Chicago City Council Forces Jersey Boys to Remove Depictions of Smoking From Play
Terry Trippany on Jul 08 2008 at 10:50 am | Filed under: Entertainment News, Feature Article, Liberalism Watch
The screws have finally turned on the Chicago production of “Jersey Boys”. Theatergoers in the windy city will no longer see the performance as written thanks to a city wide ban on smoking in public places. As a result depictions of Frankie Valli and The Four Season smoking cigarettes have been replaced with toothpicks and shticks with finicky lighters. This latest rewrite on history is courtesy of the same city council that gave Chicago its much reviled and short lived foie gras ban.
Two years after removing goose liver from the dinner table the Chicago City Council refused to allow an exemption for historically accurate depictions of smoking on stage. The issue was forced in response to a theater patron who complained that the actors shouldn’t be allowed to smoke on stage in accordance with the smoking ban. After receiving the complaint producers sought an exemption for substitutes such as herbal cigarettes and even threatened to cancel the production altogether while alderman in the theater district fought it out with the rest of the council. The actors continued their performances with the smoking scenes intact until their hand was forced after the city council refused to budge.
The Chicago production of “Jersey Boys” has gone smoke-free in the last few days. It is as if the Four Seasons never took so much as a drag. But in New York and London, Frankie and the boys still puff away. That’s because those more enlightened cities allow artistic exceptions to their bans on smoking in public. But as the anti-smoking law is written in Chicago, no such exception is possible. And the law makes no distinction between tobacco and herbal cigarettes.
I wrote about the absurdity of this when the smoking ban was first proposed. I am no fan of smoking but to legally require that shows pretend that no-one ever smoked in the history of the world is absurd, unreasonable, damaging to the city’s cultural reputation and injurious to art.
The Chicago City Council defended their decision not to allow an exemption using a second hand smoke argument and advised the producers to strike all references of smoking and smoke-filled rooms.
“We worked over two years trying to pass an ordinance here that prohibited people from smoking. They just passed a law 73 to 42″ in the Illinois House that prohibits smoking statewide, said Health Committee Chairman Ed Smith (28th), who championed Chicago’s smoking ban. “We would be duplicitous if we … say it’s all right to allow people to smoke on the stage. … It’s an adversity to people who come to see those plays and the stagehands.” Ald. Ray Suarez (31st) agreed. “It would be hypocritical of me to vote for an ordinance that bans smoking in Chicago and now has passed statewide, then go out and say we’re going to give an exemption to actors smoking on stage where the cigarettes are going to be in the air” that affects theatergoers. Instead of exempting actors, Smith advised producers to modify the lines of the play to strike references to smoking and smoke-filled rooms.
It is not quite clear what finally forced the production’s hand but the Chicago Tribune reported that Chicago Police had no choice but to start issuing warnings.
Note that the alderman was not just talking about a smoking ban, he was also talking about “references” to smoking and smoke filled rooms. Thus the thought police strike again as another page is turned in the absurd antics of nanny state politics and history is rewritten forever thanks to liberals who are compelled to tell everyone how to run their lives.
