Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot-off-the-presses.
Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . . .
Chris Jones. Bigger, Brighter, Louder: 150 Years of Chicago Theater as Seen by Chicago Tribune Critics (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013). 357pp.
17th Edition.
I’ve been to Chicago only a few times, usually on academic business, and, regrettably, rarely had time for theatergoing. On one memorable trip, in 2009, I was taken to see a play in a storefront theater, one of many in Chicago, by a former student, the wonderful Tara Mallen, who later became artistic director and frequent leading lady of yet another such intimate local playhouse, the Rivendell Theater Ensemble. (Tara, her husband, and daughter co-star in the new, well-received, theater-slanted movie Ghostlight.) The play was Our Lady of the Underpass, by Tanya Saracho, produced by the 16th Street Theatre and Teatro Visto; it is a work of gritty realism set in a rough and tumble Chicago world. Such gutsy, dynamic theater is a local trademark.
I now know a little more about the Chicago theater scene and its interesting history, thanks to a nine-year-old book by Chris Jones, long-serving chief critic of the venerable Chicago Tribune. The book, Bigger, Brighter, Louder, is one of a very small number that attempt to tell the history of Chicago’s theater. Unlike A Theatre of Our Own (2004), by former Tribune critic Richard Christiansen, which I plan to get to, it isn’t a narrative history but rather a collection of 101 Tribune items, mostly reviews, but with a few thematic essays. Nor, like Pete Blatchford’s Wicked, Immoral, Utterly Bad!, the next subject of this column, is it particularly well-illustrated. It does, however, have an index, unlike Blatchford’s book.
Following a brief, anonymous, introduction to Chicago theater written in 1853, Jones explains the purport of Bigger, Brighter, Louder in terms of the relationship of Chicago’s theater to its journalistic coverage. Throughout, he’s at pains to discuss the contribution of the principal critics as much as he is to address what they were criticizing. Important insights arise from his take on such contributors as Percy Hammond, Cecil Smith, Claudia Cassidy, William Leonard, Linda Winer, and Richard Christiansen. Jones himself—he’s still a prolific critic—is represented by five reviews.
Most prominent is the extremely prolific Cassidy, who built a powerful reputation for her lacerating pans, but who also claims a place of honor for her support of emerging classics, like Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, whose famous 1944 premiere was in Chicago. After her radiant review put the play on the map, she never let down in her admiration for Williams’s writing over the following three decades. Williams thus occupies a lot of space in Jones’s book. Jones suggests that no other critic has equaled Cassidy’s acerbic putdowns, but anyone familiar with the late John Simon’s poison pen will realize—at least from the examples of Cassidy’s witty nastiness given here—that Simon’s toxicity remains in a class of its own.
No one else’s numbers come close to the 32 reviews by Cassidy reprinted here, treating such works as a miserable revival of Abie’s Irish Rose; a pan of All My Sons, by Arthur Miller, whose writing she never warmed to (Jones includes a “Miller Responds” rebuttal); Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, in its post-Broadway tour featuring Uta Hagen as Blanche in a brilliant performance; Gigi, with the exquisite Audrey Hepburn; a lousy Lysistrata on which the critic gleefully dumps; a superb staging of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night; and one of the most inherently Chicago plays, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, which Cassidy’s review helped climb the staircase of success.
The reviews range from an extremely detailed description of Joseph Jefferson III as Rip Van Winkle in 1868 to a sterling revival of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh starring Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy in 2012; like a number of other outstanding Chicago productions of recent years, it transferred to New York. Each item is followed by a valuable comment from Jones, providing pertinent information on the critic, star, playwright, play, or whatever else might be historically relevant, including Chicago’s rapid growth. Considering that the 101 articles were selected from the many thousands to which Jones had access in the Tribune’s morgue, each has something significant to add to the picture that slowly develops of Chicago’s theater scene over the years.
Still, Jones doesn’t provide an overarching essay of his own to place these disparate essays into perspective. Other than what one pieces together from the essays themselves and Jones’s commentaries, the big picture remains fuzzy. What emerges in the 20th century is the sense of a major metropolis that had come to take pride in its potentially snide designation as the Second City, although for much of the last century it was little more than a stopping place for touring Broadway shows whose producers often had such little respect for the toddling town’s showgoers that they frequently sent it shoddy goods, with second-rate companies and cheap production values. This led critics, like Cassidy, to write vitriolic attacks on such less-than-quality productions, which presumably thought the only way to please the city’s playgoers was by utilizing the three words Jones gives in his title, taken from a producer’s admonition to his actors.
We don’t learn much about how many first-class theaters served the city in the late 19th century, or how and when their numbers evolved in the 20th, the slack being picked up by minor, often amateur or semi professional activity. Hull House, Chicago’s famous settlement house founded by Jane Addams, had a flourishing amateur theater. Originally, the Goodman Theater, now a leading regional venue, was amateur, with occasional visiting professionals. The famed Chicago Little Theater, which Maurice Browne and Ellen Von Volkenburg opened in 1912, was similarly amateur.
Non-Chicagoans will have no sense of the theater’s geographical locations, including the relationship of those in a centralized place, like the Broadway-style ones in the Loop, to smaller ones spread through the city’s neighborhoods, hundreds of them in storefront spaces. It’s too bad Jones doesn’t offer maps showing the locations of the Loop and Off-Loop theaters, like the excellent ones in Blatchford’s book.
From the information given at the head of each review, we learn the names of the old-time theaters, like the Selwyn, the Studebaker, the Auditorium, the Blackstone, the Great Northern, the Harris, the Shubert, the Erlanger, and several others, but no sense of their physical relationship to one another, their appearances, or of when any left the scene or changed their names. It’s not that kind of book. We do, however, learn something about several important institutions that came into their own during the late 20th century with individual artistic personalities, like the Goodman, Organic, St. Nicholas, and Body Politic, Wisdom Bridge, Steppenwolf companies. Productions by a few such theaters, especially Steppenwolf, founded in 1974, dominate the later portions of the book, but many others—including the important Victory Gardens Theater—go unmentioned.
Organized chronologically, the material presents three late 19th-century productions, including Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 1890. Six essays deal with shows between 1902 and 1910, including The Wizard of Oz, with a piece on the horrendous Iroquois Theater fire of 1903, America’s worst such catastrophe, with over 600 deaths, thrown in. There are two pieces for the 1910s and three for the 1920s, among them coverage of Chicago, Maurine Watkins’s quintessential drama of Chicago crime in its pre-musical dramatic state. (Two days after I finished the book “Jeopardy” had a clue based on this play!) Seven reviews deal with the 1930s, among them such path breakers as Tobacco Road, Waiting for Lefty, Orson Welles’s Voodoo Macbeth, and Our Town.
There are 15 reviews and essays for the 1940s, the shows including Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Romeo and Juliet, a revival of Porgy and Bess, and Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story, not to mention the Miller and Williams plays cited earlier; 19 items cover the 1950s, among them South Pacific, The Rose Tattoo, The Children’s Hour, Waiting for Godot, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and others already mentioned. These are the years that saw Chicago blossom as America’s home for improvisational theater, with names like Paul Sills, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May making brief appearances, although we learn of their contributions more from Jones’s words than from contemporary reviews.
For the 1960s, we get seven essays, including a sharply panned Camelot and a ruthlessly naturalistic The Brig (in a local production, not by the Living Theater), with attention also paid to Edward Albee’s increasingly important presence. For the 1970s there are 19 items, featuring shows like Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s Grease, created for a tiny, Off-Loop company, Kingston Mines, but soon to be the first Chicago show to gain world-wide popularity. Chicago in the 70s also saw Williams’s troubled Outcry (a.k.a. The Two-Character Play), the sci-fi, comic strip-like Warp!, Chicagoan Studs Terkel’s Working, fellow Chicagoan David Mamet, with Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo, and The Woods, the touring version of Kander and Ebb’s musical version of Chicago, choreographed by local boy Bob Fosse, and the explosive appearance, in 1976, in an out-of-the-way high school basement, of the remarkable Steppenwolf Theater with two one-acts, John Guare’s “The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year” and Harold Pinter’s “The Dumb Waiter.”
The 1980s are examined in seven items, the shows including Sam Shepard’s True West (making a star of John Malkovich), In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison (making a star of William L. Peterson), Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Aidan Quinn in an exciting Hamlet, and Steppenwolf’s The Grapes of Wrath. For the 1990s, Jones provides Marvin’s Room, Wings, and, most memorably, Mary Zimmerman’s imaginative staging of Ovid’s Metamorphoses for the Lookingglass Theater, another gem mined from Chicago’s theatrical renaissance.
Eight powerhouse works represent the 2000s, including Mel Brooks’s blockbuster musical, The Producers, a reconceived, stripped-down Pacific Overtures, another Long Day’s Journey, Steppenwolf’s highly regarded August: Osage County, putting playwright Tracy Letts in the spotlight, and David Cromer’s innovative Our Town. The few years following are represented by two plays, Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris’s acclaimed take on the issues of A Raisin in the Sun, and The Iceman Cometh.
There are 101 good reasons to appreciate Bigger, Brighter, Louder. The reviews, while not all on the same qualitative level, are often insightful and entertaining, although many are rather brief, omitting the kinds of detail usually found in a New York Times coverage of a major work. Even playwrights’ names are sometimes overlooked, and directors and designers don’t always make the cut. We get a good idea of Chicago’s reliance on road shows before the native product began to sprout in small venues, but it becomes increasingly apparent just how significant that native product would become, with world-class playwrights, directors, and actors claiming Chicago as the soil that gave them life.
Second City may sound like a patronizing appellation, but Chicago’s theater artists have turned it into one of which to be proud. Given the creative renaissance it has experienced in the last half century or so, however, there’s no question it will continue to supply the First City with the best in evocative, provocative new American theater for many years to come.
Up Next: Pete Blatchford. Wicked, Immoral, Utterly Bad! An Illustrated History of Chicago Theatre 1837-1974.
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.