“A Funny Thing Happened…Tomorrow!” reviewed by Julia W. Rath

[rating=3]Mystery and excitement shroud the stage when Ross Johnson employs his mindreading skills before a rapt audience at Chicago’s Rhapsody Theatre. From guessing colors to knowing what numbers have come up on a die, his feats of mentalism are cleverly accomplished and pleasant to watch. Johnson constantly asks for volunteers from the audience to assist him so that he can display his clairvoyance. Whether audience members rise from their seats or are being called onto the stage, his is a highly interactive and intriguing performance. Johnson is a psychic in the sense that he reads people and tells them about themselves. Sometimes I could imagine how he might accomplish some of his magic, at other times, I was clueless. And this is a good thing! It certainly got me thinking!

The first act is good. He knows what specific playing cards a volunteer is holding in his hand, taken from a brand-new deck. He wears a blindfold and remotely “feels for” the subtle differences in shape, color, and size of a “hidden” object in order to reveal to the audience what the object is. In one of his tricks, he uses Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Make Friends and Influence People” and accurately discerns a word from the text that a volunteer is thinking of.

But it is the last feat in the second act that is worth the cost of admission. That’s when he more deeply delves into the lives and personalities of his audience members. Before we walked into the theatre, Johnson found my guest and me in the adjacent bar and asked us to fill out a blank card with some information about ourselves. He asked me to seal the envelopes and place them into my handbag and then he would be using them at the end of his show. I joked with my guest that this reminded me of Johnny Carson’s old routine “Carnap, the Magnificent! We weren’t the only ones asked to fill out index cards: the other audience members were asked as well and there was a batch of cards, pencils, and envelopes on a table before entering the cabaret theater. And one by one, Johnson selected a sample of cards and, without opening the sealed envelopes, he told the people what they had written down. Dear Reader, you need to know that when I signed up to see the show, all that the venue knew was my name and not the name of my guest. But Johnson, during his last act, knew my guest’s name and also what she had written on her card…. and I had been holding all of our cards in sealed envelopes in my handbag until the last five minutes when they were gathered up and brought up to the stage, just before Johnson revealed their content.

The show starts out with the curtains on the stage parting and Johnson reading from a newspaper: tomorrow’s news. He explains to us that today is yesterday’s tomorrow. He explains that he once was a teacher before he started doing his mentalism. He also explains why he has arranged the props on stage to mimic a bistro setting. If one reads between the lines, Johnson’s son never had the opportunity to open his bistro, which had been his dream. Perhaps that might have been his father’s motivation to want to know what the future might bring. Maybe it wasn’t a funny thing that happened tomorrow. Maybe it was a sad thing. But then again, maybe there is a certain hopefulness in thinking that something unusual could happen that could change your life around. Maybe it’s the expectation of serendipity that makes life worth living.

Johnson is most definitely glib and entertaining. He pretty much sticks to reading people at the present moment, and that is a good thing. To put this another way, he limits how much he foretells about a person’s future in that he doesn’t embarrass them in public or possibly provide them with unwise advice. He constantly admits, however, that some people are more easily read than others, especially the more literal, less visual types. That said, I had some issues with his comparisons among people; and in that vein, my guest liked his sense of humor more than I did—and she was very impressed with him. On the other hand, I found the show as a whole somewhat slow-moving; and while professional, it lacked a certain contemporary polish. From my perspective, a crowd a hundred years ago might have enjoyed the show more than a 2022 audience. After all, there was no competition with television or talking motion pictures back then—and especially camera angles. In this performance, you have to trust that the volunteers who come on stage are faithfully telling the audience what the number is on the die or what cards they are holding. Plus from Johnson’s portrait advertising the show, I expected him to be a much younger man who didn’t wear glasses.

An hour before the mentalist took the stage, I told my guest, “He’s supposed to read my mind. But I can read his.” “Really?” she asked. I replied, “He and I are thinking, ‘Why isn’t there a much larger audience?’” Then prior to the performance, the theater’s founder Ricardo Rosenkranz made his rounds around the bar area and visited the table where my guest and I were seated. Referring to the fact that the newly renovated Rhapsody Theater just opened a short while ago, he said, “It’s a very unusual time to open a theater.” And when Johnson approached us in the bar to have us write down a question, he specifically instructed us not to ask anything about COVID. With COVID rates rising in the city and suburbs, this was apparently on his and everybody’s else’s mind.

Yes, a funny thing happened… and today you should go to the theater! Don’t wait until tomorrow!

“A Funny Thing Happened…Tomorrow!” is playing at the Rhapsody Theater,1328 W. Morse Avenue, in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, through July 31, 2022.

Tickets: $35-$75, depending on location.

Performance schedule:

Wednesdays 8:00 p.m.
Sundays 3:00 p.m.

To purchase tickets, go to: https://rhapsodytheater.thundertix.com/events/199894.

For ticketing assistance, call 888 495-9001, Tuesday-Saturday, 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.

For more information about this show and for general information about the Rhapsody Theatre and their future offerings: visit: https://www.rhapsodytheater.com/.

COVID health and safety requirements can change at any time. At this moment, masking is advised but not required, and there is no vaccination requirement. For more details, see: https://www.rhapsodytheater.com/covid-safety.php.