Burning Bluebeard

The Neo-Futurarium

Chicago

(773) 275-5255

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Few shows, if any, are able to “get under your skin before the first line is spoken,” said Nina Metz in the Chicago Tribune. This new play by Jay Torrence accomplishes the feat solely through smell: The unmistakable odor of something burning greets the audience as they enter the theater. The fact that the odor is obviously part of the production—Torrence’s show concerns the Iroquois Theater fire of 1903, the deadliest single-building fire in American history—makes the effect no less unnerving. Though Torrence never makes light of the tragedy, which killed more than 600 audience members, he “douses it in a wonderfully strange, sharply comic mood” by imagining six singed actors rising from their body bags to finish Mr. Bluebeard, the play they were performing when the fire started.

Alas, the ghostly actors never achieve their goal of completing the play, said Kris Vire in Time Out Chicago. Well into Burning Bluebeard, which features a mashup of John Lennon, Amy Winehouse, and “a creepy children’s-choir rendition of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” the terror of the original conflagration is re-created. The play isn’t uniformly macabre—“gags and dance numbers serve as a welcome balance” to the horror. The performers, from Ryan Walters as vaudevillian Eddie Foy to Molly Plunk as a “gangly” fairy queen, “convey real regret” during their doomed attempt to erase the tragedy by carrying on with the show. The play’s unlikely mix of “wistful, sidesplitting, and chill-inducing” moments lingers long after the fire burns out.