A new theater — especially one as comfortable and intimate as Northlight’s long-awaited Evanston homecoming — is cause for celebration and Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 satire of mercurial Chicago journalists in an era when the city was lousy with newsprint certainly fits. I’m not convinced the play, which held up pretty well on Broadway in 2016, needed adapting, and to some degree sanitizing, but Northlight clearly wanted to roll out some justly loved Chicago actors and baptize its new space with a celebration of our toddlin’ town’s juicily corrupt history and indomitable spirit. Who can argue with that?
“The Front Page,” which is set inside the press room of the old Criminal Courts Building, comes with a clutch of characters based on real-life figures at the legendary City News Bureau, youthful stomping ground for the likes of Mike Royko and Kurt Vonnegut and the originator of the pedagogic journalistic truism, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” MacArthur had worked there; Hecht worked for the Chicago Daily Journal and the Chicago Daily News before he went all Hollywood, to his later regret.
The pair got in their licks at the Tribune; its hypochondriac reporter is the most neurotic of the whole bunch. Some things don’t change.
The story, which will be familiar to fans of the masterful 1940 Howard Hawks movie “His Girl Friday” with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, involves a tawdry group of ink-stained wretches holed up in the court’s press room as a hanging is about to take place. Once the perp goes on the lam, ace reporter Hildy Johnson and editor Walter Burns collectively move heaven and Earth to hold on to their exclusive as to his whereabouts (not far at all from said press room).
Personal tension is added because Johnson plans to quit for a respectable job and get married — anathema to this culture — and Burns will do anything to not lose his most valuable employee.
In “The Front Page,” Hildy is a man, the center of a patriarchal culture. In “His Girl Friday,” Hildy was turned into a woman (the story goes that Hawks had his secretary read Hildy’s lines and liked how it sounded). Thus a romantic entanglement between Hildy and editor Burns was added by the screenwriter Charles Lederer wherein Hildy is Walter’s ex. Thus when Hildy is walking out on journalism, she also by extension is walking out on her soul mate, Walter. (That’s also true of the original, just not in quite the same way.)
Jeffrey Hatcher’s new adaptation keeps that Hollywood gender swap and director BJ Jones has played along by casting the real-life married couple of Kate Fry and Timothy Edward Kane as Johnson and Burns. They’re a terrific pair of actors, as most everyone in Chicago knows, and it’s all rich entertainment and perhaps an acknowledgement by all parties that “His Girl Friday” is more remembered than “The Front Page. ”
That said, I did find myself resisting this adaptation’s urge to make Johnson far more of a morally righteous figure, and separate her from the pack of male jackals. Hatcher has added for Hildy a bunch of virtuous lines about women in the workplace, presumably to appeal to modern sensibilities, but I’d argue that leaving Hildy as a do-anything-for-a-story fundamentalist who just happened to be a woman actually would have made the subtler and more progressive point. “The Front Page” is a satire with farcical elements; it’s not a feel-good sit com with quirky characters. And some of its edge, and thus its cynical humor, feels like it was blunted here.
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Still, the genuinely hilarious Tim Kazurinsky, whom I had not seen for a while on stage, walks away with every brief scene in which he appears as a hapless delivery man from the governor’s office just trying to do his duty; he plays the one character I think Hecht and MacArthur intended truly to be admirable. As the other ink-stained wretches, Joe Dempsey, Mark David Kaplan, Kelan M. Smith and Guy Van Swearingen are all in tune with their types, while William Dick and John Lister have fun with their self-serving Chicago pols. Meanwhile, the redoubtable Peter Moore, Rae Gray and Cindy Gold play the hapless civilians caught up in these machinations to hide a really good story (personified by John Drea).
The show, with a lively thrust set designed by Jeff Kmiec, certainly shows off what this new theater will be able to do without sacrificing its famously close relationship with its audience. Check it out, indeed. Especially you long-deprived Evanstonians.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
Review: “The Front Page” (3 stars)
When: Through Oct. 25
Where: Northlight Theatre, 1012 Church St., Evanston
Running time: 2 hours
Tickets: $55-$103 at 847-563-8400 and northlight.org