`Twas the week before the big lawyers` Christmas show, and all through the rehearsal hall at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers there was the usual chaos. Actors flubbing lines. Dancers misstepping. Someone
brushing against Mia Farrow, or a reasonable facsimile, as she tried to reach a microphone.
”I am God,” shouted the show`s director, E. Leonard Rubin, a lawyer with the firm of Willian, Brinks, Olds, Hofer, Gilson & Lione, as he recited an 11th commandment. ”Do not bump into people as you are exiting the stage.”
The Chicago Bar Association`s annual ”Christmas Spirits” extravaganza, this year subtitled ”Beauty and the Brief,” opens Tuesday night for a six-day run at the Sheraton Chicago. It will be the 69th in an unbroken, if occasionally raggedy, line of parodies stretching back to 1924, when members of the bar began celebrating the season by mounting a drag show.
Rehearsed and staged in a two-week December blitz, such tuneful epics as
”Dial M for Merger,” ”Dictum Tracy,” ”City of Angles” and ”Docket to Me,” have been thrown together, over the last three decades, by a small group, notably Rubin, Circuit Judge Julian J. Frazin and John E. Corkery, a professor at John Marshall Law School. Along with lawyer Phillip M. Citrin, now retired, they have acted for years as ”The Four Musketeers.”
For years, they have hung out together. Lunched every week. Spent six months out of each year swapping jokes and ideas. Toured the country with a bar show unit, doing mini-revues to cheer up other bar associations. Put framed pictures of each other on their pianos at home. Then, come December, they hole up in a hotel, while still practicing law by day, and, after a week of rehearsing a cast of a hundred or so, start a weeklong run. It`s no piece of cake.
”It`s hard enough to get two lawyers to agree. To get 106 lawyers to follow directions is virtually impossible,” moaned Rubin, a trademark and copyright specialist who once studied improvisational theater at Second City under the legendary teacher Viola Spolin.
”Lawyers are not, by nature, actors,” he said, during a break last week. ”They`re good at making themselves heard in courtrooms, but most of them have little sense of timing, timbre, projection or characterization. We have to school them in the theater arts. If they don`t follow instructions, we threaten to tell their clients that they have no sense of humor.”
”Those of us who came in the `60s thought that humor might be able to make some changes in society, working from inside the Establishment,”
recalled old-hand Citrin, referring to a time when many social institutions came under review and faced protest. Citrin`s favorite role was Wiley Nelson, a shady paving contractor singing ”On the Road Again.” But there was also, he recalled, a practical payoff for many cast members. The show was something of ”a legal meat market,” he said, the younger actors often making contacts with older talent searchers and later jumping to other law firms.
Late-breaking quips
This year`s show, its script constantly under revision with late-breaking quips, will have amusing things to say about courtroom TV, Britain`s royal family, the men`s movement, pollsters, Ross Perot, regional transportation and a variety of local concerns, including cost hold-downs at law offices. ”The heat is on at this firm,” moans one song, echoing the play ”Miss Saigon.”
There will be high jinks at the firm of Going, Going & Gone, suggestions for the site of a third airport, and Mary J. McNichols, head of the bar association`s entertainment committee, who does a good Queen Elizabeth. There also will be mention of Farrow vs. Allen, the sinking reputation of Christopher Columbus and the leaking of the Chicago River. That muddy matter will be addressed by Joel Daly, a WLS-TV anchor, professional country singer and lawyer, who will sing and yodel ”The Wabash Waterfall,” to the tune of
”Wabash Cannonball.” Sample lyrics:
So, listen to the splatter, the rumble and the roar
As the pumping sent a cascade through every open door.
LaSalle and Clark and Wacker, in buildings short and tall.
And the soggy scenes repeated with the Wabash waterfall.
Rather than prattle on with insider legal humor, the show`s writers try to stay with material that is generally accessible, though one year a new member of the script committee came up with what he thought was a humorous look at the Illinois Code of Civil Procedure. ”We didn`t use it,” Rubin recalled.
Tucked away in copious files kept by Judge Frazin are mementos of the show`s earliest days, when it was staged at the old bar association headquarters, at 160 N. LaSalle St. A group of male lawyers, aided and abetted by a lot of whiskey, got together, carpentered some comedy and appeared, in women`s clothing, doing high kicks. The set was a mock phone booth in which various characters had imaginary conversations with departed brethren, the
”Christmas Spirits.”
Austin lightens up
Some of the city`s big legal names pitched in to help, among them Edwin C. Austin, a raucous piano player. Far from being shocked, his partners at staid Sidley & Austin ”generally approved of some annual frivolity as an excellent morale-booster and a way of relieving the pressures of heavy work-loads,” according to an office history. Later, agreeing that all torts and no play made for dullness, a group of jurists joined in with an all-judge kazoo band.
Since then, the annual production has leaped from peak to peak, with only an occasional crash. (The worst: in 1975, when the stage slid forward, injuring 18 people, none seriously. Lawyer Fred Lane, on stage at the time, escaped harm and nimbly picked up two new clients among the hurting.)
But this year, the show faces a new challenge. In what Jimmy Durante might describe as ”a revoltin` development,” it is being leaned on to turn a major profit, of about $100,000.
Unlike the devil-may-care accounting of spectacles past, when each show laid out about as much as it took in, dazzling crowds with laser displays, Mississippi riverboats, ”Cats” costumes and other stage wonders, a Scrooge- like hand of accountability has fallen on the budget of ”Christmas Spirits.”
Not that there won`t be lots of magic this year. There`ll be a rousing finale, ”A Chicagoan`s Dream,” built around the trees, twinkly lights and store signs of North Michigan Avenue, a play on the show-stopping number
”American Dream” from, again, ”Miss Saigon.”
But there is also a sense that this is a year for trimming back, for ordering three robotic costumes instead of eight, for holding back on expensive props and for cutting a better deal on the meal.
”We`re not going back to the `20s, with two pianos and the phone booth,” says business manager Dean Trafelet, a Cook County Circuit Court judge who sits in the law division, ”but this year turned out to be a light show, in terms of what the creative people wanted for costumes and sets, and that`s what we wanted too.”
The budget will run about $500,000, with $242,000 for the show, about $160,000 for dinner for about 10,000 people, and the rest profit, well down from the $750,000 budgets of years past.
No time for gloom
”We want to have our cake-and eat it too,” noted bar association President Thomas Demetrio, a successful personal-injury attorney and partner in Corboy & Demetrio who oversaw the shifting of the show this year away from its longtime home, the Chicago Hilton and Towers, and into a better deal at the new Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers where, he said, ”I personally tasted four different entrees and arranged the presentation of the salad.”
Profit from ”Beauty and the Brief,” Demetrio said, will enable the bar association to hold off a dues increase next year and will help out its $8 million budget, under some strain since the 23,000-member association moved into the bottom half of a 16-story, $15 million building at 312 S. Plymouth Court in 1990.
But the point of the bar show is not to dwell on gloomy finances.
”It is a forum to entertain office workers, clients, family and friends in a congenial atmosphere,” Demetrio said, describing an annual ritual in which the legal community gathers together, at up to $85 a head, to schmooze, slap backs, swap small-talk and applaud colleagues who have survived a roller- coaster ride of rehearsal, stage blocking and what lawyer Cliff Berman once called the humiliating process of ”begging for a key change.”
Old-timers in the bar association remember days when the show was pasted together at what one called ”weekly three-martini outings.” Bar tabs were free for lawyers working on sketches, a perk that led, he said, to certain excesses. In 1971, after a lawsuit, women were allowed into the show. These days, starting each fall, a central committee meets one night a week in a wood-paneled boardroom atop bar association headquarters. Several couples in the group bring their children along for dinner, letting them crayon while the adults quip.
`Dream` finale
So, has the show changed? Has it softened? Have ”the bean counters”
taken over, as one veteran recently chided. Has ”Christmas Spirits” lost its spirit?
”No,” said Frazin, who is the kind of guy who, if the show were fading, would reach for sheet music to ”The Party`s Over,” look wistfully into the middle distance and riffle off some situationally-approp riate lyrics.
”But you don`t want to talk about budgets,” Frazin went on. ”You want to talk about the big Michigan Avenue finale,” referring to this year`s show- stopper, set on the Magnificent Mile, with chorus and non-lawyer professional orchestra, led by Chicago composer and arranger Larry Novak, belting out ”A Chicagoan`s Dream.”
Over the years, the bar show has offered a view of history, a wry compendium of the notables and events that caught the attention of Chicago. John Corkery, then a law student, recalls seeing his first show, ”Tenets Anyone,” in 1966, staged at the long-gone Edgewater Beach Hotel. One high point was a depiction of U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, recently remarried, singing ”Strangers in the Night.”
In 1969, during the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial, a bar-show skit based on ”Alice`s Adventures in Wonderland” lampooned the judicial style of U.S. District Judge Julius J. Hoffman, who presided over the case and who attended opening night. The skit drew the ire of a Tribune editorial. A revised version was later attacked by Chicago Today.
Several years later, a parody of Frank Sinatra`s ”My Way,” sung by a lawyer portraying Cardinal John Cody, the late Catholic archbishop of Chicago, was pummeled by WBBM news commentator John Madigan. One frequent target has been Richard Nixon, going back to 1963 when three Nixon impersonators appeared on a panel show, ”To Tell the Truth.”
Memories of them
Many veteran showgoers still remember the late Judge Albert J. LaPlante playing Pierre, the headwaiter at the Chez Paris, in ”Ex-Parte Girl” in 1953. Or lawyer Hugh Brodkey as conductor Daniel Barenboim, leading a Chicago audience in coughing and wheezing. Or such other longtime notables as Tamara Tanzillo, a lawyer for the University of Illinois in labor relations; Sonja Johnson, real estate tax lawyer with Madigan & Getzendanner; Audrey Holzer Rubin, a corporate attorney for a North Shore corporation who met her husband, ”Christmas Spirits” director E. Leonard Rubin, through the show; and criminal defense attorney James Montgomery, who was city corporation counsel under Mayor Harold Washington, was the first black in the show and is still one of its few black cast members.
”It`s a good way to meet a lot of other lawyers in a hurry,” says E. Leonard Rubin. ”It`s more intimate than a cocktail party or a continuing education seminar.”
The show also helps with professional skills. After a few on-stage outings, shy lawyers become extroverted. There is also a premium on quick-wittedness. Trafelet recalls a night six years ago when a 12-volt battery that powered a prop was discovered missing 41 minutes before it was due to be used. Lawyers were dispatched to scout the neighborhood. One came back with a battery from a show staffer`s car parked in the Hilton garage. Stagehands installed it with 30 seconds to spare.
For others, the show is a big break.
”For two weeks a year, I can forget being a lawyer, a wife and a mother and pretend to be a Broadway star,” says trial lawyer Joyce Staat Lewis of Clausen, Miller, Gorman, Caffrey & Witous. This year, Lewis will play Mary Ann McMorrow, the first woman justice on the Illinois Supreme Court, and will sing-what else?-”Tomorrow.”
———-
Tickets for ”Christmas Spirits” are available to the public through the Chicago Bar Association, 312-554-2000.
