Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot-off-the-presses.
Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . . .
Pete Blatchford. Wicked, Immoral, Utterly Bad! An Illustrated History of Chicago Theatre 1837-1974 (n.p.: Pete Blatchford, 2016). 339pp.
18th Edition
Followers of this column probably have noticed a recent emphasis on Chicago-related books. These have included a biography of Elaine May, an autobiography by Ben Hecht, and, last week, Chris Jones’s edited collection of reviews and essays covering the city’s theater from the mid-19th to the early 21st century. As noted in that last column, I’ve been to the so-called Second City only a handful of times, always for academic conferences, with time for only a bare minimum of theatergoing. However, the more I read about it, the more I want to find out about Chicago’s colorfully vibrant theatrical past.
The title of this week’s book, Wicked, Immoral, Utterly Bad!, comes from an old quote describing Chicago’s reputation in its rough and ready early days. Before it was even ten years old it was “the gaming center of the Middle West.” After another decade it was the nation’s “wickedest city.” The subtitle says it’s “An Illustrated History of Chicago Theatre 1837-1974”—its goal being to bring the city’s theatrical past to life with, hopefully, a satisfactory explanatory accompaniment. While there’s plenty to appreciate in author and Chicago actor Pete Blatchford’s effort, though, it falls short of expectations.
The attractive, thick, slightly oversized paperbound volume, with “design and layout” credited to Jennifer Sowinski, provides hundreds of images, a few in color, and many on facing pages that provide a few short paragraphs of commentary. Some subjects are dealt with swiftly, others in a bit more detail, but there’s a lot of white space that might have benefitted from more information. Many pages are devoted to little more than noteworthy, artfully laid-out quotes; but, often it appears some pages might have been more usefully employed. Do we really need a full quotation of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy just because the page faces photos of 19th-century stars Edwin and Junius Brutus Booth?
Blatchford’s selection combines both production photos with those of theater-related events, like the catastrophic Iroquois Theater Fire of 1903, in which over 600 people died. One wishes, however, that there were fewer pictures of artifacts like programs, advertisements, announcements, and multiple views of the same theater’s exterior, or Wolf’s Point (site of an early venue), and more of the shows and players themselves, especially from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
And while Hull-House, the settlement house founded in 1889 by Jane Addams, which had an influential theater history as a non-profit institution, gets its worthwhile due, too many photos of its nontheatrical community activities are shown. Elsewhere, several production pictures lack captions; two show an actress who is surely a young Elaine May. In another, spread across two pages, Bill Murray’s face, surrounded by less well-known ones, is buried in the spine. Among the most useful images are the well-designed maps showing clearly the locations of the Loop and major Off-Loop playhouses.
Essentially, this is a fast-moving highlight reel of Chicago’s theatrical past, which began, as in so many other American cities, in opposition to antitheatrical moralists. The focus is largely on Off-Loop activity, and the companies and artists who made significant breakthroughs outside the mainstream commercial mill. As a result, apart from the long-lived McVicker’s Theatre, which closed in 1985 in its fifth incarnation on the same site, the Loop theaters, so important a part of Chicago’s theater history—even if their output was largely for Broadway tryouts or tours—are essentially ignored.
The Broadway touring production of Hecht and MacArthur’s famous 1928 comedy about Chicago reporters, The Front Page, gets several pages of photos, but it’s practically the only Loop production so noticed; and details about it, even the theater and opening date, are omitted. And no attention is paid at all to such major offerings as Tennessee Williams’s 1944 The Glass Menagerie, even though that modern classic debuted in Chicago. Most egregiously, you’ll find not a word about Chicago’s own A Raisin the Sun.
Introductions, mostly skeletal, are provided for Maurice Browne and Ellen Von Volkenburg’s Chicago Little Theatre, the Goodman Theatre and its School of Drama, the Goodman Children’s Theatre, the Chicago Theatre Society, the Federal Theatre Project, the Playwrights Theatre Club, the Compass Players, Story Theatre, the Second City, the Organic Theatre, the Dream Theatre, the Body Politic, St. Nicholas Theatre, and the Candlelight Theatre (which kicked off the dinner theater movement).
Although the book stops at 1974, the year that Steppenwolf—Chicago’s most influential company—was founded, it chooses to conclude, oddly, with seven pages of photos devoted to their later work. Not a single word of identification is offered for any of the plays and actors pictured.
Important productions highlighted include several for the Federal Theatre Project (Theodore Ward’s controversial Black play Big White Fog, The Swing Mikado, and the Living Newspapers), The Connection, Grease, Warp!, and Bleacher Bums. We also meet, among others, such important theater folk as Chicago theater pioneers Harry Isherwood, John Blake Rice, and James McVicker, playwright Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, academic Thomas Wood Stevens, 19th-century stars Joseph Jefferson and Edwin Booth, playwrights Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, choreographer Katherine Dunham, children’s theater doyennes Winifred Ward and Charlotte Chorpenning, improvisational gurus Neva Wood, Viola Spolin, and Paul Sills, directors Robert Sickinger, David Gordon, and Rev. Jim Shiflett, and playwright David Mamet.
Blatchford could have used a better copy editor to catch his frequent misspellings: Dan Marbles for Marble, Jane Adams for Jane Addams (in the bibliography), navel for naval, Joe Mantenga for Joe Mantegna, and Ed Asnor for Ed Asner (the latter two several times each).
In Blatchford’s introduction, he notes how he “attempted to link the various periods showing the impact one movement had on another, or how one theatre or institution has been critical to the development of the next.” Had he achieved this goal, it would have made this catch-as-catch-can assortment of images and text more coherent. Instead, we get a potpourri of material that, while indubitably of interest, is inconsequential as a history of Chicago’s theater, illustrated or not. If there’s linking to be done, readers will have to do it for themselves.
Up Next: Peter Hay, Theatrical Anecdotes.
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.