Stevie Wills

Jazz lovers have long memories and pride themselves on their loyalty to trusted music resources.  That dedication explains why the Jazz Showcase was bulging at the seams Tuesday night with fans honoring retiring 90.9 WDCB radio host Barry Winograd.  Winograd will be leaving his daily 10am to 2pm slot September 20^th with early morning host Leslie Keros slated to slide over to fill the vacancy.

Winograd’s roots in the jazz community couldn’t go deeper.  Eighteen years in Glen Ellyn with DCB and lengthy stints at WBEZ and WXRT means his knowledge of the music and the people behind it is rich and plentiful.  That command came through in the easy, unhurried and indisputably cool discourse Winograd engaged in during his broadcasts about the music many consider the greatest America has ever produced. 

A veteran musician and bandleader, Winograd not only hosted the evening’s celebrations but performed with the Eric Schneider quintet.  It was clear that he shares a lot of history with this classic jazz ensemble who knows how bring the fire. 

Although stepping down from his daily show, Winograd will not be completely stepping away from his broadcasting persona.  He’ll continue to host his Saturday morning show, When Jazz was King.  It was also clear Mr. Winograd will have few regrets about not participating in the station’s seasonal fund raising drives.  The Saturday morning segment and filling in for WDCB’s other radio hosts will complete his future commitments to the station and allow Chicago to continue relishing in his superlative perspectives and insights on the magnificent musical art form known as jazz.

Tolstoy had it right.  Happy families are all the same but every unhappy family has its own special brand of sad.  He didn’t mention the broad middle ground.  That space where families skew one way or the other but can’t truly be called either happy or unhappy.  Because of their unpredictability, these are the families that can’t help but fascinate because you never know which way they’ll tilt when adversity strikes.  Will they stick together or will they crumble?

If I Forget, closing soon at Victory Gardens, scrutinizes one of those families by exposing its strengths as well as its weaknesses during crisis.  Something about it reminds you of Arthur Miller and his ability to tell a story plainly and beautifully so that you had a genuine sense of the souls inside the characters.  Always told in a straight line with tension building elegantly and dramatically to the inevitable climax, the only question left to be answered is what side of the moral divide will they fall. 

Here individual commitment to conviction dictate behavior and we see strong wills rubbing against one another like tectonic plates. Concentrating its focus on three siblings, two sisters and a brother, we watch as necessity leads them down a road that could end in family fracture. 

Their Jewishness plays as central a role as any character.  For the brother and one of his sisters, it defined how they see and relate to the world.  The radical difference in how Michael (Daniel Cantor) and his sister Sharon (Elizabeth Ledo) view the relevance of their heritage determined how the action of the play would progress.  One rabid about leading a completely secular life governed by the pursuits of the mind and moral integrity.  The other, devout and steeped in her culture, has no qualms in letting her Jewish identity direct her responses politically and socially.

An academic teaching university level Judaic studies and on the threshold of tenure, things appear to be looking good for Michael.  He’s also close to publishing a book grounded in his field of study.  This is where ominous clouds begin to gather.  Flying in the face of convention thought, he suggests Jews cleave too blindly to the tragedy of the Holocaust and should, in essence, forget it.  In the book who flies in the face of convention and declares Jews but also ominously threatening because of its stance on contemporary Jewish thought relating to the Holocaust.  It’s precisely the kind of progressive thought that translates to intellectual blasphemy. 

Still craving the approval of his father; he allows himself to become agitated with worry because it’s been six months and his father hasn’t told him what he thinks about the book’s manuscript.  Leaked by his sister Sharon to influential clergy and academics, the book initially undermines and then derails his professional career.   Eventually his need for money exposes ruinous secrets in the home of his other sister and blows away the veil of the Sharon’s clandestine and compromising love affair.  Will they cash in on the family’s sole financial legacy; property in a fast gentrifying New York neighborhood, to restore their own fiscal security but leave the next generation exposed. 

Even as they play one against the other and, when pushed, can talk to one another with enough venom to drop a rhinoceros, you admire their resiliency and determination to never forget the closeness of their blood tie. The prowess of Gail Shapiro as Holly as well as that of Cantor and Ledo sparkled and filled their performances with authenticity.  But it was Heather Townsend as Michael’s wife Ellen who brought compassion to the dance.  Very Norwegian and not Jewish, she seemed inured at the quiet slights that reminded her of her outsider status.  Both she and her husband had the additional burden of caring for a daughter whose confusion about self was resulting in functional inertia.  Drawn to her Jewish roots and raised to live a secular existence, she was becoming incapable of coping with the world at all.

Surprisingly, If I Forget raised a uniquely nagging question haunting the leftist sensibilities of some.  There’s a rage in Michael that in part stems from the direction the larger Jewish community took after the age of activism that started with Eugene Debs and ran through the civil rights era.  A time when the Jewish left was at the forefront of the union movement and the struggle for equal rights.  That fire igniting protests and demanding justice has largely been quelled by success; causing the term “red diaper babies” to age out of the lexicon. According to Michael, “Jews have become white people”.   Although spoken with anger, you can still hear the regret sitting at the declaration’s core. 

Families don’t always fall in just one of two camps as Tolstoy’s assertion implies.  The wide gray area between happy and unhappy is a landscape full of stories about families trying to keep themselves united.  If I Forget reminds you of the cost.

If I Forget

Victory Gardens Theater

2433 N. Lincoln Ave.

Chicago, IL   60614

www.victorygardens.org

773-871-3000

There was no master plan.  When the creators of the wildly successful musical Six came up with their concept to reintroduce the world to Henry the VIII’s many wives, their goal was simply to create a work that made women the centerpiece of the story and let them to flaunt their talent as if it were the Hope diamond. A rare opportunity in too many theatrical performances.  They had no idea that what they produced would take over the world.

Young and supremely gifted, Toby Marlow masterminded the concept and recruited fellow theater student Lucy Moss to work with him on the project.  Then he pitched it to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for a slot in their 2017 theater season.  Getting in was a monstrous win.  That one month run has now turned a year and a half and probably headed to Broadway (and Hollywood) where, by rights, it should be greeted with confetti raining from rooftops.

If there wasn’t such a transformative feel to the production, calling it a pop musical would suffice.  But Six is different.  It takes the cold facts of history and drapes them in gleaming lamé simply by making the stories of these exceptional women hyper-relatable to contemporary audiences.  It then builds the persona of each of the queens around that of a reigning diva of pop music culture. Adele and Sia provided the “queenspiration” for Jane Seymour while Katherine Howard’s template was modelled after Ariana Grande and Britney Spears. It’s this focus on pop divadom and its unerring devotion to the language of pop culture, the syntax of the street and the club idioms that turn the project into not only a pop musical, but pop theater. 

Watching and listening to Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss in interviews helps to understand how the musical works as well as it does.  Exploding with youth and talent, Six looks at what happened with Henry and his wives 400 years ago with baby fresh eyes.  The audience relearns who got divorced, beheaded and who survived while the queens engage in a raucous contest to see who endured the most mistreatment from H8.  It’s a game of one-upmanship that only women can pull off with such dazzling aplomb.  Plain ole fun rests at the core of a dynamic production that feels like jet powered thrill ride.

Backed by a live all girl band that can rock just as hard as any stadium tour, every sovereign comes packed with personality, brains and can throw RuPaul grade attitude.  Any audience is going to have a hard time deciding which of the six they relish more because there’s so much to like in all of them.

No doubt Catherine of Aragon, grandly played by Adrianna Hicks and modeled after Beyoncé and Shakira will be a top contender for a lot of people.  Glowing with spectacular presence and wielding confidence so fierce you’d naturally have to call it regal, she’s as funny as she is commanding.  But she’s far from the only one with those memorable traits.  Andrea Macasaet as Anne Boleyn can rightly claim flirting as one of her many interests and never lets with a wit as sweet as it is venomous    But for many, Brittney Mack’s Anne of Cleves, the “survivor”, should easily walk away as top queen.  Channeling hip hop friendly Nicki Minaj and Rhianna, Mack’s Anne doesn’t apologize for not being as pretty as her “profile picture”.  Rather than being cowed by 8, she ends up becoming renowned for the zest and relentlessness of her palatial throw downs.

Each of the six tells her story in song, most of it bouncing in a rhythm that’s tight and swinging.  And each one of them deliver lustrous sound.  Unlike that other musical that went on to global fame and fortune for reinterpreting history through music, Six is a fast efficient 90 minutes long and leaves theatergoers so light with joy they might as well levitate.

With all the success the musical has already enjoyed, co-writer Moss was asked what she most looks forward to for the play in the future.  “I can’t wait to see a school production”, she said with a big grin.  Now that would be extra.   

Six

Chicago Shakespeare Theatre

Runs through August 4

Navy Pier

800 E. Grand

Chicago, IL  60611

www.chicagoshakespeare.com

The human soul may have its own physiology.  How else do you explain two people experiencing the same hardships and responding to them completely differently.  One may succumb to the pressures of emotional or physical privation and either retreat from life or allow cynicism to lead them down a path of self-harm.  The weight of the same difficulties may make the other even more resistant to defeat and fight with even greater ardor to succeed.  Refugee busboys become restaurant titans and musically inclined street urchins become entertainment legends.  In David Cale’s case, a refusal to live the expected life set him off on a journey of self-discovery leading to self-actualization and fame.  His one-man show playing at the Goodman Theater through October 21^st is an emotionally scenic and unsparing drive through his life.  An autobiographical explanation for living life fully.

We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time is an oddly constructed vehicle to carry this message of transcendence.  Like so much of the British writer and performer’s work, there are recurring themes that link back to his childhood in the little English industrial town of Luton where no body ever leaves. You either worked in the making of cars or the production of hats and then you died.

Cale doesn’t attack the core of his narrative head on but chooses to surround it with elaborately detailed biographical sketches of the people who make up his family.  It takes a while to understand that his ultimate focus is on the older of the two sons who has an endearing love for and interest in birds.  And Liza Minnelli.  He not only analyzed himself by re-entering his skin of decades ago, he also inhabits that of his mother and father and becomes them as they fall in love, lose the love they have for one another and embark on loudly unhappy lives together.  When one takes the life of the other, Cale’s treatment of the aftermath is stunning for its honesty and for the toughness of its candor.  A gifted storyteller, his impersonations of others take on an eerie reality.  This was especially true during the sequence exploring his father’s culpability in his mother’s death.  Its poignancy enhanced the otherness quality of Cale’s persona.

Beautifully accompanied by five musicians, the performer often uses song to add dimension and another layer of texture to the emotions and dramas he’s portraying on stage. With the song, The Feral Child, he encapsulated the essence of the dystopian odyssey that was once his life.

We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time

September 15 – October 21, 2018

Goodman Theatre

170 N. Dearborn

Chicago, IL  60601

312-443-3800

www.goodmantheatre.org