WHERE THE DEAL IS ART
Much like New York City and London, Chicago is a bright beacon for culture enthusiasts
There are few better ways to kick off a vacation than with a night of fast, frantic laughter.
At Chicago’s Second City Theater, the 60-year-old comedic institution where everyone from Stephen Colbert and Tina Fey to Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray cut their teeth, we giggled, snickered and cracked up last month at skit after skit that featured a new generation of comics.
The hilarity was non-stop at the high-energy revue Grinning From Fear to Fear, which debuted last spring and is on an open run.
Funniest and smartest were the gags in a surreal game show that featured an insomniac tormented by his overactive brain. But manic impressions of a dog and cat getting acquainted, a surprise party that went terribly wrong and a song-and-tap-dance routine that lauded anti-depression were close runners-up.
Were it not for the jet lag afflicting some of my fellow travellers, we might have stayed for a third, entirely improvised set.
So ended the first of four nights dedicated to enjoying Chicago’s vibrant theatre scene.
The incandescent fame of Broadway in New York or London’s West End may be brighter, but Chicago is home to more than 250 theatres large and small, staging productions for five million people each year.
It’s telling that more people have seen the blockbuster musical Hamilton in Chicago than anywhere else. Debuting in September 2016, the beloved Tony winner will be seen by 2.6 million people — roughly the population of Chicago itself — when it ends its run early next year.
While the City of Chicago and the League of Chicago Theatres designated 2019 as the Year of Chicago Theatre, marked with special events, financial grants and marketing, it’s impossible to imagine that theatre-lovers would be let down come 2020.
Indeed, Feb. 13 to 23 next year has already been set aside as Chicago Theatre Week, when tickets discounted to $30 or less will admit audiences to more than 100 productions, from Emma at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to Madama Butterfly at the Lyric Opera of Chicago to Sophisticated Ladies at the Porchlight Music Theatre to The Mousetrap at Court Theatre.
Before some of the theatre evenings, cultured afternoon attractions beckoned.
At the world-class Art Institute of Chicago beside Millennium Park, stunning collections of impressionist, post-impressionist and pop paintings reward art lovers. Andy Warhol’s famed images of Marilyn Monroe provided a thrill, and it was humbling to be up close to the museum’s most popular and well-known painting, Georges Seurat’s huge pointillist masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
Among the exhibitions at the Field Museum, a collection of art objects, tools and even weaponry from China dating as far back as 10,000 years depict the evolution of that country. But the museum’s big crowd-pleaser is SUE, its fossilized T. rex and star attraction of its hall of dinosaurs.
At the Shedd Aquarium, there are more than 32,000 fish, from the Great Lakes, Amazon, Caribbean and beyond. But our favourite might have been the five-metre bronze fish statue outside the aquarium, which spits water and even delivers a snappy monologue, voiced by no less than Second City alumnus Steve Carell.
Downtown, Chicago’s vaunted skyscrapers can be enjoyed from above and below.
A visit to Skydeck Chicago, which opened in 1974 on the 103rd floor of what is now the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower), allows visitors to peer in every direction from the observation deck of what was the world’s tallest building for more than 20 years. In the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the hooky-playing high schoolers famously visited the tower (as well as the Art Institute of Chicago).
The Skydeck attracts more than one million visitors a year, with the most daring among them spending a minute or so on “the Ledge” — a set of clear glass boxes that extend out more than a metre from the building’s west wall. Some brave people, we were told, visit the Ledge seeking to overcome their fear of heights.
And yet, the skyscrapers are even more compelling from below, enjoyed from the comfort of one of Chicago’s architectural boat tours that takes visitors along the Chicago River. The Chicago Architecture Center’s river cruise that we took was top-notch and enhanced by a thoroughly knowledgeable guide.
Except for the boat tour, all of these daytime activities were covered by tickets from our Chicago CITYPASS booklets, which allowed for heavily discounted admissions because the attractions were bundled together.
But sightseeing aside, the plays were the thing.
In addition to visiting Second City, we saw the scrappy and thought-provoking play The Great Leap, a minimalist but imaginative and entertaining production that improbably connected basketball, the immigrant experience, Sino-u.s. relations and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and yet was rooted in U.S. playwright Lauren Yee’s family history.
We saw Yee’s play, which runs through Oct. 20, at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, an artist-run theatre in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighbourhood whose ensemble over the last 45 years has included such actors as Gary Sinise, Joan Allen and John Malkovich.
At the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, the multiacre landmark filled with diverse attractions, we saw a dynamite production of The King’s Speech, the play spun off from the 2010 Oscar-winning movie of the same name. That play, which also runs through Oct. 20 and stars British leading men known for their respective roles in Downton Abbey and The Tudors, was staged at the Yard at Chicago Shakespeare, an innovative, two-year-old space that the Chicago Tribune called “the greatest new theater in the world.”
On our last day in Chicago, we were among the throng that caught the matinee performance of Hamilton, which was as fantastic as all its hype would suggest. It will close at the CIBC Theatre, one of five historic Broadway in Chicago venues in the downtown on Jan. 5 next year.
The collection of talent, focus, humour and emotion on stage as Lin-manuel Miranda’s marvellous musical was brought to life was simply staggering.
We left the CIBC Theatre feeling completely transported, not simply because we were in Chicago but because it seemed as if theatregoing could not get any better. Peter Hum visited Chicago as a guest of Choose Chicago and CITYPASS.
More information: choosechicago.com citypass.com/chicago