If any journalist could be said to have lit the spark for an artistic movement, that scribe was Richard Christiansen, longtime chief critic at the Chicago Tribune and perhaps the single individual who did the most to put homegrown Chicago theater permanently on the global map.
Christiansen died Friday, Jan. 28 at the Selfhelp Home on the North Side. He was 90 and had been living in recent years at the Chicago home, following decades of residence on Chicago’s Near North Side. His death was announced by longtime friend Sid Smith, a former arts critic at the Tribune.
“We should all count ourselves lucky to have known this man,” Smith said Friday. “Richard was, first and foremost, a top critic of theater and the arts in general. But he was also an affectionate colleague, a beloved friend and a great mentor and teacher, helped by his near photographic memory and spot-on accuracy. He also boasted a rich and effusive sense of humor. If you worked near him, you laughed a great deal of the day.”
Christiansen’s tenure at first the Daily News and then the Tribune was marked by his fervent enthusiasm for his beat. “All my life I have been eager to go to the theater,” he said in his 2004 book “A Theater of Our Own: A History and a Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago,” perfectly describing one of the essential qualities of his affectionate and generous writing.
Most critics eventually lose their sense of wonder and excitement at their job as nights spent reviewing turn into decades. Incontrovertibly, Christiansen retained those precious qualities. “I still get a kick out it,” he told Playbill upon his 2002 retirement, stating the obvious.
“There was no group so small, no venue so foreboding, that he would not find himself climbing flights of stairs or descending into damp cellars to see what delights or disasters the latest groups of young thespians would deliver,” wrote the late actor Brian Dennehy in a forward to Christiansen’s book. And indeed, a voyage through Christiansen’s extensive oeuvre is to read words like “surprised,” “delighted” and “thrilling” on a regular basis, notwithstanding the very rare outraged pan.
With a famed tenure at the Tribune that lasted from 1978 to 2002, preceded by some two decades at the Daily News, Christiansen witnessed an extraordinary renaissance in Chicago theater, including the rise of such companies as the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Remains Theatre, Wisdom Bridge Theatre and Victory Gardens Theater, as well as the start of individual artists like Robert Falls, Gary Sinise, David Mamet, Chuck Smith, William Petersen and Mary Zimmerman. Many of those of whom he reviewed remained profoundly grateful for his role in their emergence.
Christiansen also had similarly excellent timing when it came to the now-beleaguered Chicago newspaper business, which was thriving profitably with a plethora of illustrious staff critics and arts columnists during his tenure. He made his exit before its decline.
Upon Christiansen’s epic retirement in 2002, a multiweek happening composed of a veritable rainbow tour of fond farewells around the city, Dennehy, who had been hidden away in a Tribune Tower stairwell, delivered a moving newsroom tribute to the man he described as his favorite critic.
That critic was born in August 1931 and grew up an only child in Oak Park; his father was an electrical engineer with the Western Electric Company. Christiansen attended Oak Park and River Forest high school and graduated from Carleton College in 1953.
“The responsibility to keep learning, continue questioning and engage and explore everything requires an open mind,” he told that college’s graduates in 2011, the year Carleton awarded him an honorary degree. Following a year studying at Harvard University and a stint in the U.S. Army, Christiansen chose a career in journalism, starting out at the City News Bureau in 1956. There, reported the Tribune’s Rick Kogan at the time of Christiansen’s retirement, Christiansen began a lifelong friendship with the columnist Mike Royko.
“One of the things that made Richard one of the ultimate newspaper men of his era was that in addition to being a great and influential critic, he was also a remarkable reporter,” said Kogan, a Tribune columnist and longtime friend. “That is sometimes overlooked when people consider his career. His reporting skills enabled him to have a tremendous grip on what theater meant to Chicago. and he was a remarkable mentor to the young generation of journalists, especially those working in the arts.”
In 2010, Victory Gardens Theater named its second floor black-box theater the Richard Christiansen Theater, occasioning many further plaudits for the now-emeritus (and thus yet more beloved) critic, who described himself as “tickled pink” at the honor.
“Naming this theater for Richard is a recognition of his unique and enduring contribution to the most vibrant theatre scene on the planet,” said Jane Nicholl Sahlins, a longtime arts administrator in Chicago who became Christiansen’s close friend.
“It wasn’t just that he made other people believe I was a better actor,” said an emotional Petersen at the time. “He made me believe I was a better actor.”
Petersen, who went on to movie and TV fame after cutting his teeth in Chicago theater, was also at the center of an oft-repeated and much-loved anecdote involving a famed Christiansen review of the Wisdom Bridge Theatre production of “In the Belly of the Beast” in 1983. Therein, Christiansen described himself as so overcome by emotion at the lead performance that he was forced to “pull over” on the side of the road on his way home following the show. For years thereafter, a Chicago actor in receipt of a positive Christiansen notice might be met with a colleague (such as the longtime Christiansen favorite Amy Morton) jokingly sniffing that if the critic had really liked it that much, he surely would have pulled over.
Courtly, polite and well-dressed in person and always gentle and respectful in rhetorical tone, Christiansen epitomized what is often described as old-school reviewing. Although he was frank and honest with his readers, he rarely ventured into the oft-egotistical world of first-person writing. He chose to obfuscate his own politics and ideology, preferring to allow the shows he reviewed to be seen on their own terms. Rarely did he reveal details of his own personal life in his professional work, allowing readers to see themselves and their tastes in what Christiansen had to say. When describing those artists he did not especially admire to inquisitive colleagues, he would say they were “modest talents,” which was about as harsh as Christiansen ever liked to be, especially if Chicago was part of someone’s biography.
In person, he was warm, personable and generous, encouraging of the younger critics he admired and famous for his love of big lunches, extravagant desserts and all.
Christiansen’s work hardly was limited to the theater. Over the years, he covered film, music and a variety of other art forms, notably reporting on the first trip to Chicago made by The Beatles.
Christiansen also famously adored both Consumer Reports and Mickey Rooney, describing a 1986 appearance of the latter in Chicago with veritable glee: “The doorbell rings, the door flings open and there is Mickey Rooney — porkpie hat perched on his fringe of white hair, a shaggy coat reaching down to his knees, baggy pants falling below his little pot belly, gym shoes on his feet and his tongue sticking out in demonic glee — ready to charge forward to shake hands with the folks in the front row and give his audience almost two hours of lunatic hilarity.”
That said and when deserved, he wrote much the same way about young talent performing where the front row made up most of the house.
Christiansen, who did not marry and had no children, also was a collector of contemporary art, especially by Chicago artists, eventually affording him the best wall art in the Selfhelp Home where he spent his last years, often visited by former newsroom colleagues, people of the Chicago theater and cherished old friends.
“Writing about the theater you quickly come to realize that the experience you’re trying to describe already has vanished,” Christiansen once wrote, accurately noting a conundrum.
For generations of Chicagoans, he kept what happened in its glorious neighborhood theaters alive for ever.
Funeral service are expected to be private, Smith said. A public memorial service is being planned for a date to be announced.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
