Magic Hour (and 17 Seconds)

The Zabrecky Hour

The Zabrecky Hour, playing through Halloween at the Rhapsody Theatre (the whilom Morse Theatre) is an enjoyable evening of mildly macabre magic and comedy by the protean writer and performer Rob Zabrecky.

Zabrecky has an interesting stage presence.  He’s got the lean and hungry look of a highway drifter with perhaps a few unsolved homicides under his too-tight belt, combined with the piercing intelligence of a vulpine T.S. Eliot sort who has eschewed poetry for necromancy.  

Zabrecky plays with this Hitchcockian persona by pretending to be sinister while, in actuality, he tells silly jokes in a deadpan style — “when I see a balloon floating in the sky, I know there’s a child nearby… (long pause) …learning about disappointment” — and engages the audience in clever feats of mentalism.  A favorite moment for me:  He brought two audience members onto the stage, positioned them far apart from each other, and tickled the nose of one with a feather.  He then asked the other audience member what he felt.  Answer:  “My nose was itching.”

He also mocks his own feats of mentalism and prestidigitation: “If you are stupid, the next part will fool you.”  Well, it fooled me, so…  And he offers calamitous life advice to the audience too, advising them to dwell on the past and brood about the future:  “Spend every waking moment avoiding the present.” 

Zabrecky excels at bringing the audience into the show.  He performs one very impressive trick in which he displays a deck of cards featuring the images of Harry Houdini and his wife Bess.  After mixing up the cards, you might assume that the feat consists of him being able to discern from their back sides (I mean the cards, not the nether parts) the Harry ones from the Bess ones, but no:  Random members of the audience do the guessing, and get it right 100% of the time.  They are made to feel, by some dark Zabrecky art, a sort of “intuition” about which card is which.  I kind of, sort of, figured out how this trick was done, but it was so much fun in the doing that it really didn’t matter.

Zabrecky seems to have zeroed in on the close connection between comedy and magic:  Both practices involve creating anticipation for something we know very well is coming — a punch line or a big reveal — building suspense as the moment approaches, and then delivering what we are expecting but with an unexpected twist that causes us to catch our breath, and laugh, and applaud, with a combination of pleasure and relief.  He’s skilled at both disciplines, and also is a musician (he was the frontman for the angular and staccato 90s indie group Possum Dixon, and a Beck collaborator), an author of a memoir, an actor — guest-starring on, you guessed it, Criminal Minds — and, of all things, an auctioneer.  

He does a spot of dancing too — in a style that is most aptly described, for better or for worse, as sui generis. 

The Zabrecky Hour — actually closer to 90 minutes, and there’s also a “17-second intermission” — is a great date show, since there’s plenty of fun audience participation.  The evening’s enjoyment is enhanced by the surroundings; the lovingly restored Rhapsody Theatre is a comfortable and intimate venue with excellent acoustics and sight lines, and bar service with appetizers and desserts.  The theatre is just off of Lake Shore Drive and the Morse El stop; it’s a much-needed pick-me-up for the Rogers Park neighborhood, and a valuable addition to Chicago’s cultural scene.  I’d never even heard of this under-publicized new theatre until I received this reviewing assignment; like magic, it just appeared. 

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Michael Antman

Presented September 28 through October 31 at Rhapsody Theater, 1328 W. Morse Avenue.

Tickets are available at rhapsodytheater.com.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found at www.theatreinchicago.com