The laid-back, unassuming, eminently cool aesthetic of Pilsen’s Thalia Hall is such a harmonious fit for veteran stand-up Todd Barry that it’s wild he hadn’t performed there yet in his many stops through Chicago. The ASMR-voiced comic and author will play the historic venue for the first time February 22 as part of his facetiously-named Stadium Tour.
Well, one of the best green rooms is near you, actually, in Evanston in a place called Space. I think it’s a famously good green room. There’s multiple rooms and there’s couches, and it’s clean—it seems like it’s meant to be a green room. There’s food and lots of tissues out. Oftentimes, you’ll play a place where you’re sitting there next to a drum of Diet Coke or something. “This is a storage room, and you’ve got a folding chair.” I don’t need a whole lot. The only thing I get a little prickly about is if I just feel like they didn’t know a show was about to happen. And another thing is it’s great when there’s a bathroom backstage. Oftentimes, I’ve done shows where you’re like, “Well, you can go to this restaurant.” I just don’t want to use the bathroom with people who are about to see me. I like to have some delusions that there’s a mystique involved.
I’m always interested in hearing what artists think about the adjectives that get ascribed to them in the press. [Playwright] Sarah Ruhl, for example, is on the record as hating the word “whimsical,” which critics called her work during her early career.
Patton Oswalt could go to any club in the country and destroy for any audience.
There’s a moment in your Crowd Work Tour special that packs in like five different audience energies into a minute or two: the loquacious woman in Portland passionately delivering an unsolicited diatribe about urban chicken farming.
Sat 2/22, 7:30 PM (doors 6:30 PM), Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, 312-526-3851, thaliahallchicago.com, $25-$35, 17+.
