Playwright: Andrew Thorp. At: Public House Theatre, 3914 N. Clark Street. Tickets: 1-800-650-6449; www.publichousetheatre.com; $15. Runs through: Sept. 27 ( Sundays only )
The theater venue that long housed Live Bait Theatre, and later the Artistic Home, has been the Public House Theatre for several years now, acquiring a cabaret license to allow drink service during performances of varied sketch comedy shows. Perhaps this formula is more appropriate for a Wrigleyville venue than the more traditional theater offerings of the former occupants.
The company's newest show ( running in rep with several others ) is The History of Alcohol in Chicago: A Drinker's Guide, offering several history-based vignettes that link Chicago and alcohol. Mixed with the scenes are several audience-interactive drinking games. It's a clever idea but it suffers from pedestrian execution, as written and directed by Andrew Thorp. It doesn't dig deeply enough into its incredibly rich subject matter or create well-etched sketch characters. It also seemed, at the first performance, woefully under-rehearsed. For example, there's a scene about Prohibition and Al Capone—as one might expect—with Capone portrayed in superficial style as a cigar-chomping, gun-wielding thug. Isn't there something more imaginative the Public House folks might have done?
The show runs just 55 minutes, which barely gives viewers time to finish one drink, let alone order a second. The number of sketches is minimal introducing us to 1850s Chicago mayor Levi Boone ( first to impose a Sunday liquor ban ), temperance leader and suffragette Frances Willard, tavern owner and powerful politico Michael "Hinky-Dink" Kenna and a few others. But the brief sketches never spell out the intense link between saloons and politics ( in the years before female suffrage ), or gangsters and politics ( Capone and 1920s Chicago mayor William Hale Thompson, for example ) nor even mention the game-changing Women's Christian Temperance Union of which Willard was president. The show ignores, for example, beer shipments from Milwaukee to Chicago immediately after the Great Chicago Fire, hooch-smuggling from Canada and anything post-Prohibition. It does mention that Chicago once was a beer brewing center ( several of the long-defunct breweries still stand ) and then focuses on an obscure brewing institute in a sketch in which the characters are not well-defined.
It also introduces the turn-of-the-last-century First Ward Ball hosted annually by Kenna and his ally "Bathhouse" John Coughlin, but doesn't mention that it was infamous for drag attendees. There's little connective tissue and so much that is, uh, untapped.
The program lists seven performers but there only were five onstage and they never identified themselves, so it's impossible to comment on them. Frances Willard was played by an actor in drag, and he had a fine sense of comic timing and improvisatory skills as he handled most of the audience-interactive sequences. Less is more may be a good rule for architecture, but it doesn't work for this show.
