Garrison Keillor Brings Radio Show to Ravinia

A near-capacity crowd took a journey into a medium of the past with a very present-day bent as Garrison Keillor brought his live A Prairie Home Companion radio show to for its annual performance Saturday afternoon.

Keillor does the show, which is broadcast on NPR at 5 p.m. every Saturday, live from Ravinia once a year. For many onlookers in Highland Park on Saturday, the show had a special meaning. 

“I think it’s the last radio show still being broadcast,” Chicago attorney Allan Muchin said as he stood by his Pavilion seat. 

The audience could watch band members moving back and forth as they prepared for their next number while radio actors did a skit--something no one would observe on a television variety show. 

Chicago talent joins the regulars

Keillor emceed a show featuring his regulars plus some local talent: The Guy’s All Star Shoe Band and The Royal Academy of Radio Actors. They were interspersed with the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Kiri Deonarine, who drew the loudest cheers, rock singer Joe Puck and comedian Jack Zimmerman, who received the most laughs. 

“I don’t know where he [Keillor] finds these guys,” said Kirsten Jeron of Lake Bluff. 

Mary Keefe of Winnetka listens to the broadcast each week, though the show is usually background for other things she is doing. 

“I can’t believe how much fun it is to be here,” Keefe said. “To see one is so much different from hearing him in my car.” 

'We have a show to do'

Before the show went live on the air, Keillor and regular singer Andrea Suchy left the stage, walked up an aisle and mingled with the crowd on the lawn for 15 minutes. They also sang a duet of popular songs including “You’re Always on My Mind” and “Teach Your Children Well.” 

Keillor then returned to the stage and said, “We have a show to do.” 

The band started playing, the audience began to clap, feet stomped  in rhythm and the “On Air” sign lit up. 

“We’re live from Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, IL,” Keillor said. He told his nationwide radio audience about Ravinia, sparing few people in the neighborhood from his humor. 

“People here sit on the grass to hear music, all kinds of music,” Keillor said. “There was a group of suburban women in button downs and khakis who look better in men’s clothing than men. The Asians bring their children to hear classical music hoping it will improve their grades. Jewish teenagers spend Friday night here with Bubbe and Zayde.” 

If Keillor pulled few punches, Zimmerman pulled none. 

From wakes to taverns

Zimmerman described an Irish upbringing on Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s. He painted a picture of fathers who went to work, attended wakes and then, while children and mothers waited at the funeral parlor, downed a few at a tavern. 

People did not need to know the deceased well. 

“If you knew a friend of a second cousin that was OK,” Zimmerman said. “One day my mother said she did not see the notice in the papers and my father said ‘in the Herald American’ throwing the paper down on the table like a winning poker hand.” 

As a native of the South Side, the family rarely ventured north. 

“My mother never went north of the Loop except when she and my aunt ditched school to go to Wrigley Field to watch Hack Wilson,” he said about the legendary Cub outfielder who still holds the major league single season RBI record. 

“I grew up on the South Side and it brought it all back to me, the funeral parlors, everything,” Tom Angell of Falls Church, VA, said after the concert. “We never went to the North Side.”

Lyric singer a hit

Angell’s wife, Elsa, gushed about Deonarine. 

“She was wonderful. She acts while she sings. She’s going to be great. She already is,” she said. 

“And she was such a good sport,” Elsa added, describing an operatic rendition Deonarine did as a restaurant commercial. 

Deonarine sang two opera selections including one from Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. 

“Her voice was so clear. She’s going to be a star,” said Dave Nelson, a Lincolnshire resident who has sung in amateur classical choirs.

“There’s a reason it’s rarely performed,” Keillor said before Deonarine sang. The audience responded with its loudest applause of the night.