Playwright: Neil Giuntoli
At: Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston
Contact: 773/539-7838, www.hizzonertheplay.com; www.propthtr.com; www.ticketweb.com; $25
Runs through: Open run
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
Some shows just go up before they should. Case in point: Prop Thtr's Hizzoner, a production doomed opening night by subpar video projections, botched sound cues, clunky blackouts and almost enough dead air to turn the Windy City into a black hole.
That's a shame. Richard J. Daley—love him as the Great White Savior of the working class or hate him as the standard-bearer for corruption, racism and white male arrogance in Chicago—is a character rife with dramatic possibilities.
But in playwright Neil Giuntoli's riff on the man who could go to Mass in the morning and give a 'shoot to kill' order in the evening, Daley all but vanishes in a sea of poor production values and pacing as snappy as continental drift.
For me, the production passed the point of no return opening night just after a burst of crowd noise suddenly erupted into a scene without crowds. It was then, during a brief, awkward silence after the miscue and before the dialogue picked up again, that somebody back by the soundboard hissed a very audible 'shit!'
Maybe the free Jell-O shots handed out in the lobby opening night weren't such a good idea after all.
Hizzoner focuses on Daley's years in office from the mid-1960s through 1968, when his police-state handling of the assassination of Martin Luther King and the protestors at the Democratic National Convention left Chicago with scars and divisions that resound today.
Many of the scenes—most of which take place in Daley's office—are punctuated by video projections courtesy of the We're So Screwed Films. We were. The projections were so blurry opening night that you could barely tell a shot of the stockyards from a shot of rioters at the DNC. And there were plenty of things that, well, you couldn't tell what the heck they were.
There were also several commercials early 1960s that seem to have been used to cue audience into the time, ( there's a lot of awkward jumping between 1976, when Daley died, and the 1960s ) . But showing squint-o-vision promos for QT tanning lotion and hair dye in their fuzzy entirety only added to the show's sluggish feel.
That feel is probably thanks to director Stefan Brun, who seems to have instructed his actors to count to five between lines.
As Daley, Giuntoli has a single, strong note: Portraying the enraged Daley blasting Mike Royko ( 'Sewage flows out of him like a river' ) or turning heart-attack red over how 'they' ( Chicago's 'bad Negroes' ) are destroying his city.
The rest of the man? He's a stone-faced bore, displaying none of the charisma that let him run the city like a Gaelic chieftain.