TOMFOOLERY
Different Drummer Music Theatre at Urbus Orbis
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
His theme was upwardly mobile America’s effort to stifle or hide its baser instincts–its lust for sex and violence, its capacity for intolerance and inhumanity–and his darts were aimed at the squares and the hipsters alike. After deflating the conservatives’ Norman Rockwell image of small-town American innocence in such diabolical ditties as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Old Dope Peddler,” and “My Home Town,” he would take aim at liberal idealism. “We Will All Go Together When We Go” mocked the antinuke movement by embracing worldwide nuclear holocaust as the ultimate uniting of humankind; “National Brotherhood Week” exposed the underlying hypocrisy of pluralistic platitudes; “Smut” knocked down the civil-libertarian free-speech defense of pornography and instead reveled in porn’s inherent dirty-mindedness and repressiveness. Interestingly, when Lehrer faded from public view in the mid-1960s, it seemed a retreat in the face of society’s increasing permissiveness regarding speech and behavior; without repression, Lehrer seemed to lose his motivation.
The current production, at the hands of the itinerant Different Drummer Music Theatre, is a stripped-down version of the original two-act show; it packs into one very brisk hour 18 songs plus a smattering of spoken commentary, mostly adapted from Lehrer’s own concert patter.
THAT JAZZ
Different Drummer Music Theatre at the Roxy
