Score: Philip LaZebnik; Book: Kingsley Day and LaZebnik. At: City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave. Tickets: 773-293-3682 or www.citylit.org; $30. Runs through: June 24
Chicago history buffs appear to be the target audience for State Street, a world-premiere musical comedy by Philip LaZebnik and Kingsley Day. But historians journeying to City Lit Theater to see State Street probably aren’t going to be that impressed, even though the bulk of the characters are based upon significant and notorious 19th-century Chicagoans.
State Street is set in 1871, the year of the Great Chicago Fire. But rather than focus on the drama and individual stories from that disaster (as Lookingglass Theatre did earlier this season with The Great Fire), LaZebnik and Day appear more interested in creating a world for famous Chicagoans to sing and cavort about the stage as if they were in a sketch-comedy revue.
Hence, we get Chicago business titans like Marshall Field, Potter Palmer, Cyrus McCormick and Samuel Nickerson singing together as a barber-shop quartet. Crosby Opera House proprietor Uranus H. Crosby (Matthew Keffer) is presented as a huckster con artist in the vein of The Music Man’s Harold Hill, while crooked gamblers Cap Hyman (Clay Sanderson) and George Trussell (Chase McCurdy) always greet each other with an unfunny pistol shoot-out gag.
The creators of State Street take great delight in cramming in as many Chicago historical figures as possible, ranging from scandal-mongering Chicago Times editor Wilbur Storey (Matt Rockwood) to the brothel madam Annie Stafford (Patti Roeder). Thus, State Street becomes overloaded with characters severely lacking in much dramatic conflict or development.
Day and LaZebnik do present a fictional opera-loving and moralistic grown orphan character named Jennie Comstock (Diane Mair) to guide us through the milieu of Chicago’s high-society matrons and lowlife bar habitués, but she’s treated more as a silly framing device than a person the audience should care about. That’s despite ambitious bellhop and future hotel magnate John B. Drake’s (Matt Edmonds) off-again, on-again romantic pursuit of Jennie. This lightweight romantic plot device feels cribbed from Sandy Wilson’s The Boyfriend.
State Street receives a choppy staging by Second City veteran Sheldon Patinkin, but he’s saddled with pieced-together and derivative material that revels more in recasting its historical research in a comical light rather than serving a coherent and involving story. The large cast also seem to be stylistically undone by State Street, with only Annie Passanisi (and sometimes Ed Rutherford) finding an appropriate exaggerated and comic performance style to appropriately mesh with the material.
One can easily see the ambition of State Street, and City Lit bursts at its seams to present it all in its intimate space at Edgewater Presbyterian Church. But ultimately, State Street fails at trying to refashion Chicago history as rollicking musical comedy.