Like the Chicago subculture it depicts, “Early and Often” is rough, rude, manipulative–and it delivers.
Written by the team of Barbara Wallace and Thomas R. Wolfe, this new high-speed, vastly entertaining comedy focuses on the big presidential election of 1960, when the issue in Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago was as much about getting rid of Republican State’s Atty. Benjamin Adamowski as it was about electing John F. Kennedy.
One of the field lieutenants in this free-for-all is Art Ruck (Marc Grapey), a hustling, college-educated pro whose efforts to get out the votes for the Daley machine are complicated by the fact his district’s Democratic candidate for state representative (whose motto is “He’ll Do What He Can”) has been found murdered by the mob.
Urged on by the amiable, evil Boss Flannery (Will Casey), helped by a crooked detective (Neil Friedman) and hindered by the incompetence of the boss’s numbskull, beer-guzzling relative Dennis (Dan Rivkin), Art finds a way of keeping the murder a secret.
But that’s only the start. Before long, Art must deal with his singer girlfriend Connie’s (Stephanie Childers) pregnancy, his intimacies with the dead man’s wife (Laura T. Fisher), Connie’s handsome, homosexual singing partner (Tim Kane), her meddling married sister (Hanna Dworkin), the sister’s bartender boyfriend (Danny McCarthy), a confused parish priest (Michael Loeffelholz), the Republican Party, the FBI and two young policemen (Brad Johnson and Jesse Weaver) who find, lose and then find again the dead man’s body.
Swept along by Karen Kessler’s crackling direction, the play convincingly and hilariously leaps from one absurdity to the next, underscoring its laughs with the dark business of racism, corruption and block-busting that in those days and in that milieu were absolutely politically correct.
Wallace and Wolfe, who also launched the TV series “Welcome to New York” this season, are not quite in the same league as Hecht and MacArthur in “The Front Page.” But their “Early and Often” has the same true Chicago grit, the same cynical and sentimental attitude toward the city’s craziness and energy.
The cast of 16 actors sails through the situations with breakneck speed and hellbent brio.
Grapey–sweating with romantic and moral anxiety–triumphantly leads the charge as the dynamic, desperate hero Art; but he is only one of several marvelous actors.
In a show full of scene stealers, for example, Fisher’s dead-on delivery of the great dialogue for her tough-as-nails politician’s widow comes close to stealing the show.
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“Early and Often”
When: Through Dec. 3
Where: Famous Door Theatre Co. at the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont Ave.
Phone: 773-327-5252
