Chicago theater critic Jack Helbig died last week from a heart attack at age 66 after more than four decades of penning reviews that ranged from wrecking ball to bear hug — and everything in between.
“He had high standards,” said his wife, Sherry Kent. “He wanted people to do good theater, so he liked to nudge them and maybe he was a little more outspoken in how he nudged people in his younger years.”
In a review published in the Reader in 1993, Mr. Helbig eviscerated “Killer Joe” and called its writer, Tony Award winner/actor Tracy Letts, a hack.
“At the center of the play is something so disturbing, so gratuitously nasty, brutish, and misogynistic it all but cancels out the work’s finer qualities,” he wrote.
Letts later encountered Helbig outside a separate theater production and called him the male genitalia of a horse.
“Why Letts chose those particular words? I have no idea, but I think Jack might have been insulted at first, but ultimately he took it as a badge of honor,” recalled Tony Adler, a former editor at the Reader.
“There’s been a lot of talk about [Helbig’s] harshness. I never felt that way. I thought he was remarkably honest. There was really just that one famous review of ‘Killer Joe’ where he just eviscerated it, other than that, no, I don’t think he was ever out to get anybody. What I would call his work overall was candid, but informed by a lot of knowledge,” Adler said.
“He backed up what he wrote, and he did not hold grudges,” said Kerry Reid, who is the theater and dance editor at the Reader. “I always found it interesting that some people took such great umbrage with what he wrote. The longer he wrote, there was more of a sense that ‘I want to explain why this isn’t working.’ He wasn’t going for cheap shots. If he didn’t like something, he sounded like a disappointed father or teacher, like ‘I know you can do better.’ And when he liked something he was just absolutely unabashed in being enthusiastic about it and didn’t worry about the possibility of how being seen as a cheerleader might undercut his credibility.”
Mr. Helbig wrote reviews for more than 40 years for several publications, including the Sun-Times, the Daily Herald, NewCity and the Wednesday Journal in Oak Park. Mr. Helbig, who died at Rush Oak Park Hospital, had been scheduled to review “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” this weekend at the Drury Lane Theatre in Oakbrook Terrace.
“He lived for chatting with people,” said his wife. “He was a very curious, smart and funny guy. And he was a voracious reader; our house in Oak Park is jam packed with books.”
In addition to working as a theater critic, Mr. Helbig was a teacher. He taught English for 17 years at Holy Trinity High School in Wicker Park, and for the last few years had been teaching at Rochelle Zell Jewish High School in Deerfield.
Mr. Helbig, who grew up in St. Louis and attended the University of Chicago, studied at iO Theater and The Second City and was an occasional actor and playwright.
“He had a sense of what it was like as a performer and someone who puts things on stage,” Adler said. “The only frustration in his career is he’d have liked to have received more slings and arrows himself if his work had been seen more.”
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter Margaret Helbig, who is a police officer in suburban Minneapolis.
A memorial is being planned.