A pair at Broadway (Chicago, Montrose: neighborhood, theater, live)

[nJohn]

For those who are interested theater, Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts and Keith Huff's Steady Rain will be heading to Broadway. Both plays take place in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood.

'Donuts,' 'Steady Rain': Uptown is about to intersect with Broadway, in a big way | The Theater Loop - News from America's hottest theater city

On Sept. 29 at New York’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, Keith Huff’s two-character Chicago play, “A Steady Rain,” will open with the marquee names of Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig playing the roles of the two typically stressed-out Chicago cops trying to hold their jobs and their lives together. Already, several millions of dollars for advance tickets have been sold.

The play’s pivotal scenes—wherein the cops bungle the handling of a young victim whose horrible fate then haunts them relentlessly—take place in an empty lot on Broadway. That’s the Chicago Broadway, and the lot is a real lot, located just north of Montrose Avenue. “A Steady Rain” ranges all over Chicago, but the core of the play takes place in Uptown, the lakefront neighborhood on Chicago’s Far North Side.

Just two days later—two days!—Tracy Letts’ “Superior Donuts” will open at the Music Box Theatre. The play, which premiered in 2008 at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and stars Michael McKean, reprising his role along with the rest of the cast, is a drama involving a fight for control over a faded but venerable snack shop and de facto community center and police hangout in the heart of Uptown. Perhaps to head off legal issues, there is a textual vagueness as to the precise location of the model Uptown doughnut shop.