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Ray St. Ray leans on his trusty cab. Credit: Isa Giallorenzo

“Entertainer, street philosopher, raconteur. I cruise the streets like a wandering knight seeking people to save from time and space, and perhaps life itself,” says Ray St. Ray, 70, accurately describing his iconic persona. “I’m in the business of creating the legend of ‘the Singing Cab Driver’ for people to cash in on with an interesting story to tell. That makes your life more interesting—now what you do with that is up to you,” he adds. 

Elusive as legends should be, St. Ray is not available upon demand: “If you already know about me, you’re already in the club. I got to find people who don’t,” he says. To add to his aura of mystery, St. Ray doesn’t allow recordings of his cab performances; as he explains, “When you record something, you’re not experiencing the thing, you’re experiencing recording something.” In that same vein, St. Ray is not a huge fan of social media, stating that he is a “one-on-one, real-life kind of person.”

St. Ray claims to have entertained an audience of more than 100,000 passengers since he started driving his cab in 1991. It all started when he “got a kick” out of singing during a New Year’s Eve gig, making him realize he wanted a career in showbiz. “At that point in my life, I was already almost 40. I had to pay child support to two ex-wives for two little daughters I loved very much who lived in two suburbs far from each other and from where I lived. I was unemployed, I couldn’t play any instruments, and had never been in a band before the evening I made this decision. I’m not gay, not Jewish, I’m not even Canadian. Under these circumstances, success in American showbiz ain’t happening overnight. I need a plan, and that plan better include a day job with flexible hours, no career commitment, daily cash flow, and a large insured company car to go see the kids in,” St. Ray reminisces. 

At first, he started singing to his passengers to promote the shows with Chameleon World, the band he played with for over 20 years. When the band broke up ten years ago, he decided to pursue a solo career as the Singing Cab Driver.

St. Ray considers his songs to be “the yellows—the opposite of the blues. Happy, snappy, up-tempo music for people who can still think and hear, or at least dance,” he says. “I just write songs in whatever style fits, but my influences are 60s pop and old movie music, like James Bond themes.” He writes about “love, sex, social significance, and dreams,” which he calls the four topics of life. 

Ray St. Ray’s neckwear is known as a “western bowtie.” This particular tie is made from ribbon with a polka dot pattern. Ray gave his jacket an extra touch by adding a jaunty pocket square. Credit: Isa Giallorenzo

He is currently writing a script for an upcoming podcast called Future Man Versus The Wrong Side of Enough, “a musical manifesto about the theft of our future. We used to be people who shared and achieved dreams. Now we spend much of our time arguing over which nightmares are more worthy of attention. Our future has been hijacked. Basically big money has been buying the governments and changing the rules in their favor. Both parties are working for the same groups of people competing for control of our society,” he says.

To deal with the ways of the world, he adopts the philosophy of “riding the razor’s edge of giving a shit.” “If you care too much, there will never be a shortage of people who need you, your money, your attention, your help. But if you don’t give a shit, you are an asshole, and you’re just adding to the misery of the universe. I think the secret of happiness and living a long life is to ride the razor’s edge between the two.”

This attitude might have helped during some reversals of fortune St. Ray has encountered, such as the advent of ride-hailing apps (just before COVID hit, he was making so little money he thought he would have to quit driving). Still, he always looks impeccable, like a modern dandy superhero with plenty of flair. 

“It’s my effort to make yours a more beautiful world, starting with my image in the mirror,” he says. St. Ray thrifts most of his garments, but he always looks for quality, yet costumey stuff. 

“I enjoy an anachronistic look—something like in the 1920s, or from an old cowboy movie, or detective novels, like pulp fiction,” he says. “My purpose is to live the life that I would want to read a book or see a movie about. I’m living that life, and it’s a musical—which is even better.”

Find more music and info at singingcabdriver.com

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Kurt Chiang and Melinda Jean Myers (known to friends as Mindy) have wanted to collaborate for years. But it took a pandemic for the former Neo-Futurist artistic director and the Lucky Plush ensemble member to finally develop a full-length piece together. 

Unfinished Business, the fruit of that longed-for collaboration (much of it conducted remotely, and not just due to the pandemic; Myers now lives in Iowa City, where she teaches dance at the University of Iowa), gets three public performances this weekend at Links Hall. (There is also a workshop, “Finishing the Business,” conducted by Myers and Chiang on Saturday.) Supported in part by Lucky Plush’s Embodied Research microgrant program, the piece looks at the career trajectories of its creators “while attempting to connect with the audience in ways that are honest and entirely present.”

Unfinished BusinessThu-Sat 10/20-10/22, 7 PM, Links Hall, 3111 N. Western, luckyplush.com, $30 ($15 industry), livestream (Sat only) $20, “Finishing the Business” workshop Sat 11 AM-2:30 PM, $70 (includes one free in-person or livestream ticket).

That last part should sound familiar to longtime fans of both the Neo-Futurists and Lucky Plush. The former has been serving up short plays since 1988 in their late-night show (originally Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, until a dispute with founder and original artistic director Greg Allen led to reinvention as The Infinite Wrench). Those plays, as well as many of the primetime full-length shows presented by the Neos, have been rooted in the idea that the performers aren’t pretending to be anyone other than who they are, and the writing has always been “grounded in their personal experiences and perspectives.”

Lucky Plush, founded by artistic director Julia Rhoads in 2000, is notable for work that blends theater and dance with a focus on what they describe as “provoking and supporting an immediacy of presence—a palpable live-ness—shared by performers in real time with audiences.”

Chiang and Myers had been aware of (and admirers of) each other’s work for years. Myers, who lived in Chicago from 2012-2016, says, “I got to know Kurt’s work by going to see him at the Neo-Futurists, seeing him perform and then also seeing him direct things. And then I invited him to a one-woman show I did with High Concept Laboratories. I think that’s one of the first times that it was like, ‘Oh, we both kind of do this.’ Then I had invited him to do something with me, but then I became pregnant. And so that process was interrupted, and, you know, turned into nothing. And then Kurt invited me to be in The Arrow, which was a show he was directing.” (That storytelling show, created by Chiang and Lily Mooney, “subjects written essays to spontaneous interruptions, complications, absurdity and horseplay.”)

Rhoads too has long been a fan of the Neo-Futurists. She noted in a 2021 interview with Reader contributor Irene Hsiao that part of the idea behind Lucky Plush’s digital festival, The Map of Now, was inspired by the Neos’ use of the Gather.Town platform for a virtual benefit. Rhoads was also featured in the Neo-Futurists’ 2017 publication, The Neo-Futurists: Body.

What was the personal career trajectory guiding Chiang and Myers’s different paths? In a rehearsal video on the Lucky Plush site, Chiang talks about thinking that, after landing in Chicago post-college, he would go around town with “a suitcase full of headshots, and I would give those headshots out to everyone who casts people,” with the aim of then becoming wildly successful in theater and film. 

In the same video, Myers recalls interviewing to be a server at a fine-dining restaurant (food-service jobs and performing artists being long joined at the hip), and becoming flummoxed by the interviewer asking her, “How many balloons do you think can fit in this room?” “Needless to say, I didn’t get the job,” she notes.

Chiang tells me, “We wanted [the piece] to center around ‘How did we get into this? How did I get into theater? How did I start acting? How did Mindy get into dance? How did she start dancing?’ So we thought, ‘Let’s give voice to that in the piece and then build choreography or like movement and staging around that idea and try to pace it, piece it all together.’ So it feels like it’s autobiographical in that way.” He adds, “It also matched up with the times of it being instigated by this global plague. ‘What is it that we’re doing? How do we get here? What are we gonna do next?’ It’s not a pandemic show. We don’t address that socially or politically. But it definitely is sprung from that sort of existential crisis.”

Myers notes that she had called upon Chiang for feedback after she moved to Iowa City for a one-woman show she was working on. “I just really needed some support dramaturgically. And so I was sending Kurt all these videos and just being like, ‘Help, help me. Please.’ And so that kind of reignited this relationship. I just wanted to know more about that, but more in a way that  we were working side by side, even though we’re far apart. It’s literally not side by side. We have really different lives and really different day-to-days and whatnot. But I think the nugget of it was that when I called Kurt, I had a lot of nervous energy about asking, ‘Can you imagine making a show with me?’ And he said that we have unfinished business.”

The process of working together without being in physical proximity presented challenges, of course. Says Myers, “The hours we’ve spent in person are far less than the times we’ve spent on Zoom. And we did a voice memo practice, so we were leaving just copious amounts of little memos over the last year and a half. Talking about the process and then also fulfilling it with content.” Myers adds, “I don’t know about Kurt, but I’ve never worked like that before. I’m typically an in-studio person and doing it all live and in real time.”

Rhoads notes that becoming more comfortable with this mode of collaboration has been a natural evolution for Lucky Plush, which created the Virtual Dance Lab in response to the pandemic. The Embodied Research program itself was also born out of the COVID-19 shutdown and continuing concerns about working together in person as subsequent variants emerged. It’s not just about providing some financial support for artists in unprecedented times, but also seeding the ground for different approaches to creating work. 

“We were doing tours that were postponed from the pandemic, so we had those on the schedule. But in terms of going back in a studio, a lot of our ensemble members have babies, so there is concern about that [in the pandemic],” says Rhoads. “Lucky Plush has always had long-term ensemble members. They move on, different things happen, sometimes they come back. So much about the ensemble and so much about what the artists bring that’s always been part of the ethos of our work is that it’s collaborative. We draw from each other, we learn from each other. So rather than kind of forcing a new process that I wasn’t ready to undertake in a studio . . .  I was like, ‘You know, why not put money toward their own independent research with really no expectation that it would evolve into a show?’ So there’s all kinds of research projects that we’ve supported. One of our ensemble members [Meghann Wilkinson], who has had scoliosis for many years, started working with pilates practitioners and somatic practitioners on how to really shift thinking about working with the body in different ways.”

What both Chiang and Myers hope audiences for Unfinished Business will take away is an appreciation for their own journeys, inside or outside of the arts, where the “busyness” of life so often gets in the way of what we think we should be doing, or our self-image of what success means. As numerous essays about the Great Resignation have made clear, a lot of people are reexamining their relationship with work right now. 

“I think that what I bring forward in the show the most is this very real and lived experience that I have, which I think a lot of folks have, of reaching toward something to be attained or seeing it from like the beginning space and then taking your time to do the things you need to do to get there,” says Myers. “My sort of take is just proclaiming that anytime I’ve gotten there, it isn’t what I think it’s gonna be. There’s like this really big tension of ‘I really want that thing. I really wanna be in a dance company. I really wanna be touring the world internationally.’ And it doesn’t end up that way . . . it’s not an arrival point per se. There’s always the next thing. And I’ve had a lot of conversations about this—that morning when the show’s done, we did it, people came and then there’s that feeling afterward of like, ‘It’s over.’ And it’s not satiated, it’s still hungry. There’s still an itch to scratch. So for me, I think at this point in my life, I think that I’m really reckoning with many interests.”

Braden Abraham Brounwen Houck Photography

Writers names new artistic director

Fifteen months after founding artistic director Michael Halberstam’s resignation in the wake of sexual harassment allegations, Writers Theatre in Glencoe has finally named a permanent successor. Braden Abraham comes to the 30-year-old company from Seattle, where he’s been associated with Seattle Rep for 20 years (the past eight as artistic director). During his tenure, Seattle Rep greatly expanded its commitment to new work through three different programs that, collectively, will support the development of 20 new pieces over the next decade. He will assume the reins at Writers in February. Kate Lipuma continues in her role as executive director. Bobby Kennedy, the director of new work and dramaturgy for the company, had been serving as interim artistic director and will continue with Writers in a role still to be determined.

And the Jeff Awards go to . . .

Monday night at Drury Lane Theatre in Oakbrook Terrace, the Joseph Jefferson (Jeff) Awards for Equity theater were handed out live for the first time since the pandemic began, in a ceremony hosted by Chicago powerhouse E. Faye Butler. The biggest winners were Aurora’s Paramount Theatre, which bagged six awards for its production of Kinky Boots (the show was one of the first to open last fall, and the theater took some heat for its masking and proof-of-vax policies) and the Goodman, which took five Jeffs for the Broadway-bound Good Night, Oscarand one for their revival of Gem of the Ocean. 

The latter’s director, Chuck Smith, received a lifetime achievement award. The former show has been the source of controversy in recent weeks. Playwright David Adjmi went public with his account of an abortive attempt to work with star Sean Hayes on an Oscar Levant play in 2012. Doug Wright ended up writing Good Night, Oscar (and shared the Jeff Award for new work with Tyla Abercrumbie’s Relentlessat TimeLine Theatre). According to Adjmi, producer Beth Williams, who originally optioned Adjmi’s Levant play, told his agent in 2015 that they wouldn’t be moving forward with his script and that he would be sued if he didn’t “scrub all mention” of that script from the Internet. The Broadway production begins performances on April 7, 2023.

Several years ago, the Equity Jeff Awards (there is a separate awards program for non-Equity companies) divided productions into “large” and “midsize” categories to help level the playing field, though the acting awards put everyone head-to-head, regardless of gender identification or production size. So Cassidy Slaughter-Mason shared the award for principal performance in a play (for her stellar turn in Raven’s The Luckiest) with Hayes.

This year the Jeffs also added categories for shorter runs (nine to 17 performances), in recognition of the fact that several companies weren’t doing the usual longer runs coming out of the shutdown. Winners in those categories included About Face Theatre’s The Magnolia Ballet, which won in the categories for best production and best performer for Terry Guest (who also wrote the play); Congo Square Theatre’s ensemble for last spring’s production of What to Send Up When It Goes Down (which just finished an encore run at Lookingglass); and Natalie Y. Moore for her script of The Billboard, presented by 16th Street Theater. The entire list of winners is online at jeffawards.org.

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Ray St. Ray leans on his trusty cab. Credit: Isa Giallorenzo

“Entertainer, street philosopher, raconteur. I cruise the streets like a wandering knight seeking people to save from time and space, and perhaps life itself,” says Ray St. Ray, 70, accurately describing his iconic persona. “I’m in the business of creating the legend of ‘the Singing Cab Driver’ for people to cash in on with an interesting story to tell. That makes your life more interesting—now what you do with that is up to you,” he adds. 

Elusive as legends should be, St. Ray is not available upon demand: “If you already know about me, you’re already in the club. I got to find people who don’t,” he says. To add to his aura of mystery, St. Ray doesn’t allow recordings of his cab performances; as he explains, “When you record something, you’re not experiencing the thing, you’re experiencing recording something.” In that same vein, St. Ray is not a huge fan of social media, stating that he is a “one-on-one, real-life kind of person.”

St. Ray claims to have entertained an audience of more than 100,000 passengers since he started driving his cab in 1991. It all started when he “got a kick” out of singing during a New Year’s Eve gig, making him realize he wanted a career in showbiz. “At that point in my life, I was already almost 40. I had to pay child support to two ex-wives for two little daughters I loved very much who lived in two suburbs far from each other and from where I lived. I was unemployed, I couldn’t play any instruments, and had never been in a band before the evening I made this decision. I’m not gay, not Jewish, I’m not even Canadian. Under these circumstances, success in American showbiz ain’t happening overnight. I need a plan, and that plan better include a day job with flexible hours, no career commitment, daily cash flow, and a large insured company car to go see the kids in,” St. Ray reminisces. 

At first, he started singing to his passengers to promote the shows with Chameleon World, the band he played with for over 20 years. When the band broke up ten years ago, he decided to pursue a solo career as the Singing Cab Driver.

St. Ray considers his songs to be “the yellows—the opposite of the blues. Happy, snappy, up-tempo music for people who can still think and hear, or at least dance,” he says. “I just write songs in whatever style fits, but my influences are 60s pop and old movie music, like James Bond themes.” He writes about “love, sex, social significance, and dreams,” which he calls the four topics of life. 

Ray St. Ray’s neckwear is known as a “western bowtie.” This particular tie is made from ribbon with a polka dot pattern. Ray gave his jacket an extra touch by adding a jaunty pocket square. Credit: Isa Giallorenzo

He is currently writing a script for an upcoming podcast called Future Man Versus The Wrong Side of Enough, “a musical manifesto about the theft of our future. We used to be people who shared and achieved dreams. Now we spend much of our time arguing over which nightmares are more worthy of attention. Our future has been hijacked. Basically big money has been buying the governments and changing the rules in their favor. Both parties are working for the same groups of people competing for control of our society,” he says.

To deal with the ways of the world, he adopts the philosophy of “riding the razor’s edge of giving a shit.” “If you care too much, there will never be a shortage of people who need you, your money, your attention, your help. But if you don’t give a shit, you are an asshole, and you’re just adding to the misery of the universe. I think the secret of happiness and living a long life is to ride the razor’s edge between the two.”

This attitude might have helped during some reversals of fortune St. Ray has encountered, such as the advent of ride-hailing apps (just before COVID hit, he was making so little money he thought he would have to quit driving). Still, he always looks impeccable, like a modern dandy superhero with plenty of flair. 

“It’s my effort to make yours a more beautiful world, starting with my image in the mirror,” he says. St. Ray thrifts most of his garments, but he always looks for quality, yet costumey stuff. 

“I enjoy an anachronistic look—something like in the 1920s, or from an old cowboy movie, or detective novels, like pulp fiction,” he says. “My purpose is to live the life that I would want to read a book or see a movie about. I’m living that life, and it’s a musical—which is even better.”

Find more music and info at singingcabdriver.com

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For the first time since the Chicago Cubs signed starting pitcher Yu Darvish in 2018, the team is expected to swim in the deep of Major League Baseball free agency this offseason.

Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer told reporters at the end of the season that the team is entering the offseason with the intent of “spending intelligently” and that has added more smoke to the rumors of the Cubs having an active offseason.

The Cubs have been oft-rumored to land one of the four top free-agent shortstops this winter as the likes of Trea Turner, Carlos Correa, Xander Boegaerts, and Dansby Swanson are all expected to hit free agency this winter.

Outside of pursuing one of the top free agent shortstops, there has been very little indication as to what else Hoyer has planned for the offseason.

That may have changed this past weekend as Chicago baseball insider Bruce Levine may have shed light on how the Cubs plan to open free agency this winter. Levine reported on Saturday that the Cubs have made signing free-agent first baseman Jose Abreu a priority this offseason.

Cubs fans should be no strangers to Abreu as he has been a cornerstone of the Chicago White Sox organization for the past nine seasons.

Growing speculation surrounding the White Sox has suggested that the team will move on from Abreu as they currently have a logjam of young, skilled offensive players that are limited defensively.

Opting not to re-sign Abreu would alleviate the logjam and create a clear path to playing time for the likes of Andrew Vaughn and Gavin Sheets. If Abreu’s time with the Sox is at an end, the Cubs should make certain that his time in Chicago is not.

The Chicago Cubs may open their free agency spending with a shocking signing.

Abreu will be 36 at the start of next season but proved this past season that he is still an elite offensive talent. Abreu appeared in all but 5 games for the White Sox in 2022 while posting a slash line of .304/.378/.446/.824 to go along with a 137 wRC+.

First base was a glaring weak spot for the Cubs during the 2022 season. Throughout the 2022 season, Cubs’ first baseman hit .232 with only 17 home runs and a 86 wRC+. Abreu would be an instant upgrade for the Cubs at the position.

Looking beyond the obvious fit at first base, Abreu would be a perfect fit for the Cubs’ clubhouse. Signing him would provide the Cubs with a veteran leader in the clubhouse and a mentor to the top prospects that will be making their way to Wrigley Field over the course of the next few years.

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Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. 

Chicago Reader podcasts are recorded on Shure microphones. Learn more at Shure.com.

Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.

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Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. 

Chicago Reader podcasts are recorded on Shure microphones. Learn more at Shure.com.

Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.

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A lot of big moves were made by the Chicago Blackhawks during the off-season. One of them included their former third-overall pick (2019 NHL draft) Kirby Dach. He is a kid that had ups and downs to start his career but the team did him no favors in his development.

Now, he is with a new young team that is going to use him properly. The Blackhawks traded him to the Montreal Canadiens at the 2022 NHL Draft in exchange for a first-round pick in the same draft.

He came into Monday night’s game against the Pittsburgh Penguins looking for his first goal of the 2022-23 season which would also be his first in a Habs uniform. He had one assist in the prior three games before this one. Well, he waited until the perfect time for his first goal.

The Pittsburgh Penguins got out to a hot 2-0 lead thanks to two goals by Evgeni Malkin. Trailing by two going into the third, they needed a big effort in order to come back. Nick Suzuki scored just 1:10 into the period to set the tone.

Then, late in the period and regulation, Cole Caufield scored to make it 2-2. That is the Canadiens getting big goals from two of their best players. In overtime while on the power play, Dach scored a very nice tip-in goal that was set up by Sean Monahan. Suzuki also grabbed an assist.

Former Chicago Blackhawks player Kirby Dach has his first goal of the season.

Dach scored by being parked right in front of the goaltender on the power play. He can make a lot of money in this league if he continues to use his size, strength, and skill to get the job done as he did on this goal. This was a nice way for him to get on the board.

Montreal probably isn’t going to have a banner year as they are still developing guys and trying to get better. They are farther along in the rebuild than the Blackhawks are but it is going to be a while before they are contenders again too.

Hopefully, for Dach’s sake, they continue to develop him properly as he is a very good player. It isn’t his fault that the team he was drafted by handled his development very poorly.

It would also be nice to see Frank Nazar turn into a great defenseman as he is the selection that Chicago made with the pick that Montreal gave them (it originally belonged to the New York Islanders). It should be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming years.

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