Editorial: Norm on ‘Cheers'? George Wendt meant far more to Chicagoans.
Being a gentle and kind spirit, Wendt would smile wryly, like a man with an eternal cross to bear. He'd typically say afterward that he at least made people smile just by his existence.
But for those who work or care about Chicago theater, the barfly Norm from 'Cheers' was not what first came to mind when the actor died Tuesday at the age of 76. Rather, the city's creative community lost not just one of its most important comedic actors and spokespeople, but one of its most enthusiastic supporters.
Long after 'Cheers' was gone from our screens, Wendt was willing to leverage his fame and his regular-guy authenticity, being such a stereotypical Chicagoan, in service of the city that nurtured him (Wendt grew up in Beverly). He showed up for most every Second City reunion. He always talked happily to this newspaper. Playing a gruff, arts-loving Chicago cop, he even made a commercial (at no charge) for the League of Chicago Theatres with the tagline, 'Now That's What I Call Theatre.' He appeared in two shows for the Northlight Theatre: Richard Dresser's 'Rounding Third' in 2002 and Bruce Graham's 'Funnyman' in 2015.
In the latter show about an old school comic, Wendt actually confronted what it meant to be known everywhere as a lovable comedian. 'People stop me on the street all the time,' his character said. ''Say something funny!'' We all have a Wowza! — the one thing that people think we do and that we're sick of doing.' For anyone who saw Wendt do that show, it was clear that Wendt's 'Wowza!' was Norm from 'Cheers,' even though he was always careful to say that he was appreciative of the fame and fortune from the beloved sitcom.
Wendt long had faced health problems, but that didn't make his death any less of a jolt. Over the years, Chicago has had some entertainment figures indelibly associated with the city. The late John and the living Jim Belushi, both complex figures, certainly come to mind. So does Joe Mantegna. And Chris Farley.
But while we're praising what you might call the Mike Ditka school of Chicago comedy ( Bears), let's agree that Wendt was the gentle leader of that particular Chicago Rat Pack.
So long, George. We appreciate all you did for us in this town.
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Chicago Tribune
4 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
Heidi Stevens: After a child leaves the nest, you get the privilege of parenting the new version of them
My friend Jason is getting ready to drop off his daughter, his firstborn child, at college. And by 'getting ready,' I mean crying himself to sleep at night and asking strangers what to do. Normal. If there's another way to do it, I certainly don't know it. 'I feel like the dad in 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding,'' he texted me the other day. 'WHY YOU WANT TO LEAVE ME?!?!?!?' Even though, of course, he wants her to leave him. Even though, of course, he wants her to want to leave him. 'It's an odd feeling when your heart is simultaneously swelling with pride,' he texted, 'and also being ripped out of your chest.' I call that feeling parenting. You meet your child for the first time and suddenly the world is absolutely beautiful and mind-blowing and magical and your heart is exploding with love and gratitude and awe. And also, at the exact same moment, your heart is breaking in half because one day, lots of days, actually, your child is going to go out and enjoy that absolutely beautiful, mind-blowing, magical world. Without you. What a terrible system. Who thought of this? 'Several people have told us, 'You're not supposed to let her see you cry. Don't cry until after you leave,'' Jason texted. Nonsense, I texted back. Cry your eyes out in front of her if you want to. It's OK to let her see that your world changed forever the day she was born and your world changed forever the day she went to kindergarten and camp and prom and that one party but all those times she came back to you. And this time she won't. At least not for a while. 'I've told her already that no matter how much of an idiot I make of myself,' Jason texted, 'she has to know how proud I am of her and how excited I am for her.' She will. She does. Last year, I wrote a column full of wisdom for launching your kid after high school, collected from readers who had already done so. Chicagoan Allison Clark offered a story about her own experience being dropped off at college: 'My parents unloaded my stuff into my dorm room and then my dad basically hugged me, said goodbye and abruptly left to head back to the car,' Clark wrote. 'My mother stayed a little bit longer and then left as well. 'Months later,' she continued, 'I told my mom that I was a little hurt that my dad left so quickly when they dropped me off. 'Oh, Allison,' my mom said. 'Your dad was about to cry, and he didn't want to cry in front of you. He was very proud about not ever being seen crying.'' Ah. 'I will forever be grateful that she shared that insight with me,' Clark wrote. 'Because it both corrected my memory of what had happened and made me feel so much more understanding of his experience as a parent. It also meant that when I dropped my own child off in that same freshman dorm 34 years later, I made sure to both linger and openly cry before I left.' Two months after I wrote that column, I dropped my daughter at college for the first time. I didn't cry when we pulled up to her dorm. I didn't cry as I unpacked her clothes and folded them into little piles to line her dorm room dresser drawers and had flashbacks of folding her onesies into little piles to line her nursery dresser drawers. I didn't cry when we went to get our nails done together one last time before the old chapter officially ended and the new chapter officially began. I didn't cry when we walked to get iced coffees and I pictured all the times she'd go to that coffee shop and place that coffee order and I wouldn't even know she was there unless she used my PayPal account, which, in the end, happened most of the time. I didn't even cry when I hugged her goodbye. I did cry when I was all alone on the drive home and Luke Combs came on my radio. Mostly because she and I spent part of the drive on the way to college (and the years leading up to that drive to college) singing his songs together at the top of our lungs. But the timing of the tears had nothing to do with hiding what I was feeling from her. The tears came — and come — when they decide to. In a few days I'll drop her at college for the second time. I don't know if it will feel harder or easier. I've heard both. And I don't have a lot of wisdom to share with Jason or any of my other friends who are doing it for the first time, except this one thing. A few weeks ago, my daughter and I stood side by side singing Luke Combs together at the top of our lungs in Grant Park, where he was performing at Lollapalooza. And that was a moment when the world felt absolutely beautiful and mind-blowing and magical and my heart was exploding with love and gratitude and awe. And also, at the exact same moment, my heart started healing in some of the cracked places. Because I realized that after they go out and enjoy that absolutely beautiful, mind-blowing, magical world without us, they come back different. Smarter, probably. Stronger, hopefully. And we get to fall in love with the new them. Over and over again.
Chicago Tribune
6 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
To know them is to loath them: Oak Park's Alec Nevala-Lee finds a niche, writing about science's biggest jerks
Luis W. Alvarez, physicist, genius, conspiracy debunker, military hawk, Zelig, University of Chicago dyspeptic, to cut to the chase, was not a very pleasant man. He was not especially liked by colleagues. It's hard to tell if he was even liked by his kids. And so, for Alec Nevala-Lee of Oak Park, who has become an underrated biographer of Great Jerks in Science, Alvarez was perfect. Nevala-Lee's previous biography was on Buckminster Fuller, architect, futurist, longtime professor at Southern Illinois University, but also an infamously obtuse, inscrutable mansplainer's mansplainer — his lectures seemed to go on for days. Before that, Nevala-Lee wrote 'Astounding,' a harrowing account of the men behind mid-century science fiction, particularly editor John W. Campbell, who could be described charitably as fascist. His next book, already in the works, is about those lovable scamps behind the RAND Corporation, the most despised think tank in history. Am I nuts or do I see a pattern here? 'No question!' Nevala-Lee said the other day, getting a little loud in his neighborhood library. 'I like intelligent people who succeed in one field only to try and apply those skills elsewhere and decide that they should convince the world that only they have the answer to certain problems.' At the risk of playing pop psychologist, I asked a natural follow-up: Is that you, too? 'I mean, uh… I it.' He smiled. 'Am I a reasonably intelligent person who thought a lot about where to apply their skills? Sure.' I asked this because he attended Harvard University and left with a degree in classics and an over-confident idea that knowing the classics was really the only way to become a writer. So when his fiction-writing career stalled before it could get started, he decided to reinvent himself. He developed a talent for writing quite accessible histories of the boorish. The boorish, but brilliant. 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In fact, Alvarez's bubble chamber, the project that would earn him a Nobel, may have been his least publicized work: a pressurized chamber to help scientists study particle behavior. It was groundbreaking, though not as thrilling as proving — using a bunch of watermelons and a high-powered rifle — why the Warren Commission was probably correct about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In Alvarez's last decades, as if knocking out a little extra credit, he even gave us the answer to a mystery we all know the answer to now: He explained how a planet ruled by dinosaurs could go extinct nearly overnight. But … he was also something of a bootlicker. 'Alvarez knew how to cleave to power,' Nevala-Lee said. 'In a way I find interesting. The contrast to Oppenheimer is real, because Oppenheimer, equally brilliant, spoke his truth as he saw it.' He came to regret his role in creating nuclear weapons, so at the peak of McCarthy-era paranoia, his loyalty to the government was doubted and the head of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory had his security clearance revoked. Alvarez, meanwhile, 'was very careful about alienating people he needed to get stuff done,' Nevala-Lee said. 'In fact, and this is important, he doubled down and felt the solution to the Soviet problem was definitely a thermonuclear bomb. Alvarez would even become one of those people who was all for mutual assured destruction. Oppenheimer was not. Alvarez had such a high opinion of his own intelligence that when he sees someone equally bright, like Oppenheimer, opposing him on a fundamental point, he assumed it couldn't be he's wrong — no, Oppenheimer must be compromised. I don't know if he really believed that for sure, but I think so: Alvarez saw it to his advantage if Oppenheimer could be neutralized. He was causing problems, and Alvarez's work would go smoother if he was out of the way.' In the end, ever an opportunist, Alvarez testified Oppenheimer was loyal to his country, yet wrong on nukes. Not the profile in courage that makes for Oscar biopics. (Indeed, in Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer,' Alvarez is mostly on hand to say Germans just split the atom. Then he's gone from the picture. Alvarez, whose career was just getting started in 1939, wouldn't have been pleased.) To make matters worse, egads — Alvarez didn't seem to be a big fan of Chicago. Scientist Luis Walter Alvarez with a radio transmitter used in a radar ground-controlled approach system built to help guide airplanes to land. (AP) His ex-wife lived here with his ex-mother-in-law. During the development of the bomb, while traveling constantly between MIT and Los Alamos, he would call Chicago his 'decompression chamber,' but after working for a while at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, he felt rudderless and assumed all of the interesting science was being done elsewhere. He became something of a legend around Hyde Park — 'high on my list of mythological figures,' is how one scientist at University of Chicago described him — but Alvarez himself complained bitterly of his undergraduate education at the school, a place where, he said: 'Most of the graduate students didn't understand any quantum mechanics, largely for the reason that the professors had just learned it themselves.' He sounds, in many ways, I told Nevala-Lee, like the archetypal UC student. How so, he asked. Arrogant, awkward, questioning yet has all the answers; inquisitive yet careerist. 'I mean, that describes Alvarez,' Nevala-Lee said. 'I think of him now as someone who understood how to get things done. But he was abrasive, didn't treat subordinates well — it was a problem. He would have gotten more accomplished if people didn't feel personally attacked by him so much. He assumed if you were in physics at his level, you get this treatment. Can't take it, find another field.' Tack on a whimsical side — a study of UFOs, a study of pyramids, a genuine love for the science of the Superball by Wham-O — and Alvarez even sounds like a descendant of, well, Elon Musk. Nevala-Lee can see it. He was once enthralled himself by 'the American idea of visionary genius.' Nevala-Lee is 45 now, though younger, 'I had an exaggerated sense of my own abilities. I thought of myself as someone who could enter the world and solve its problems myself. Elon Musk was that guy about 10 years ago. I've since become pretty skeptical of this idea of a visionary genius. I don't know now if they ever did exist. Deep down, our figures like this, they all have the same problems.' By the way, since you're probably wondering, for the record, Nevala-Lee is a nice guy. cborrelli@
Chicago Tribune
06-08-2025
- Chicago Tribune
Column: A new podcast seeks to put you in ‘Hamlet's' head
In the centuries since William Shakespeare put quill to paper and wrote 'The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark' in 1602, or thereabout, we have met all sorts of Hamlets, seen all manner of versions of the play. We have encountered Hamlet in such actors as Sarah Bernhardt and Daniel Day-Lewis, Laurence Olivier and Mel Gibson, John Wilkes Booth and Richard Burton. Quite a crowd. We have seen 'Hamlet' on stages, in movies, in parks. Some of us (myself included) vividly remember the 1985 Wisdom Bridge Theater production directed by Bob Falls (soon to move on to lead the Goodman Theater) and starring a 26-year-old Aidan Quinn, who spray-painted the words 'To Be / Not to Be' before turning to the audience and saying, 'that is the question.' The latest and among the most intriguing, exciting and entertaining is currently available for your listening pleasure and, frankly, your amazement is 'Hamlet,' a Chicago-spawned six-part podcast series. Jeremy McCarter, who calls 'Hamlet' the most famous play ever written, has adapted and directed the play in collaboration with dozens of others, most crucially sound designer Mikhail Fiksel. 'The idea came to me two years ago,' McCarter says. 'We all have this super power when wearing headphones, the ability to let sound take us inside the head to a character. And I thought, 'Now, who has the most interesting head?' Hamlet came quickly to me.' The final result did not. 'It was a challenge and there were many scary moments,' McCarter says. 'We wanted to be inside Hamlet's head, hearing all he would be hearing. But the words had to remain all Shakespeare's. It was important to get the approval of some scholars (such as James Shapiro). I didn't want the Shakespeare police coming after me. … But we carried on, and in two years we had it.' McCarter moved here from Brooklyn in 2014 with his journalist wife and their baby girl. I interviewed him then, and he talked about his Harvard education; helping run New York City's Public Theater; writing books, including 'Hamilton: The Revolution,' with good friend Lin-Manuel Miranda; and recently becoming the literary executor of the novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. In 2017, he founded and is the executive producer of the Make-Believe Association, a nonprofit audio production company. 'Hamlet' is available free on all major podcast streaming platforms, but I would urge you to listen to (or at least visit) It will give you a fuller vision of his mission, which is to 'create a community of artists and audiences who believe that telling stories together, and talking about what they mean, creates a more vibrant democracy,' with an emphasis on local talents. You will also be able to hear previous productions, such as 'City On Fire: Chicago Race Riot 1919.' 'Hamlet' stars 30-year-old Daniel Kyri, a native Chicagoan and familiar presence on local stages. He has been Hamlet before, in an acclaimed 2019 performance at the Gift Theatre, with Tribune critic Chris Jones calling Kyri an 'exceptional young Chicago talent … a distinguished young 'Hamlet.'' He called the performance 'honest, vulnerable enough, sufficiently complicated and, most important of all, walks its own walk.' 'I had worked with Daniel before on a project and so, of course, I saw him as Hamlet at Gift,' McCarter says. 'I was mesmerized by his performance and knew he was right for this project.' Kyri wasn't immediately sold. 'But finally, I became eager to get another crack at the character. I knew I was ready to tackle it again,' Kyri said. 'I think we are able to give the audience the ability to see into Hamlet's soul.' Even McCarter was anxious, saying, 'This really did start as an experiment. It took a while before we knew it was going to work.' The work was done at Tightrope Recording on the North Side. Kyri would often arrive fresh from the filming of 'Chicago Fire,' the locally shot NBC show on which he has been a regular cast member since 2018. It was announced earlier this year that he would be leaving due to budgetary reasons. 'But I am happy to tell you that things have changed and I will be coming back next season,' he told me. 'It is great for any actor to get a steady paycheck and when I was first cast on the show, it was so affirming for me as an actor.' It is beyond my caveman-like knowledge to detail all of the technological wizardry involved in this production. Sound designer Fiksel employs what is called the binaural method and all sorts of audio technological tools. The podcast premiered in June at the Tribeca Festival in New York City to rave reviews, one critic writing that it was 'a fastidious and entertaining reworking of the script. But it only gels into transportive immersion thanks to Mikhail Fiksel's sound design.' Since that premiere, McCarter, frequently with Kyri, has been spreading the word. Toward that end, he wrote a provocative essay in the New York Times, saying that the 'similarities between Shakespeare's bewildered, semi-deranged prince and his audience — all of us — have rarely been clearer than they are today.' That, of course, is for you to decide, but I will tell you that this is one powerful podcast. I had long thought Hamlet, during and after many encounters, was kind of a confused, lonely and vengeful young prince. That view has been altered by this new 'Hamlet.' Spending time 'in Hamlet's head,' as McCarter puts it, is an intimate and ultimately enlightening experience. I now find Hamlet a searcher, damaged, yes, but determined, isolated, but still curious. And, as I was pleasantly reminded, that Shakespeare guy sure could write.
