-Boeing, the 1960 French sex comedy by Marc Camoletti (translated by Beverly Cross and Francis Evans) that’s now being mounted by Saint Sebastian Players, protagonist Bernard (Garrett Wiegel), an expat American in Paris, is juggling three different “fiancees.” He explains to friend Robert (Joshua Paul Wright), who is visiting from Wisconsin, the one central tenet behind maintaining his lascivious lifestyle: order. 

Boeing-Boeing Through 11/20: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Saint Bonaventure Church, 1625 W. Diversey, saintsebastianplayers.org, $30 (seniors, children under 12, and students with valid ID $25)

Bernard tracks the comings-and-goings of his paramours, all flight attendants, thanks to their airlines’ timetables. Three, he has determined, is the number of women that most effectively defies monotony without overwhelming the order allowing him to preserve this arrangement. Keeping each relegated to the status of “fiancee” keeps them interested enough to stick around without anyone crossing the line into full-time commitment. He doesn’t need to get to know them too well, since he’s confident the airlines—with their strict standards of appearance and acuity—have done the work for him already.  

But this is a French sex comedy. Six doors flank the stage; you don’t need to be especially clairvoyant to determine those wouldn’t be there—ready to be slammed open and shut—unless Bernard’s carefully thought-out order was not about to be disrupted.

Bernard fails to accurately emphasize the outsized role that his housekeeper, Berthe (Lauren Miller), plays in all this. The ultimate expression of what happens when you mix indolence and passive-aggression with a heaping helping of martyr complex, Berthe’s the one who really keeps this setup afloat, and the jet-age precision Bernard congratulates himself for is really just Berthe staying three steps ahead of his paramours even as she picks up the messes he leaves behind. Miller commands your focus even as she comes in and surveys the antics happening across the stage. 

Each of Bernard’s fiancees is based on archetype, and thanks to a storm in the North Atlantic and changes in schedule, they all—who’d have thought it?—happen to show up on the same day.

The no-nonsense American, Gloria (Claire Rutkowski), seems to travel with the least amount of emotional baggage, though she continuously disgusts Berthe by her choices in food toppings. Gabriella (Allison Zanolli) is an Italian spitfire based more on archetypes created by Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren in movies more than actual observations of real Italian women.

Then there’s Gretchen (Valerie Gerlock), Bernard’s self-proclaimed “little fiancee from beyond the Rhine,” whose arrival motivates much of act two. Exuding the energy of a Valkyrie throughout, Gerlock brilliantly contrasts Gretchen’s need for love with her need for order; Robert is alternately terrified and turned on, and it doesn’t take long for all these arrivals to usurp Bernard’s oh-so carefully curated love life.      

I’ll hand it to Saint Sebastian Players for tackling Boeing-Boeing (directed by Sean Michael Barrett), a show that closed quickly on Broadway but played for years in the West End. They don’t make them much like this anymore, as the saying goes, and I’m a sucker for stuff with slamming doors, funny shower caps, and wisecracking domestics. 

But, even if this is for the sake of laughs, there might be more viewers nowadays who will be made queasy by the gender politics of the script. Bernard refers to his fiancees as if they have the interchangeability of Barbie dolls, and there are weird references to his “friend from Orly” who brokers a meeting with a new woman whenever Bernard gets dumped. Bernard’s deceptions are motivated by the same misogyny the first Austin Powers movie parodied back in 1997. 

It feels like Robert takes center stage trying to do damage control more than Bernard does. Wright is excellent depicting Robert’s country-boy naïveté, which threatens to give in to the continual temptations offered by Bernard’s excesses. Wright is elastic in his performance too—he has the most physical role of the cast and handles the slapstick and a few pratfalls deftly. (I’m not sure how anyone who grew up in Wisconsin in the 50s and 60s would be so mystified by Gretchen’s German-ness, though!)

The production smartly transformed the Saint Bonaventure fellowship hall into a mod Parisian bachelor pad, thanks to set designer Emil Zbella, and the costumes by Robert-Eric West look great. Boeing-Boeing’s script drags a bit (the entrances and exits likely defy cuts), but the performances here more than anything take the show to cruising altitude. 

Read More