My friend, George Wendt, was as kind and thoughtful a human being as walked on this planet. He was a true man of the Theatre, and perhaps one of the most underrated actors I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. His performance in Funnyman by Bruce Graham was inspired, as so many of his friends and Northlight audiences can attest. He worked as hard at Northlight as he did on Broadway.
I think it’s important for a macro look at George Wendt’s career to realize that he was a true man of the theater. George worked on Broadway. George worked in London and Ireland, and George worked in regional theatre both here in Chicago at Northlight and at the Royal George Theatre. He did two world premieres for me, taking risks that the audience would only see him as Norm. In Funnyman, the meta-theatrical nature of the character reinvented their perception. Our monthly check-ins were filled with great show business stories, and in his case, so many observations about the national theater scene. He was a voracious reader of Variety and Playbill as well as American Theatre Magazine. George kept up.
It was always about the hang with George, and during the run of Rounding Third, we delighted in barbecuing a Turducken in my backyard with disastrous results. Tim Kazurinski and George sold me on doing Neil Simon’s Odd Couple, adding pals like Bruce Jarchow to the card players. Sadly, George had a medical emergency during tech, and Marc Grapey stepped in to cover for him brilliantly in the run.
The morning of his procedure, Bernadette, his wife, and I stood in his hospital room as he tried to convince the surgeon to let him go on for first preview.
“He’s my boss, doc,” he said, pointing at me. “Ask him. We have an audience Friday night! “
“I’m not making Bern a widow, George,” I said. “That’s what understudies are for.”
Grapey was great and took over for the run, I’m delighted to say.
So many people knew George, and he knew them, and his remarkable memory for names and experiences was impressive. I came away from our monthly chat, learning more from him than he got from me, certainly. But George’s real secret sauce was his love of Bernadette and his family.
You know he didn’t have to come to Skokie to fill our theatre for so much less than he made in Hollywood. But as his pal Tim Kazurinsky said to me, he loved being on stage every night. The laughter nourished him. And he could recount every one of those laughs in Richard Dresser’s Rounding Third, a play he loved doing. I wish he could have done it in New York.
As I watched NBC’s national news on the night he died, George’s face popped up in the third spot of Lester Holt’s newscast. In between the horrific news of “the Big Beautiful Bill” and the latest sadness from Gaza, George reminded us all of our humanity and of a simpler time.
He would regularly schlep his Beer book to Comic Cons to sign autographs and pose for pics. He referred to it as the Norm Petting Zoo. But it let him work for me for comparatively little. I did commercials for the same reason, to work in storefront theatres for $100 a week. Because George was a real Man of the Theatre, as Martha Lavey, the late Artistic Director of Steppenwolf, would say.
I cannot express my debt of gratitude for George’s help in lifting Northlight up. And I’ll miss those monthly gossipy gab fests like crazy.” One by one our old friends are gone,” as Johnny Olaf said in The Godfather, a film we quoted frequently. But George left a huge mark, and our ghost light burns brighter because of him.
BJ Jones
Northlight Artistic Director
