Mitchell Oldham

It’s surprising what can result from realized passions. For the past ten years, Melissa Mallinson and Nicole Gifford have pooled their creative energy to build and mount the Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival.  Both have extensive backgrounds in dance and their annual event gives Chicago a chance to see trailblazing work being created both locally and around the country.  Held at the Ruth Page Center for Performing Arts, the festival’s setting provides an intimate view of how imaginatively contemporary dance is being interpreted.

One of the most dramatic and radical works, Ripples from the Skin We Shed takes dance off the floor and places it underwater.   Presented on film through the auspices of a university research grant and Take Root films, the screened performance proved that “moving rhythmically to music”, Webster’s definition of dance, can be transferred to an entirely different plane and remain viable and beautiful.  Because of the way water affects movement, the format required dancers to use time differently.  It also allowed the troupe to exploit the concept of buoyancy and use it as a tool to exaggerate grace.  The sequence typifies how the Harvest dance festival ably showcases the way boundaries and limitations can be suspended when taking a fresh look at an ancient art form like dance.

That exploration was extended with Aerial Dance Chicago’s rendition of Stacked.  Here aerial acrobatics are refined and choreographed allowing three dancers to coordinate their movements to create perpendicular rhythmic harmony.

More conventional dance forms found representation too.  Giordano Dance Chicago’s incubator company; Giordano II, chose to veer away from ostentatious and make restraint their centerpiece.  Set to Nils Frahm’s serenely solemn score, Periphery exalted in control, thoughtful fluidity and elegance. 

The stage’s proximity to the audience had a second important advantage. Its closeness allowed you to note the tiny deviations in performance that distinguishes one dancer from another.  It’s those differences that become windows revealing each artist’s unique talents, skills and abilities.

Vadco/Valerie Alpert Dance’s excerpt from Moving through Memphis Project opened slowly on rhythms meant to instill tense anticipation.  With dancers sitting still in a line on the floor, they stir and eventually appear to connect psychically.   Their movements become less and less individualized and synchronize with the other dancers to form a bond transforming them into a single transfixing organism.  Narrative explaining the inspiration for the work adds to the appreciation of it.  Alpert’s visit to several Memphis historical sites including the National Civil Rights Museum and the Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum planted the seeds for the Moving Through Memphis Project which was just representational enough to see and feel the dance’s link to what inspired it.

Physically powerful and psychologically engrossing, J’Sun Howard’s aMoratorium:  at the altar, it may not be my time was an intensely absorbing duet that’s oddly not often seen.  Intended to explore issues surrounding black male identity and visibility, the seriousness of the piece seemed to add to both its appeal and its strength.  Howard’s bold choreography asked much of its dancers.  Both Solomon Bowser and Damon Green seemed to easily master the piece as well as add an elusive spiritual component so essential in material that demands intimacy and a high degree of co-reliance.   Tension, power, strength, vulnerability and resilience all had a palpable presence in aMoratorium.  Fitting attributes for a work that was originally commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago to commemorate the marvelous Charles White retrospective on exhibit last year. 

The festival’s three solo pieces were harder to decipher.  Two felt as if they may have been more suitable in the world of performance art.  One, comedic parody and the other, extravagant and exotic mime.  In the end, it’s the performers and the festival’s producers to decide in which camp they fall.  As dance, some will find them challenging.  If so, the festival’s organizers have succeeded in continuing to make us think about what dance is and how it can be expressed. 

A second weekend of the festival runs September 27^th and 28^th with nine different companies bringing their own engrossing interpretations of what constitutes contemporary dance.   

Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival

September 20 – 28, 2019

Ruth Page Center for the Arts

1016 N. Dearborn

Chicago, IL    60610

www.hccdf.com

We often forget, especially when considering a single individual, that genius can have many dimensions.  Although Chicago can boast of being home to some of famed Mies van der Rohe’s most important architectural contributions, there was another side to this modernist master.  Known for the sleek majesty of masterpieces like 860/880 N. Lake Shore Drive or the quiet splendor of Farnsworth House, a single room retreat in Plano, Illinois that remains a marvel of simplicity and beauty, van der Rohe took on and excelled at other projects too.

From mid-September through January 12^th of 2020, the Elmhurst Art Museum will be showcasing one of only three single family homes the famed architect ever designed. With its exhibition, McCormick House:  Past, Present and Future, the museum looks at the house from the inside and uses the approach to spotlight its livability as well as the exceptionalism of its design.  Offering tours and programming that explain the house’s significance and importance, the four-month event is an extremely rare opportunity to personally experience the vision of a brilliant architect at such an intimate level and understand how a home that exudes so much beauty might function as a household.

Built in 1952, one year after Farnsworth, McCormick House represented a very different goal for Mies.  It was not intended as an isolated jewel or exclusive retreat.  McCormick House was intended to work as a family home with the many practical considerations that entails.  An early adopter of the modernist aesthetic that embraced sleek lines, natural materials and light; these are now precisely the elements that have become synonymous with van der Rohe’s name. 

With its three bedrooms, carport and high end materials, McCormick House was also a deluxe prototype.  Robert McCormick, scion of one of Chicago’s most illustrious families, was one of the developers of van der Rohe’s triumphs on Lake Shore Drive.  According to Elmhurst Art Museum’s Executive Director, John McKinnon, it was during their collaborations on 860/880 that the idea to develop a prefab neighborhood in the western suburbs took root. McCormick House would be their prototype and would also become the home of its namesake, Robert McCormick and his wife, poet Isabella Gardner.

It’s not known why the project didn’t attract the interest needed to progress, but it was not realized.  Mies however would go on a few years later to complete Lafayette Park in downtown Detroit that includes 186 residences, covers 78 acres and enjoys a cachet of enviable exclusivity.   

Since the museum bought the house from its last owners, Ray and Mary Ann Fick in 1992, it’s been both moved and reconfigured.    The current exhibit, focusing on the home’s interior space, is filled with surprises that center on the home’s charisma and its adaptability to a 2019 world.  Prominent Chicago interior architect, Robert Kleinschmidt, who also sits on the board of the Mies van der Rohe Society at the Illinois Institute Technology can be credited for adding the ideal visual complements that draw your attention to the spatial and textural wonders of the house. Interior architecture requires a detailed understanding of the science behind a structure as well as the ability to enhance it aesthetically.  Infrastructure and décor are brought together to complement one another. 

As part of the activities commemorating the separation of McCormick House from the main museum last Fall, Kleinschmidt designed an installation in the children’s wing of the house to highlight the home’s suitability and comfort in a contemporary context.  All the while retaining its mid-century soul.  Executive Director McKinnon confided that because Kleinschmidt’s work received such unsparing praise, he was invited to expand his vision to the whole house.  The results as seen at the exhibit’s reception on the 14^th are splendid.  The blending of 1950’s era modernism with elements reflective of 21^st century tastes is extremely beautiful and retains constancy in every room.  Staged for function as well as beauty, every item and its placement speaks as much to purpose as it does to cosmetic appeal and discreetly emphasizes how inviting a home like this would be to live in.  Textures and colors balance, accentuate or subtly complement steel, wood and stone.  And in every room, those wonderful walls of windows are celebrated by letting them simply be.

The continuity of elm clad walls gives the house pervasive warmth.  Pockets accommodating privacy seem to be everywhere as are tantalizing and comfortable spaces intended for gathering and sharing.  

An unintended consequence of the show may be in the manner it subtly proves how much the way we live today mirrors the modernist principles McCormick House’s honors and embodies. 

An array of docent led tours and programs support the exhibit.  Tours began September 15 and will continue Sunday afternoons between 1pm and 3pm.  One is even being conducted by a former resident.

A doubtless fascinating curated tour by interior architect Robert Kleinschmidt is scheduled for Saturday September 21^st at 1:30pm.

Additional information about intriguing lectures and panel discussions revolving around the impact residential modernist architecture has on metropolitan Chicago can be found on the museum’s website, https://www.elmhurstartmuseum.org/events/.

McCormick House:  Past, Present and Future

Elmhurst Art Museum

150 Cottage Hill Avenue

Elmhurst, IL   60126

630-834-020

https://www.elmhurstartmuseum.org

Whether it’s on a wall or on a stage, altering expectations of what creative imagination can look like is what contemporary art is all about.  Interested in celebrating how such transformations might manifest from the vantage point of black creativity, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s associate curator Tara Aisha Willis organized a dazzling trilogy of performances that gave full expression to how rich the world of black creativity is. Drawing deeply from talent that was either spawned or currently resides in Chicago, the series ended August 30^th with musical performances by two remarkable artists, Thurman Barker and Ben LaMar Gay.  Both translated their memories and emotions about Chicago through the way they create sound.  

Performing individually in two sets and then together briefly in pure improvisation, their shows reflected the same expansive innovation seen throughout the series and were executed with the same exceptional distinction.

Both native Chicagoans, Barker and Gay tapped into their most seminal impressions of the city to express themselves in very different ways.  A splendid drummer, Barker and his quintet chose the orchestral format to paint a beautiful kaleidoscope of feelings.  From somber to poignant to explosive and rapturous, his work in progress, South Side Suite is a fascinating and thoughtful reflection of his complex home town. 

Ben LaMar Gay’s Hecky Naw! Angles! was more resistant to categorization and in many ways better typified the two preceding performances in the series.  Dahlak Brathwaite’s Try/Step/Trip two weeks earlier started life as a solo piece.  Collaborating with director Roberta Uno, it appeared on the MCA stage as an ensemble production so powerful it made the Edlis Neeson Theater quake.  In it, Brathwaite examined a journey that led a child of immigrants into the snares that entrap so many black youth.  For him it led to a prison cell and the scarlet letter of a felon.  He rebuffs the stigma his past entails and chooses to move forward with positive affirmation. Gifted with exceptional powers of expression, his dialog can be breathtakingly scorching and impossibly exquisite. He uses it deliver his take on the balance of power in a country divided along many lines.  Despite last minute personnel changes and severely abbreviated rehearsal schedules, his cast of actors more than met the challenge of cogently delivering riveting dialog at lightning speed. 

It’s that assertiveness that made Try/Step/Trip so much in sync with Ben Lamar Gay’s work.  In addition to the way they both brought in other performance elements to add depth to their productions.  Try/Step/Trip could be called musical theater with heft and combat boots.  And like Gay’s Hecky Naw!  Angles!, he uses dance as a form of emphasis.   Step, a group dance form ingrained in the black community, is laden with ritual and attachment.  Brathwaite employs it to signify unity and self-worth.  Gay goes the interpretive route letting a single female dancer, Raquel Monroe, translate his music through the movement of her body.  He also featured cutting edge video that re-enforced the rhythm of his music and give it visual dimension.  Not only were they mesmerizing and startling in their creativity, Kim Alpert’s image projections were in perfect harmony with the dynamics of the sextet’s unorthodox sound.    

Spellbinding moments kept popping up in all three of the series’ performances.  In Rennie Harris’s Lifted, the second of the three, dance took center stage and featured the unforgettable skills of Joshua Culbreath. Built around a modern-day morality play that sears house to gospel into some kind of astonishing hybrid, Lifted showers the notion of redemption with its own brand of highly relatable relevance.  And, because Harris believes “movement is how we worship life”, his dancers employ an impressive array of styles to demonstrate exactly how that’s done.  Hip hop, break, lock and conventional contemporary stage dance are all pressed into service in the name of divinely bestowed personal salvation. The conceit worked splendidly and live vocals from a local Chicago choir acted as the golden thread that framed the entire piece.

Transformative experiences can pertain to who as well as what.  The dancers performing in Lifted reminded us that many others besides the slim and the svelte can bust a move.  Yet another small example of the inclusive nature of creativity.

Dahlak Brathwaite

Try/Step/Trip

MCA Edlis Neeson Theatre

Friday August 16, 2019

Rennie Harris

Lifted

MCA Edlis Neeson Theatre

Friday August 23, 2019

Saturday August 24, 2019

Thurman Barker/Ben LaMar Gay

South Side Suite/ Hecky Naw! Angles!

MCA Edlis Neeson Theatre

Friday August 30, 2019

Since they mounted their first exhibit in 2016, movin’ in the right direction sums up the boldly ambitious goals of an arts collective known as the Floating Museum.  The group sees the entire city as a museum and treats each neighborhood as a potential gallery.  For the past three years they’ve collaborated with communities and other artists to develop original themes that they use to develop one-of-a-kind concepts.

Last year the collective met with some success and acclaim for their inspired repurposing of a 100’ barge on the Chicago river.  Redefining what it means to transport, they used the barge to “off load” art at various sites along the river delivering original works by local artists, conducting song circles and presenting live dance performance.  By taking art to where people live and work the collective hopes to energize neighborhoods as well as individuals.

Despite of the group’s name and its 2018 Chicago river production, the Floating Museum is not water bound. Floating more like a butterfly than a boat, it can light or land anywhere in town with one of its pioneering outdoor projects.  This year, the Green Line’s route functions as the Floating Museum’s geographical muse with neighborhoods running from Austin to Englewood acting as the collective’s exhibition spaces.

Hoping to turn the Green Line into an arts destination, the collective took to the rails with their current project, Cultural Transit Assembly.  Building historical relevance into the artistic exercise, the Floating Museum aims to highlight “historical figures that elevate the stories of indigenous people and people of color”.  Partnering with the CTA, two train cars have been converted into moving art rooms.   The cars have been melded into the system’s regular schedule and are wrapped in white sheeting carrying portrait renderings.  One car commemorates the recognized founder of Chicago, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable and the other honors his Potawatomi bride, Kitihawa.  Each car displays local artist interpretations of what du Sable and his wife looked like and provide information about the import each had on the settlement of the city.  Much like the popular CTA Holiday train during the Christmas season, seeing or riding in the Floating Museum’s tribute cars is based on luck or perseverance. 

On the ground a similarly impressive effort extends the tribute with an imposing air-filled sculpture entitled Founders.  Over 25’ tall and in luminescent white, it too carries images Chicago’s first settler and Kitihawa.  They are joined by a likeness of Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington.  From July 24^th through September 11^th, the four-headed bust “floats” from neighborhood to neighborhood where it remains in residence from 11am to 6pm.  Docents are on hand to talk about the significance of each person as well as the story of the sculpture’s construction.  Tying a more performance based component into the sculpture’s stay at each spot would enliven the experience and make its presence more meaningful. 

To stimulate curiosity and interest, the sculpture is often placed on a site that insures its visibility by passengers riding the line. 

Random CTA stations like the west side’s Pulaski stop also act as unexpected galleries.   There, photographer Nicole Harrison uses portraiture to “honor family bonds and heritage”.

The Floating Museum’s Cultural Transit Assembly culminates with its participation in Expo Chicago on Navy Pier September 19 – 21, 2019.

The Floating Museum

Cultural Transit Assembly

July 24 – September 21, 2019

https://floatingmuseum.org/Calendar

Born out of crisis 28 years ago, Dance for Life has become a beloved and perhaps even indispensable Chicago institution. Created to raise funds that would help address the dire health needs of dance community members stricken with the AIDS virus, it’s evolved to provide invaluable assistance to dancers confronting a variety of other health and living needs.   Drawing from the many tributaries that define the varied styles of dance performed in the city, the annual benefit performance showcases each branch of dance to highlight the depth of impact each has on Chicago’s cultural identity.

Always highly anticipated, the electricity running through the pre-show crowd in the Auditorium’s lobby all but crackles in intensity.  Saturday night was no exception and the intermission-free show proved why.  From ballet, tap, modern, Latin, jazz and hip-hop; nearly every significant genre of dance was on the program’s roster.  And not one of them left their A game at home.

Giordano Dance Chicago opened large with a piece they introduced last year.  Saturday night’s performance of Soul looked as if it may have already been reworked. If so, this version’s a bona fide keeper.  The flow seems cleaner, crisper and the overall look of the dance seems better tailored to the company’s style.  Still riding on the shoulders of R&B giants, Gladys Knight, Al Green and Tina Turner, Soul’s musical foundation is tailor made for fire. In a single instant when the first strains of Proud Mary oozed from speakers, the dancers responded in perfect timing and as one. Click, and the company’s signature seductive dynamism exploded and covered the stage to cheers.

Dance is a language with many beautiful dialects.  It can pulse with that dynamism found in Soul and then move seamlessly to the cool measured syncopation of tap.  Chicago Human Rhythm Project/Stone Soup Rhythms presented Movement 11, a lovely expression of grace and structured rhythm.  Initially the music had sound clues that suggested classical.  But unusual things can happen when you blend electronic music with jazz. Here it achieved an ethereal timelessness that worked beautifully with the percussive cadence of modern forward thinking tap.

Short video clips interspersed through the show called attention to the people who’ve made essential contributions to the city’s dance culture or have benefited from Dance for Life’s assistance.  One tribute recalled the work and life of Claire Bataille before Robyn Mineko Williams and Artists danced an excerpt from Echo Mine; a piece dedicated to Bataille.  In it dancers Jacqueline Burnett, Meredith Dincolo and Robyn Mineko Williams moved with the grace of spirits in a time disdaining universe.  Virtually identical in appearance and dressed in asymmetrical costumes by Hogan McLaughlin, the effect was to push the dance and our minds into a distant future full of alternate exquisite possibilities.

The Joffrey Ballet contributed two works to the program; Lorelei (2018) and Bells (2011).  Both were dances for two and both were beautiful.  Choreography and the talents of a singular dancer set them apart.  Choreographed by Yuri Possokhov, Bells is indeed passionate.  Even in all its subtlety, the work is also hugely complex which adds tremendously to its fascination.  Dancers Victoria Jaiani and Temur Suluashvili have been performing Bells since its inception and their familiarity with it seems to flow from their pores.  The dance is so perfect and Jaiani’s performance is so exemplary that the piece was completely transfixing. Bells has been called a triumph many times and it still is.

Just before Jaiani and Suluashvili took the stage, Ensemble Espanol Spanish Dance Theater put a whole new slant on timing, precision and the myriad things you can do with rhythm.  Packed together and in the hands of a strong dance company; they make up the primary ingredients of excitement with a distinct flair.  Mar de Fuego/Sea of Fire, also created in 2018 by Madrid based choreographer Carlos Rodriguez and dedicated to the company’s recently deceased founder Dame Libby Komaiko, fills the stage with dancers loaded with panache dressed in stunning costumes and flaunting that gorgeous timing. It’s exhilarating to experience dance from the perspective of other cultures.  The ensemble funnels its inspirations directly from Spain and focuses on several dance styles that best typify the totality of what Spanish dance is.  Showcasing the expressive vibrancy of flamenco Saturday night, the company’s repertoire also includes contemporary work, both folkloric and classical dance and Escuela Bolera (classical Spanish ballet).   

Immediately following the delicate beauty of Bells, Chicago Dance Crash nearly ripped the building apart with dance as American as Beyoncé and as current as your next text.  Wrapping acrobatics, hip hop, break and concert dance into a tight ball to express thoughts and ideas makes for thrilling dance.   Leap of Faith, choreographed by the company’s artistic director, Jessica Deahr was conceived to validate the taking of risks, particularly highly consequential risks that can ultimately lead to self-actualization.  Leap of Faith is not only magnificent, it broadens the definition of dance by framing for the stage what grew from the streets.

Tapping into a completely different wellspring, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago did much the same thing with their excerpt from Decadance/Chicago.  The blissful marriage of dance and theater, a semi-circle of chairs sweep the length of the stage with dancers standing behind them in the dark clothes and hats of Jewish orthodoxy.  Opening to Hava Nagila before morphing into a very muscular and brazenly assertive rendition of Echad Mi Yodea, the dance moves methodically from staid reserve to joyous frenzy with dancers shedding both their inhibitions and their clothes as they lose themselves in joyous rapture.

That sense of joy and excitement carried right through to the finale as a convergence of dancers from across the city’s contemporary dance community performed the world premiere of Randy Duncan’s Release.  Well named, the work exuded spiritual flight, an absolute absence of restraint with dancers exalting in some secret happiness that they gladly shared with the audience.  Release and everything preceding it proved eloquent reminders of the boundless creativity and staggering talent Chicago’s dance community possesses.  And that we are all very fortunate to enjoy.

Dance for Life

August 17, 2019

Auditorium Theatre

50 East Ida B. Wells Drive

Chicago, IL  60605

www.chicagodancersunited.org

All’s forgiven if it slipped your mind that we have a National Picnic Month.  It’s July of course, the most appropriate month of all when summer is at full flower.  And perhaps the unlikeliest of suspects has created an ingenious way to celebrate al fresco dining at its purest. 

For the past few years, the Grant Park Music Festival has brought the celebration into the heart of the city by placing it on the Great Lawn facing Millennium’s Park spectacular center piece, the Pritzker Pavilion.

Known formally as a Pastoral Picnic in White, the themed commemoration of Picnic month cast a long net all the way across the Atlantic to find its inspiration.  Emulating a similar event that started in Paris during the late 80’s, this event also asks everyone to dress in white “from head to toe” for this novel and very fun happening. 

The French version started in the vast 2000 acre Bois de Boulogne, one of Paris’s most beloved and prestigious parks.  Participants wore white then just so they could find one another.  With a 6:00 pm start time last Saturday, finding people was a non-issue. 

Millennium Park’s Great Lawn can accommodate up to 7000 people and it would have been both dramatic and striking to see the entire lawn blanketed in white all the way to Monroe.  The evening’s impeccable weather would have enhanced the spectacle even more.  On this night pools of white clustered at the front of lawn closest to the band shell.  What celebrants lacked in numbers they made up for in style.   

Like haute pioneers, not only were these revelers clothed in white from tip top to flat bottom, they were dressed to the nines.  Most, conspicuously chic.  The inspiration may have been true French, but the feel somehow also had the unmistakable texture of New Orleans and carried the scent of extreme ease.

With long tables covered in white lace or linen, candelabra fitted with delicate tapers of wax, silver trays filled with an array of delicacies, stemmed wine glasses standing at the ready, and flower vases overflowing with pale green hydrangea and big white puffs of peonies, those who chose to go all in on the spirit of the event were a stunning sight.  Slightly awed, someone asked a person passing by why so many people were wearing white.  On hearing the explanation, he shook his head in mild dismay and replied, “I wish I got the memo”.

Sunset amplified the event’s theatricality.  And there was a reward.

The Grant Park Music Festival’s orchestra had selected Dvorak’s Symphony No. 7 to accompany the evening and invited two extraordinary artists, brothers, to join them.  Anthony McGill holds principal clarinetist status at the New York Philharmonic.  His brother, Demarre, is principal flutist with the Seattle Symphony.  They performed a piece written for them, Puckett’s Concerto Duo and Saint-Saëns’ Tarantelle. At peak, the music flashed and sparkled like tiny rockets of color.   Brilliant renditions, their performances were as exciting as they were splendid.  As suitable for a night in the depths of the Bois de Boulogne as it was last weekend in contemporary Chicago with a wall of skyscrapers standing sentry, the program charmed across both time and place.

As one of a few, if not the only remaining free outdoor classical music series in the United States, the evening’s music sponsored by the Grant Park Music Festival as well as the Festival’s Pastoral Picnic in White act as potent reminders of Chicago’s good fortune.   They represent generous spirit restoring gifts of the city at completely no charge.   

Pastoral Picnic in White

Millennium Park

July 27, 2019

Pritzker Pavilion & Lawn

6:00 pm Open

7:30 pm Concert

Chicago, IL  60601

gpmf.org

Autobiography as performance art can be dangerous territory.  Keeping an audience’s rapt attention while recounting the events of one’s life is not the habitat of the ordinary man or woman.  But as we saw Friday night at Skokie’s North Shore Center of Performing Arts, Renée Taylor is far from ordinary.

Resilient, talented and according to the many disclosures in her one woman show, My Life on a Diet; a striver always looking for the next big role.  During her 90-minute humor filled spree, she shared insights into a world of glamor that frequently touched on Hollywood’s golden age. 

Everybody knows the story.  Infected with the show biz bug in the womb. Maneuvering through the audition circuit until you land your first professional role at 15.   Scoring bit parts and then bigger parts until you get a star on your dressing room door.  By returning to her roots in stand up, it’s Taylor comedic slant that injected the tale with genuine vitality. 

Allegedly inspired by the warm and lucrative reception of her friend Nora Ephron’s monologue driven play; Love, Loss and What I Wore, Taylor and her late husband Joseph Bologna created My Life on a Diet to conjure similar magic.  Premiering last year to wide critical acclaim, all indications point to their achieving their end. 

Using the foil of a Hollywood staple, perpetual dieting, Taylor matched the stages of her life and career to the diet she was on at each significant juncture and milestone.  An unrepentant “diet junkie who used to think if she ate like a star, she’d just might look and live like one”, the Academy award nominated and Emmy winning actress and writer can say she succeeded admirably.  Her 70-year career include over 20 plays, 4 films and 9 television series and movies. Many of them conceived and co-created in collaboration with Mr. Bologna. 

Still a fun blond at 86, and resplendent Friday night in a glittering gold gown, Taylor deftly mixed the poignant and the sweet with the titillating and saucy.  An anecdote gently recounting the days leading up to her friend’s Marilyn Monroe’s final days would be offset with a retelling of how she craftily excused herself from an impromptu porn screening at a party in a Beverly Hills mansion.

With the use of movie clips and the wonders of PowerPoint, sitting comfortably ensconced on an elegant chair, Taylor took us on a stroll through a past bubbling over with goal driven living and recounted the many famous people she worked and became friends with along the way.  From studying under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg to working with Cary Grant, Barbara Streisand and Joan Crawford, Taylor not only rolled with them all as buddies, she politely took them off their pedestals during the show to reveal how much like the rest of us they are. 

With stagecraft imbedded in her core, she graciously acknowledged the warm applause following her very entertaining performance. Was that gesture at the close demure encouragement for the audience to rise in a standing ovation?  It hardly matters.  A career as full of color and accomplishment as hers deserves exactly that.   

Renée Taylor  – My Life on a Diet

Through August 4, 2019

North Shore Center of the Performing Arts

9501 Skokie Blvd.

Skokie, IL  60077

847-679-9501

www.northshorecenter.org