Live! From the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue!

Live! From the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue! It's been a whirlwind of a weekend here in Chicago, the windy rainy city. The main reasons for the trip have been accomplished and now I'm sucking up the bandwidth at the spiffy new Apple Store on Michigan Avenue in their free Internet nook.

Friday night, I saw Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul at the Steppenwolf, a 3-1/2 hour journey to Afghanistan in Kushner's typically well-wrought, wordy style. After a brilliant first act monologue -- a fantastic marathon of a performance piece by a single actress -- the play stumbled several times en route to its not-quite-conclusion. It was all well-performed but unlike, say, Angels in America, I found myself wishing it was about 2-1/2 hours shorter. Still, I haven't been able to stop talking and speculating about it over the past two days, so I suppose it's going to stick with me for a while.

Saturday found me at the Goodman for the new, much-discussed Stephen Sondheim musical Bounce, formerly Gold, formerly Wise Guys, formerly thought unproduceable, and, alas, that latter formerly may just be so.

Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderfully acted show, Richard Kind as Addison Mizner and Jane Powell as mama standing out among the cast. And a lot of the music and lyrics are gilt-edged classic Sondheim (with a few melodic and lyrical echoes of Merrily, We Roll Along, Follies, and Sunday in the Park with George). But here, the story of the peripatetic Mizner brothers starts slow and ends slumpy, with a lot of high jinks and high spirits in the middle. If the rest of the show can be made to match the momentum built up from the last half of act one and the first half of act two, it might be pretty damned bankable. The show has a planned pre-Broadway tryout at the Kennedy Center this autumn, but it won't hit New York without a lot of work, I'm afraid.

That said, I haven't be able to stop humming the title tune so I hope, at least, it'll be recorded somewhere along the way.

Yesterday, I made the soggy trek to the United Center for the latest installment of Cirque du Soleil, Varekai. It features a lot of the typically thrilling acrobatics that I've come to expect from CDS, especially the Russian Swings and the beautiful (and hunky!) Aerial Strap ballet. This production is a lot more dance-intensive than other recent entries, but that's far from a bad thing when the dance is so inventive and enticing.

And today? Well, today has been about relaxing and shopping and trying desperately not to walk out of the Apple Store with a new PowerBook, Tungsten C and Minolta camera. All that remains is a bit more power-browsing, dinner and some carousing with the always-diverting lads of Boystown.

I'll be home in time to entertain this week's special guest star.

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