The double casting of quick-changing supporting roles is good fun when their characters starkly contrast. Stephen Berenson plays the sheriff with a snarl and swagger, calming down in the role of a reporter. Hilariously, Brian McEleney plays both the prissy reporter Bensinger and the outlandish gangster Diamond Louie, whose face is contorted with a permanent hole where an ever-present cigar fits when he's not growling out dialogue. Janice Duclos has a grand old time, along with us, as Hildy's prim and proper future mother-in-law, who eventually is chased by police and arrested with counterfeit money, and she is amusingly nuanced as a soft-spoken minister. Phyllis Kay plays a butch reporter and a gold-hearted prostitute. Richard Donelly is both the arrogant mayor and a harmonica-playing reporter.
But everything circles around the central couple. Brazil's sparks-shedding Hildy is reporter-as-velociraptor — in one scene she's dragged around latched onto an ankle in pursuit of an interview. Sullivan as conniving, imploring editor Burns wants a reporter whose wife is in labor to ignore "the squalling demands of some infant you've never even met."
What a play. What a production. Don't miss it.
Topics:
Theater
, Media, Chicago, Crime, More 
, Media, Chicago, Crime, Curt Columbus, Stephen Thorne, Janice Duclos, Theater, Angela Brazil, Theatre, film, Less 
