I walked into the Second City’s newest musical parody a typical left-of-center kind of guy. But judging by how much I thoroughly relished its total obliteration of Limbaugh and his right-wing cronies, I walked out of the theater beaming the bluest shade of blue. Rush Limbaugh! The Musical is at times offensive, cheap and one-sided—not unlike Limbaugh himself. In other words, it does what doey-eyed liberals (and moderate conservatives) have feared to do for decades, fills its arsenal with slanderous vitriol and aims it straight back at the conservative machine. Except that it’s far smarter and funnier than anything the right could ever throw our way (thank God entertainers are on our side!).

The story begins in the early sixties with a young Rush pedaling his mediocre talents as a DJ at a church sock hop. Even his musical choices reflect his blooming conservatism. “Screw those commie, faggy Beatles and give me some Pat Boone!” It’s here that he cozies up to Reverend Rightwing, a Darth Vader–like demagogue who convinces Rush to pledge allegiance to Pat Robertson, Ronald Reagan and Old Country Buffet with sly one-liners like, “Hating the people God hates is a great way to share his eternal love.” He also comes face to face with dirty hippies Barney Frank and Hillary Clinton, before their own meteoric rises to fame. In one of the shows most enduring gags, a young Frank can’t help but turn every sentence he utters into a metaphor for gay sex. Read more »

Midnight shows are perfectly slotted to become cult phenomenons (After all, how many underground sensations happen at lunchtime?). If given the chance, iO’s latest late night talk show endeavor, El Show with Alex Moffat which is directed by Clyde Christopher, could become just that. As Nancy Franklin pointed out in a discussion in this week’s issue of the New Yorker regarding the Leno vs. O’Brien flap, NBC pulled the plug on O’Brien way too soon. Sure it may have been a ratings clunker in comparison to Letterman, but remember how poorly Leno was performing until July 10, 1995 when he called out Hugh Grant on his sex scandal by uttering those four famous words, “What were you thinking?” The comparison of course is that El Show is just a few exhilarating gags away from success.

El Show vaunts a mixture of live music, variety, stand-up, improv, sketch and interview. Last Friday’s show featured a sit-down with Cook County Social Club’s very funny Brendan Jennings (who recently joined the Second City e.t.c. cast) as well as improvising musical duo Kate and Mike, currently in the middle of a run at Donny’s Skybox. It began with with a short sketch, a parody of the film Groundhog Day in which host Alex Moffat and crew are doomed to ask the question, will the show be renewed for a second season (a timely one given that its run is slated to end on February 19).

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30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan will appear at the Improv in Schaumburg this weekend, just not when we expected. The comic has canceled his Friday appearances, but will add a show to both Saturday and Sunday. Morgan will appear perform Saturday at 7, 9:15 and 11:15pm and again on Sunday at and 9:15. Friday ticket holders may contact the Improv at (847) 240-2001.

Firefighters are saying a fire has rendered the building that housed Blu 47 “a total loss.” They’re not kidding. In Bronzeville, restaurants of Blu 47’s caliber are rare, and the loss strikes a serious blow to the neighborhood’s food scene.

With any luck, Blu 47 will reappear elsewhere. (Understandably, the owners have so far not answered our calls). But until then, everybody (including 312 Dining Diva) is wondering: Where will Bronzeville eat now?

Three places come to mind:

Chicago’s Home of Chicken and Waffles: So maybe it’s a rip-off of Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. Who cares? It’s still chicken and waffles.

Pearl’s Place: My personal-favorite soul food joint for collard greens.

Zaleski & Horvath Market Cafe: Artisanal sandwiches and a pretty damn good oatmeal cookie. It doesn’t replace Blu 47, but it will keep you full until Blu 47 returns.

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. Photo by Sascha Vaughn.

Classical ballet lends itself to snobbery. Seduces it, even. Asks snobbery to come share a divan with it and dish about who’s put on a little too much weight or didn’t go to the best school. At its heart, though, it’s an art form that paints every individual, from whatever circumstances, as a vessel of elegance. Sure, queens and princes are stock characters of the form, but many of the classical canon’s richest roles—Swanilda, Giselle, Colas, Basilio—are farmers, peasants and barbers.

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, based in New York, may be a bunch of drag queens in pointe shoes hawking sight gags and stumbling here and there, but when it comes to the spirit of ballet, it embodies it more clearly than a lot of the big-ticket companies I watch wander lost in a hall of mirrors. On a behemoth program at the Harris Theater Wednesday night (Trock was billed to play four pieces and added two more), it brought a satirical angle to Petipa, Cunningham, Bournonville and Balanchine, telling you more about who those choreographers really were than you might get in a year of freshman dance history.  Read more »

Throw out your blackberry! Tear down your Sports Illustrated calendars! The Second City introduces its new 2010 calendars just in time for, uh, late January? Yep, just yesterday the Second City added to its website new Men of the Second City calendars featuring all your favorite Second City dudes. The calendar benefits the alumni fund and judging by the pic below, tongues are planted firmly in cheeks. Come to think of it, hold on to that Sports Illustrated calendar.

It’s a pleasant surprise (and about as common as spotting a four-leaf clover) when a full weekend of comedy yields nothing but rave-worthy programming. Such was the luck I had at week two of Sketchfest, which blew me away.

First up was Tim & Micah: CONTINUE. In the past I’ve applauded these guys for their precision timing, but now I’m just plain convinced they’re fraternal twins. Tim and Micah’s bizarre and brainy comedy plays like a cuckoo sketch show hatched by two MIT chums determined to create their own screwball version of Jacques Tati’s Play Time. In one sketch, a couple of fumbling and overly polite souls inadvertently discover they’re father and son. And in the show’s most meta moment, two newscasters offer commentary on the very show we’re watching thus far. These rubbery-faced and lanky goofballs never lack for physicality, as evidenced by the second sketch of the evening, a feat of human symmetry that’s matched with a spectacular punchline I won’t give away here. Instead, let me point you to the show itself coming late winter to Donny’s Skybox.

Last Call Cleveland was more traditional but no less knee-slapping in its approach. A mixture of original sketch and taped segments (we love the Cleveland tourism videos), these guys offered up a melange of weird and wonderful scenes and characters like Chet Huntley, the overly accommodating ’80s bad guy, and a parenting seminar for dads in which the fathers in question compulsively engage in baby shaking. But it was the last sketch of the night that won me over, a musical finale set to Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out For a Hero, in which the four members dig through the audience in search of an American hero. Read more »

Thrift stores are fascinating places. Mainly because they’re our dumping grounds for pop- culture detritus, of-their-time must-haves that ultimately proved completely disposable. Peruse enough Brown Elephant, Goodwill and Salvation Army stores, and you’re bound to pick up on patterns: shelves of unwanted copies of The Celestine Prophecy. Crates of Don’t Say No, Billy Squier’s 1981 album featuring “The Stroke.” And, when it comes to VHS thrift-store cinema, there’s arguably no more ubiquitous film than Jerry Maguire. The 1996 Tom Cruise–Renée Zellweger–Cuba Gooding Jr. romcom—equal parts quote-o-rama (take your pick) and sap fest (the mere presence of creepy-cute Jonathan Lipnicki)—grabbed America by the heart and would not not let go. (Remember when you thought no one would ever stop saying “Show me the money!”?)

Then seemingly, like a bunch of amnesiacs, these people woke up and couldn’t remember why they liked Jerry Maguire to the extent that they needed to own the video. Or maybe they all just donated their VHS copies and bought the DVD. In any case, local found-footage video blog Everything Is Terrible! is honoring this inescapable secondhand phenomenon by stockpiling copies of Jerry Maguire. “Our goal is to have the largest private collection of Jerry Maguire VHS tapes in the history of mankind and we need your help,” read a recent post on the site. “Don’t let another orphaned Jerry sit forgotten in a cold, dark bargain bin.” Copies can be sent to the following address:

Everything is Terrible!
P.O. Box 47924
Chicago, IL 60647 USA

Aemilia & Ed

After the madness of opening weekend at Sketchfest, I’m finally mulling over my notes from the first few days. A few thoughts:

Local troupe Salsation was at Sketchfest Saturday night peddling its latest show, The Brown Supremacy, and it’s a mixed bag. The company is at its best when firing sharp political barbs. A recurring sketch about the confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, for example, offers plenty of pointed jabs at racist senators and the lunacy surrounding the “wise Latina” remark. Likewise, a very funny sketch likens an undocumented Superman to the immigration dilemma. Sorry, Superman! I also enjoyed a sketch in which Willy Wonka moves his factory to Mexico, thanks in part to NAFTA. But a vampire sketch tries too hard to mine the Twilight zeitgeist, and a recurring sketch featuring an overbearing mother missed as often as it hit. For Latin-influenced sketch, I much more enjoyed the meticulous, character-driven scene work from Dominizuelan, a local, two-person sketch group consisting of Wendy Mateo and Lorena Diaz that played on Sunday. Even when indulging in broad stereotypes (drunken Lincoln Park Trixies out on the town, a tranny prostitute working the corner of Clark and Belmont), Mateo and Diaz managed to show affection and empathy for their characters, while simultaneously poking fun at them.

Two groups—Asheville, North Carolina–based Feral Chihuahuas and local jokers Robot Vs. Dinosaur—did a fine job shelling out the ridiculous. The former impressed me with its wig-donning, glitter-throwing theatrics.

In one sketch, the troupe pays homage to the awkwardness of acquaintanceship with a fully choreographed dance number inspired by ’70s variety shows. I also loved a video clip in which a member of the Blue Man Group gets a blow job, a sketch that peddled hip-hop for the deaf and an imagining of what it would’ve been like if Facebook had been around during medieval times. On the other hand, a choreographed tribute to pop divas (in this case “Cherdonna”) was just plain boring. But I’ll be keeping my eye on these guys.

Meanwhile, Robot vs. Dinosaur’s full-length show, Mrs. Gruber’s Ding Dong School (which debuted last year), offered a twisted take on children’s programming (think Romper Room from hell). Using puppets, arts and crafts and events like story time to tell some pretty sick tales, the show was at its best when poking sly fun at the unrealistic crap we teach children. In one scene, the Reality Fairy sings, “While there’s unlimited dreams just for you, there’s limited money to make them come true.” And in another, a couple of sprightly puppets struggle to understand a guy dying of bone cancer (even going so far as to eat out of his bedpan). But a couple of sketches were clunkers. I didn’t care for the wife-hating Professor Smart (too hammy), or an oddball sketch about a homeless man, but the show finale, in which Mrs. Gruber is revealed to be a fraud, was a gut-buster.

If you wandered through the record section

of an antique store, you might dust off an old LP called Aemilia & Ed’s One Man Show. That’s the conceit from sketch duo Aemilia and Ed, who ape classic couples like May and Nichols and Burns and Allen. Set entirely in 1960, the show had a great attention to detail (like a subtle reference to the days when the Oriental Theater was a first-run movie house), even during times when it wasn’t particularly funny. I thoroughly enjoyed having the Cuban Missile Crisis explained by Carmen Miranda and a recurring sketch that imagined romantic couplings between famous authors. Like the decade proceeding it, some of the sketches were a bit stuffy, but overall, Ed & Aemilia offered a welcome Sketchfest diversion.

The defining buzz at the Theatre Building in Lakeview Thursday night was a reminder that as a sketch comedy town, Chicago rules. I eased into the opening night of the Ninth Annual Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival last night by taking in a quartet of local groups.

First up was a duo called Fried Green Durbins. Their show was like watching sketch comedy on training wheels. There were hints at goodness, but these guys overacted up the wazoo and too often hit the audience over the head with their comedy. In one scene, two roommates struggle to record an answering machine message amidst arguing neighbors (does anybody use an answering machine anymore?). When one neighbor kills the other he yells out, “Oh shit, are you really dead?” as if we aren’t smart enough to figure that out. In another scene, a parent-teacher conference reveals the father to be a vampire. This device is used to take aim at the Twilight phenomenon (a good idea in theory), although the Sketchfest crowd probably skews a bit too old for the blood-sucking tween series to catch all the insider references. I certainly didn’t. I’ll be curious to see how this group fares in a year or two.

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