Downtown Chicago St. Patrick’s Day Parade, 2018

I fell asleep to light rain and occasional thunder on Friday night. A comforting sound. During the hours when I was dreaming odd dreams — damned odd, but it all made perfect sense at the time — the rain must have picked up its pace, since large puddles had formed in our back yard by Saturday morning, as usually happens with inches of rain. But not quite this much.

Two years ago we went into the city in mid-March and found ourselves near the Downtown Chicago St. Patrick’s Day Parade. We were going to visit the Art Institute that day, and the parade was passing next to the museum, on S. Columbus Dr.

We walked over to see it, but the crowd was so thick that we never really got a close look. Often enough, the view looked something like this.Downtown Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade 2018The crowd was festive, with many dressed for the occasion.Downtown Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade 2018Downtown Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade 2018

Downtown Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade 2018

We stayed for a little while and saw what we could.Downtown Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade 2018

Downtown Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade 2018

The solid-waste industry was well represented.Downtown Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade 2018

Downtown Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade 2018

Some participants were off to the side. I suppose they were finished and watching the rest of the parade.

Downtown Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade 2018

Crowds thronged in front of the Art Institute and elsewhere.
Downtown Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade 2018Downtown Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade 2018No social distancing in evidence. It would have been weird if there had been. No wonder the parade was cancelled this year.

Yakov

Though not particularly warm today, we took a mile or so walk beginning at about 5:30 this afternoon. Just an afternoon stroll. There’s still traffic on our suburb roads, of course, but in volume it was more like a Sunday afternoon than a weekday rush hour.

One more item from the early 2000s. I didn’t realize it until today, but everything this week has been from that period, except for Sunday. An unconscious choice, probably, signifying — like all that sound and fury — nothing.

The first time we ever passed through Branson, in 2001 as a short detour on the way to Dallas, I picked up a Yakov ad pamphlet. Probably at the restaurant we ate lunch, which was the only thing we did in town.

Why? We weren’t planning to see the show. I think I’d heard of him, maybe even seen him on television by chance, such as his beer commercial, though I didn’t watch much TV during his heyday.

I’m sure I picked up the pamphlet because of the billboards we’d seen between Springfield, Mo., and Branson, which amused me. There were a lot of them advertising his Branson show, which he did from 1993 to 2015. The billboards looked a lot like the pamphlet, if I remember right. A big Yakov face promising a wacky Soviet — that is, Russian — comedian.

For the record, Yakov Naumovich Pokhis — his stage name taken from the vodka, apparently — was actually from the Ukraine. He’s still touring, or presumably was until recently, and probably will be again sometime.

Not This Year

We’d planned to see The Pirates of Penzance this year in Hyde Park on Saturday, by the Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Co. We’ve been seeing their shows most years for a while now, since Yeoman of the Guard in 2015.

As you’d expect, the show was cancelled. As recently as a week ago, I didn’t think that was going to happen, but the country is going into no-frills mode faster than expected. In an age besotted with video and other impersonal entertainment, it’s interesting how many diversions still involve numbers of human beings coming together at the same place at the same time.

A pretty minor inconvenience for us, though I expect the cast and crew were upset all their work came to nothing. Much more than diversions have been disrupted. Ann’s school is out this week, ahead of its scheduled spring break next week, so that makes two weeks off — at least. After that, “remote learning.” Maybe. Down at UIUC, no more physical classes for Lilly till further notice. I’ll bet there will be no graduation ceremony in May, which would be too bad.

For me, I’m going to work at home. Wait, I’ve been doing that for almost 15 years now. In the early days, I remember telling people on the phone, usually someone I needed to interview, that they might hear noise in the background without warning. The noise of a young child. I can’t remember the last time I warned anyone about that. These days, occasionally the dog makes noise, but even that’s a rarity, since her idea of a good time is lounging quietly on a flat surface.

So I’m amused by the current flood of articles about working from home — it’s great, it’s terrible, How To Do It, What Equipment Do I Need? Sheesh. Ours is a time of overthinking. My expert opinion? It’s OK. Mostly tolerable. Helps not to mind hours and hours by yourself, which seems to unnerve some people. Can’t say I feel isolated, since my job — and the adverb is correct — is literally to find out things from other people, which often enough means talking to them. I suppose not everyone could say that about their at-home jobs, however.

The best part of working at home is the commute. The office as a work environment was invented by smug morning people. A one-or-so-minute commute (there’s always a bathroom stop first) is a way to ameliorate the tyranny of office hours. Working times are roughly the same, but there’s no back and forth.

In lieu of The Pirates of Penzance on stage, here are some YouTube clips of everyone’s favorite scene. Mine anyway. Impersonal entertainment will have to do for a while.

Recorded at the Stratford Festival in 1985. Many of its shows were cancelled just Friday.

From the 1983 movie version.

At the English National Opera more recently, in 2015.

The tune with other words. Couldn’t very well leave this out.

Tom Lehrer is still with us, last I heard. Next month he will be what I hope is a hale 92 years old.

Falun Dafa by USPS

Winter hasn’t been very bitter so far. Yet. All of last week’s light snow has melted. But the polar vortex hammer could still drop. Hard.

Back to posting on January 21. I take holidays where I can get ’em, even in the stony bleak mid-winter.

The following is an example of a small item, a throw-away item — literally, though I’m going to put it in the blue recycle bin — with a long story trailing behind it. Today in the mail I received a high-quality pamphlet, 16 glossy pages, rich bright colors, advertising the Shen Yun dance show in the Chicago area this spring. It’s merely the latest example of advertising created by what must be a deep marketing budget for that show.

Mostly I’ve been ignoring the marketing. Maybe it’s the oversell. “A Life-Changing Experience,” the cover proclaims. Gee, I hope not. Inside: “A Gift from the Heavens,” “Watch 5,000 years unfold before your eyes,” “the Divine Origin of a Glorious Civilization.” Sure, whatever you say.

It’s probably a corker of a show, if you like that kind of spectacle, though I doubt — as the pamphlet implies visually — that any of the dancers can actually fly. Then again, I suppose a fantasy counterpart culture of imperial China has some appeal. Just not for me. Well, I might go if I didn’t have to pay.

More interesting to me is text box on the last page. It says, in bold letters: CANNOT BE SEEN IN COMMUNIST CHINA.

“Traditional Chinese culture — with its deep spiritual roots and profound worldview — was displaced by communism in China. While Shen Yun cannot perform in mainland China today, we are reviving this precious heritage and sharing it with the world.”

Hm. I looked a little further. The return address for the pamphlet, for it did come in the mail, cites the Mid-USA Falun Dafa Association as the sender.

Ah. Falun Dafa (Gong), whom the Chinese government hates so much. Seems like the show, then, is a way for the religion, persecuted as it is in China, to poke the Chinese government in the eye. That’s a sentiment we can all get behind, but I’m still not paying to see the show.

Richard III

In our lifetime, only five years ago, Richard III got a spiffy tomb at Leicester Cathedral, after centuries in an anonymous grave not far away. That came to mind when Ann and I went into the city on Saturday to see a reading of Richard III at the Newberry Library.

It was the same setup as last year, when we saw Titus Andronicus: actors reading their parts, holding scripts, while moving around one of the library’s large rooms, in front of and to the side of the audience. Outside wind blew and rain fell, just above freezing, so that might account for the slightly smaller crowd than last year, but even so a lot of people came out for the tale of murder, intrigue, more murder, double-dealing and a violent denouement. Everything you need in an Elizabethan history play.

Very talented actors, so the lack of any set or costumes didn’t matter. Christopher Prentice, who played Richard, did the demented villain to just the right pitch, and moved himself in ways that didn’t exactly suggest a hunchback, but weren’t quite normal either, and strangely menacing.

One more thing. Here’s the mission statement of the Richard III Society, which was instrumental in finding the king’s bones in our time: “In the belief that many features of the traditional accounts of the character and career of Richard III are neither supported by sufficient evidence nor reasonably tenable, the Society aims to promote, in every possible way, research into the life and times of Richard III, and to secure a reassessment of the material relating to this period, and of the role of this monarch in English history.”

I’m all for historical inquiry, but even so — Richard III gets to be a villain. The literary Richard III is more robust than any historic portrait of him is ever likely to be.

The Hot Sardines

Usually one visit to the city per weekend is enough. On Saturday, the trip to see The Merchant of Venice involved a drive to a part of town where parking is easy and an El stop is nearby, so we could ride the rest of the way to a neighborhood with far more difficult parking.

Not long ago, I found out that the Hot Sardines were going to be in town the same weekend — but on Sunday — so I decided that I wanted to see them, too. At least driving all the way was an option, since the band was playing at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Lincoln Square. We parked a half a block away.

The only reason I know about the Hot Sardines is YouTube. To be more exact, YouTube algorithms that suggest one thing and another. When it comes to music, that’s almost always very little outside a narrow range, but occasionally something unusual gets through. Probably listening to electroswing a few years ago made the bots suggest the Hot Sardines’ to-the-ceiling-lively version of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.”

They’re just as lively in person. Hot is fitting. Hot jazz and lots of it, in a roughly two-hour show with no intermission and two encores, with frontwoman Elizabeth Bougerol and bandleader Evan Palazzo each hopping their jive — peppy vocals and animated piano, respectively. Other band members jammed on trombone, trumpet, bass, tenor saxophone, clarinet and drums, sometimes including conga. Often enough each of them had solos in which to shine, and shine they did, every jack jazzman of them.

There was also a fellow on stage with no instruments. Sitting in a chair in his fancy duds and fine hat. (Of course, they all wore fancy duds — Bougerol in gold lame and Palazzo in powder blue.) As soon as the first number started, his feet started tapping, and you noticed the taps on his shoes. He was the band tap dancer. Did he ever move, sometimes just sitting down, but often on his feet, moving all over the stage, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap with arms and legs moving every which way, adding his distinctive rhythm to the band. Who thought of adding him? (A.C. Lincoln by name.) What an inspiration.

Some tunes were more familiar, some less, all good. Among others, the Hot Sardines played “Some of These Days,” a Sophie Tucker number, “Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home,” “Lulu’s Back in Town” and “Caravan” (take note of A.C. Lincoln doing his thing in that last video). “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” was the first encore.

As we entered the theater, I noticed a few small signs here and there explaining that the show was partly sponsored by the European Union. Odd, I thought, then forgot about it.

About mid-way through, Bougerol, who had a pretty good between-song patter, mentioned it. “Seems like one of our sponsors is the European Union,” she said, making a gesture that told us, How strange.

“Must be because I’m a French national,” she said.

Listening to her speak or sing in perfectly idiomatic and unaccented English, you’d have no clue. Apparently she was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, but spent time in Ivory Coast and Canada while growing up — as well she might, since her grandfather was a Canadian jazzman named Bobby Gimby, who wrote a song I might have sung as a six-year-old had I lived in Ontario instead of Texas.

Bougerol did four or five of songs in French — just as jazzy as anything in English — but the only one whose title I know was “I Wanna Be Like You,” or whatever the French equivalent is. She said she knew it from watching the French version of Disney’s Jungle Book as a child.

The band lineup is a little different in this video, but the tune and lyrics are the same.

She also told the amusing story of how the band formed. Namely, the beginning of the musical collaboration between her and Palazzo, who met by answering the same Craigslist ad for a jazz jam. They discovered they both knew a relatively obscure Fats Waller song, “Feet’s Too Big,” and played it at the jam.

Then they played it for us in the audience.

Now that’s a fun song. Fats Waller’s recording of it is here.

The Merchant of Venice

On Saturday Ann and I went to the North Side of Chicago to the Pride Arts Center to see The Merchant of Venice as performed on a small stage by Invictus Theatre Co., which did a first-rate job.

Besides enjoying the steady stream Shakespearean turns of phrase — as with any of his works — by seeing that play, we were also dipping our toes into the unending argument about how to interpret the play and especially Shylock.

The modern urge is to want Shylock to be sympathetic, and he is sometimes, such as in his righteous anger. Yet sometimes he’s not, as when he bemoans not his lost daughter, but the money she took with her. I doubt that Elizabethan audiences concerned themselves much with understanding Shylock, however nuanced Shakespeare made him. They just were looking to be entertained, and probably booing and hissing at Shylock was fully part of that.

But we bring centuries of further history with us when we see the play. Invictus referenced this explicitly by setting the action in Fascist Italy, with costumes specific to that period — including the stylish dresses of upper-class women of the time, but also blackshirts. The setting added an extra layer of menace to the situation Shylock found himself in, making him easier to sympathize with.

Also emphasized: Shylock as an outsider. Joseph Beal, who did a fine turn with the part, played it with a Yiddish accent, which might not have meant anything to Venetians of 1600 or even 1938, but which marks him apart from the rest of the cast to our ears.

There are comic elements in the play, of course, some of which actually were funny, especially when Portia’s suitors mulled which box to pick to win her hand. A young actor named Jack Morsovillo briefly stole the show as the comic Arragon in that scene. Though it wasn’t all that funny, the play also featured the comic conceit of two men unable to recognize their wives simply because they were pretending to be men.

In this production, a silent addition marked the end of the play. Jessica, the daughter who abandoned Shylock, emerges on one side of the stage, looking miserably torn about the decision she’s made. Shylock emerges on the other side of the stage, looking at her. Are they going to reconcile? Quarrel? Before anything is said, two blackshirts come from behind Shylock, grab him and take him away.

Quite an ending, even if appended for a modern audience, for a play that’s technically a comedy. So the production was squarely in this new(ish) tradition — since the 19th century, I believe — of making Shylock more victim than monster, but hardly all victim. Well done, Invictus.

Colonial Williamsburg

Things to bring to Colonial Williamsburg: money, walking shoes, water (especially in summer) and — I can’t stress this enough — some historical imagination. Not everyone has much. I understand that. Still, if you can’t bring much historical imagination to your visit, best to go somewhere else.

A look at a few of the recent “terrible” reviews of Colonial Williamsburg on TripAdvisor illustrates the point (all sic).

Mrpetsaver: This place is like that fort or museum with old buildings common in some communities, but on a larger scale.

My kids got bored very quickly and so did I. Most of the staff are great and professional dressed up in costumes, but aren’t acting. Instead, they discuss how the original inhabitants did their different jobs etc.

Dewpayne: It has some very interesting sites but there so far away you get bored it’s more about the shops and selling water I wouldn’t recommend it.

zebra051819: This historical site was a huge disappointment and I would not recommend spending your time here. There must be more informative sites where one could gain an appreciation of Civil War history.

Mrpetsaver is right, though. Colonial Williamsburg is a larger version of an open-air museum. It is an open-air museum. One on a grand scale, the likes of which we’d only experienced — sort of — at Greenfield Village.

Colonial Williamsburg shouldn’t be confused with Williamsburg, Virginia, which is a town of around 14,500 on the lower reaches of the James River. As a 21st-century American town, it has the usual amenities, such as honky-tonks (maybe), Dairy Queens and 7-11s, where you can buy cherry pies, candy bars and chocolate-chip cookies.

Colonial Williamsburg, on the other hand, occupies 173 acres and includes 88 original buildings and more than 50 major reconstructions. All of Colonial Williamsburg is within modern Williamsburg, but not all of modern Williamsburg involves Colonial Williamsburg. A fair bit of it doesn’t, according to maps.

A hundred years ago, Williamsburg was a small college town with a history, namely as the second capital of Virginia when it was a prosperous tobacco colony. No doubt the story of how Colonial Williamsburg came to be in the early 20th century is fairly complicated, with a number of major players, but I’m going to oversimplify by saying that Money wanted it to happen, as persuaded by Preservationism.

Money in the form of Rockefeller scion John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had the deep pockets necessary to start the purchase and restoration of the historic sites, and Preservationism in the form of W.A.R. Goodwin (1869–1939), rector of Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, who felt alarmed that the 20th century was eating away at the area’s historic structures.

Colonial Williamsburg is a odd hybrid of past and present, but also of museum and neighborhood. The foundation that runs the museum doesn’t play it up — and some of the disappointed TripAdvisor reviews note it ruefully — but it turns out that you don’t need a ticket to wander along the streets of Colonial Williamsburg.

Cars aren’t allowed on the streets during museum hours, but visitors are perfectly free to park a few blocks away and walk around. That’s because the town of Williamsburg still owns the streets and sidewalks, making them public thoroughfares.

Also — another thing the foundation doesn’t dwell on — people live in Colonial Williamsburg. “There are dozens of people — families, couples, college students — who live in some of the historic homes of Colonial Williamsburg,” says Local Scoop. “Many of the homes are original colonial-era buildings; others were rebuilt based on historical accounts to look like the homes they once were.

“It’s not a perk available to everyone. To live in the Historic Area, one has to work at Colonial Williamsburg or be an employee at the College of William & Mary. In all, there are 75 houses rented through the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation…”

I found this out when I was there, and pretty soon I started noticing that a fair number of the houses had small signs denoting them as private residences. I also noticed a few people doing neighborhood sorts of things, like jogging or walking their dogs, as opposed to tourist sorts of things.

So why buy a ticket? That’s so you can see the interiors of the many buildings flying the Grand Union flag. They mark the open-air museum’s buildings.
Colonial WilliamsburgAlso, your ticket gets you into some Colonial Williamsburg events, many of which involve reenactors. So we got tickets. At $45 each, and no student discount (grumble), that’s more than Henry Ford/Greenfield, in the same league as some theater tickets and some theme parks, and less than other theme parks (whose mascot is a Mouse).

At that price, I was determined to wear out my feet. So we did, spending October 14 from late morning to late afternoon at Colonial Williamsburg. At the end, I felt like I’d gotten my money’s worth. I’m a sucker for open-air museums, for one thing, but more than that, it is a special place with a lot to see and think about, if you add a dash of historical imagination.

You walk from the visitor center along a wooded path until you come to the historic buildings. The first one of any heft is the Governor’s Palace.
Colonial WilliamsburgColonial WilliamsburgColonial WilliamsburgMaybe no grand thing back in England, but for colonial Virginia, a worthy residence for the gov. What you see now is a reconstruction from plans and, according to the guide on the interior tour that we joined, archaeological investigation of the materials left when the building collapsed in a fire in 1781, not long after Gov. Jefferson had decamped to Richmond.

When it burned, the structure was being used as a hospital for men wounded at the Battle of Yorktown. All of them but one escaped the fire, the guide said. I told Ann we should listen for that unfortunate fellow’s ghost. She told me to shush.

From there we wandered down the Palace Green to Duke of Gloucester St., pretty much the main street of the historic area. The view from the other end of the Palace Green.
Colonial WilliamsburgNearby is the Bruton Parish Church. It isn’t one of the Colonial Williamsburg buildings, but people go in as if it were. We did. A couple of parishioners were on hand to tell visitors about the church.
Bruton Parish ChurchBruton Parish ChurchThe building dates from the 1710s, but according to this history, it didn’t look much like the original by the mid-1800s, after various alterations and modernizations. Like Colonial Williamsburg, the church was restored to its 18th-century appearance only in the early 20th century.

The church’s graveyard was fenced in, but you could get a pretty good look at it anyway.
Bruton Parish ChurchBruton Parish ChurchSome of the stones were close to the church itself.
Bruton Parish ChurchThe stone of Letitia Tyler Semple, one of President Tyler’s many children. A handful of stones were inside, flush with the floor of the church, as you see in old English churches. W.A.R. Goodwin has one of those.

We spent the rest of the day looking at and entering various structures on or near Duke of Glouchester St., such as the Geddy Foundry, the Courthouse, the Market Square, the Magazine, the Printing Office, the Silversmith, Bakery, Apothecary, and Raleigh Tavern, where we saw two reenactors: one playing Marquis de Lafayette and other James Armistead Lafayette, who spied for the Patriots at the Marquis’ request, and, after some inexcusable delays by the state of Virginia, finally won his freedom for his service.

Duke of Glouchester St.
Duke of Glouchester St.The Magazine and its arms.
Duke of Glouchester St.Duke of Glouchester St. MagazineThe Courthouse and nearby stocks. No rotten tomatoes on hand for tossing.
Duke of Glouchester St. Courthouse

Duke of Glouchester St. Courthouse stocks

Botetourt St.
Colonial Williamsburg The reconstructed Capitol was the second-to-last place we visited, taking a late-afternoon tour. Nicely done, I thought, though the authenticity of the redesign has been questioned.
Colonial Williamsburg CapitolColonial Williamsburg CapitolThe last place was Charlton’s Coffeehouse, where a foundation employee (“costumed interpreter”) in 18th-century garb showed us around and served visitors either coffee, tea or hot chocolate. Most of us tried the chocolate, as Ann and I did. Colonial hot chocolate included a variety of flavors not usually associated with modern hot chocolate. If I remember right, almonds, cinnamon and nutmeg in our case, but no rum. Our time is decidedly more abstemious than Colonial days when it comes to alcohol. Tasty anyway.

Some people expect the costumed interpreters to be actors (see above). To varying degrees they were in character, but mostly their job was to explain what went on in a particular building, and in the places like the foundry and silversmith and printing office, demonstrate some of the 18th-century work techniques. I had no complaints.

The fellow in the foundry turned out pewterware before our eyes and the young woman who showed us around the coffeeshop was informative and entertaining, telling us for instance the story of the tax collector (under the Stamp Act, I believe) who was greeted at the coffeehouse by a committee (mob) of citizens who suggested he find other work for himself. Wisely, he did.

There are restaurants at Colonial Williamsburg in some of the “taverns,” but I didn’t want to spend time at a sit-down restaurant when there were other things to see. So we subsisted on snacks during the visit, which are available in Colonial-themed small stores here and there on the grounds.

The 21st-century snacks were good.

The Comedy of Errors

Went to Aurora, Illinois, on Saturday evening for a performance of The Comedy of Errors, the only one in the suburbs this year by Chicago Shakespeare in the Parks.
The play’s the trope-namer, though I expect the idea is much older even than Plautus, and in fact Errors owes a lot to Plautus. It’s a trope big enough to include comic high points like Fawlty Towers (also a comedy of manners) as well as such excrescences as Three’s Company.

Free Shakespeare in the 21st century packs ’em, I’m glad to report.
The Chicago Shakespeare Company, full of talented young actors, handled the material well, including lots of slapstick and wordplay. I suspect some of the more obscure jokes were removed and other points smoothed out, though I’m not an expert on the play. No matter. It was funny.

The show began when the sun was still hot, so Shakespeare-shaped hand fans were available. By the time Errors ended, it was dusk and pretty comfortable there at RiverEdge Park.

Acrobatics and juggling punctuated the play, which I figure is true to the spirit of the earliest performances. And to the staging by the Flying Karamazov Brothers, for that matter. The goal was (is) to entertain, after all. So it does, in competent hands, 400+ years later.

The biggest laughs came when one of the Dromios described being pursued by the other Dromio’s girlfriend, a kitchen wench.

Dromio: Marry, sir, she’s the kitchen wench, and all grease, and I know not what use to put her to but to make a lamp of her and run from her by her own light. If she lives till doomsday, she’ll burn a week longer than the whole world.

Antipholus: What complexion is she of?

Dromio: Swart like my shoe, but her face nothing like so clean kept. For why? She sweats. A man may go overshoes in the grime of it.

Antipholus: That’s a fault that water will mend.

Dromio: No, sir, ’tis in grain; Noah’s flood could not do it.

Antipholus: What’s her name?

Dromio: Nell, sir, but her name and three quarters — that’s an ell and three quarters — will not measure her from hip to hip.

Antipholus: Then she bears some breadth?

Dromio: No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip. She is spherical, like a globe. I could find out countries in her.

Othello

Not long ago we went to the Factory Theater in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood to see a staging of Othello by the Babes With Blades Theatre Company. I suggested we go because I’d never seen that play staged. Also, Ann read it not too long ago for school — wrote some papers and so on, the usual sort of things you do in high school.

The Factory is a small venue, about 70 seats on three sides of a simple stage. As far as I could tell, we saw a completely traditional staging of Othello, complete with well-done period costumes and actual swords and knifes, except for one thing. Babes With Babes is an entirely female theater company.

But not just a female company. A company of players with some specific talents.

According to the BWB web site: “Our initial showcase, in 1997, was conceived by founder Dawn ‘Sam’ Alden as a two-day presentation of fights and monologues, intended to bring to the Chicago art world an awareness of the large number of stage combat-trained women it had in its midst whose talent was being consistently underutilized.”

While not an overly stabby play (unlike Titus Andronicus) Othello certainly has its share of swords and knives as a part of the action, and the troupe handled them well.

More importantly, they handled their parts well. The novelty of women in the parts always played by men — Deveon Bromby as Othello and Kathrynne Wolf as Iago, to name the principals — lasted for a few minutes. Then it wore off and you were simply watching a solid production of Othello.

Wolf was particularly good as Iago. If you’re not going to have a spot-on Iago, a character that believably exults in the art of deceit, you might as well not do the play, since everything turns on that performance.

Much has been made of the muddled motives of Iago, or perhaps his motivelessness, but I’m not sure that matters. If it’s perversely captivating to watch his glee at destroying the Moor, I’d say the actor has done his, and in this case, her job.