A Top-Notch “Topdog”

On my very first business trip to New York City, in my early 20s, I was fortunate enough to be the victim of a classic three-card monte sidewalk card-shuffling scam that cost me 20 bucks and a much-anticipated stop at Grey’s Papaya for lunch.  Why “fortunate”?  Because it taught me a few very valuable lessons: Con artists have already figured out all of the possible angles, and not one of those angles ever includes you, the mark; the hand is always faster than the eye; greed and overconfidence (the source of the prefix “con” in the phrase “con artist”) will cause you to lose, at the very least, a hot dog and papaya juice lunch and, at the very most, your life savings; and the guy in the crowd who just “won” 100 bucks before your turn is the “shill,” a friend, or a cousin, or a brother, of the card thrower himself.

A PRETENDER NOT A CONTENDER AT THE LYRIC

Whether you are, like me, a boxing fan or unalterably opposed to that primal sport for its bloody brutality, if you’re planning to see Champion, the Lyric Opera’s “opera in jazz,” it’s essential to first view a certain grainy black-and-white video available on YouTube.  It depicts one of the absolute low points in the history of the sport, Emile Griffith’s fatal beating of Cuban boxer Benny Paret in their third fight; the actual footage of Paret’s slow collapse under a barrage of 29 unanswered punches from Griffith is an important corrective to the awkwardly aestheticized and distanced version of that event that is intended to be the dramatic turning point of Champion.

Second to None

Oh, the Places You’ll Glow! 

Is there anything more delightful to do in Chicago as the days turn dark and dreary then to experience the world-class sketch comedy of Second City e.t.c.’s new show, Oh, the Places You’ll Glow?  Disregard the dopey title (the show features glow sticks and brilliantly colored fiber optics, but a hundred other titles would’ve sounded more appealing and less juvenile) and focus instead on a troupe of comic performers and writers at the pinnacle of heart and hilarity.  

LANDSLIDE VICTORY

A key moment in Steppenwolf’s triumphant new Chicago premiere production, POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Great Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, features a buxom young White House aide named Stephanie (Caroline Neff) clad only in her underwear, high on THC-enriched Tums, drenched in blood, and racing around the office of the First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS) with an enormous, translucent, lime-green inflatable flotation donut around her ankles.  

A Limited Vista 

¡Bernarda! 

The new production by Teatro Vista at Steppenwolf’s intimate 1700 Theatre, ¡Bernarda!, is a play by Emilio Williams based on the classic Andalusian drama by Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, La Casa de Bernarda Alba.  

Un-Poe-etic

Into That Darkness: The Corrosive Hours of Edgar Poe

Into That Darkness: The Corrosive Hours of Edgar Poe is a labor of love one-man passion project written and enacted by Jacob Mundell that brings Edgar Allan Poe to life through dramatizations of his letters and book reviews, as well as a few of his poems.

Neighboring on Disturbed 

Right Now.

For those of you who remember their dreams, you’ve probably had some unsettling dream experiences where you’re talking to, say, your sister, and suddenly, without warning or volition, you realize that she has actually been, all along, an old boss or your high school gym teacher.  

A Man of Parts 

Frankenstein 

The Joffrey Ballet adaptation of Mary Shelley’s landmark novel Frankenstein, now in its Chicago premiere at the Lyric Opera, should not come as a surprise to anyone, given that this ballet received its world premiere at London’s Royal Opera House back in 2016.  Still, it’s a little startling to contemplate the notion that anyone could have ever concocted such an esoteric production and managed to pull it off successfully.  Even after seeing it, I was still left wondering whether it ever even did make sense or could make sense to produce a ballet about the mad ambition of an inadvertent monster maker.