Here’s what works really well in writer-performer Mitchell Bisschop’s new solo show, Royko: The Toughest Man in Chicago: bringing to passionate life Mike Royko’s columns on the civil rights movement, specifically his legendary pieces on Jackie Robinson’s first visit to Chicago as a player and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
The irascible, irreverent columnist for the Chicago Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune honed a keenly calibrated bullshit and hypocrisy detector in the taverns and softball fields of the working-class city. That translated into progressive takes on civil rights, Machine politics, police torture and gun control that play well today, even though Royko’s personal politics tended to be somewhat more retrograde.
Bringing back snippets of long-gone Chicago via video clips that complement Bisschop’s recitations of Royko material on Mayor Richard J. Daley (as well as Michael Bilandic and Jane Byrne) also plays well on the multiple screens that serve as backdrop to a simple set that finds the actor shifting back and forth between his office chair and a stool at the Billy Goat. Also enjoyable: the set piece encapsulating Royko’s column needling Frank Sinatra for having a round-the-clock police guard during a stay in Chicago, which led to a hilariously pugnacious response from Ol’ Blue Eyes, and then to the columnist’s point-by-point rebuttal of Sinatra’s letter.
Act One flows past easily enough on the strength of those highlights, even though Bisschop’s portrayal of Royko feels somewhat superficial and mannered. When he started arguing with an unseen patron of the Goat one night, I thought, now we’ll get some insight into what the guy was like when he wasn’t performing his persona over the course of five columns a week (more than 7,500 in all). But no, the confrontation fizzles out. Not a collar ruffled nor a punch thrown. Which is when I realized the title is a problem. Not only is this Royko far from the toughest man in Chicago, he may not even be the toughest guy in the tavern.
Instead, he’s a bemused wiseass who becomes quite proficient in spinning up columns out of thin air, a skill necessary when filing every weekday for decades, but not that compelling as theater. Act Two is the real issue. As the 1980s come into view and Royko’s beloved Daily News shutters, he shuttles over to the Sun-Times and then, incensed by the gutter news values of new owner Rupert Murdoch (who Royko accurately summed up as focused solely on building vast political power before that was readily apparent), to the Tribune, the Republican paper he’d always shunned.
The Royko of later years just wasn’t the writer of his glory days in the 50s, 60s and 70s (he won the Pulitzer for Commentary in 1972), when he had Daley as a reliable foil. The scattershot structure of the second act doesn’t help. We get footage of the Mike Royko Ribfest while Bisschop appears onstage in apron and chef’s hat. We get a snippet of Continental Divide, the forgettable film in which John Belushi played a character based loosely on Royko. We get Royko’s grief over the tragic death of Belushi, for whom he was an honorary uncle with deep ties to the family. It’s all over the map, and it provides precious few insights into the man behind the headlines.
At the end, after we have witnessed video interview re-creations featuring Bisschop, we see footage of the man himself cracking wise and delivering some of the same lines. So why did they bother shooting the video snippets with the actor playing him? It’s an odd choice that doesn’t make a lot of sense. There are enough of those throughout that Royko might have gotten a pretty good column out of detailing the faults. He might not have included among them a lack of in-depth examination of the uglier aspects of his life, but then again, maybe his sense of fairness would have compelled him to mention that, too.
The first half of the show serves as a reminder of how good Royko was at the top of his game. If it introduces a new audience to his work and prompts people to read Boss and his early column collections, well, that’s all to the good. As Bisschop says at one point, Royko didn’t think his columns were meant to last for 100 years, let alone 100 days. But a few of Royko’s gems will hold up that long and longer.
Ultimately, this show might work better as a lean, mean one-act. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.
Royko: The Toughest Man in Chicago runs through September 29 at the Chopin Theatre.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Sarah Larson
