Great Chicago Fire Festival

Performed on the Chicago River, the Chicago Fire Festival was the saddest thing found floating on water since Whitney Houston. It was packed and hard to see as the river banks were jammed with nearly 30,000 people. Luckily, at the current homicide rate in the city, this number should be down substantially by next year. The event included lowering cauldrons of fire into the river, symbolizing Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods and also many of those neighborhoods’ primary heat source. There was a children’s choir that floated by on a boat, symbolizing the innocence and cost-​effectiveness of youth. And as you now know, RedMoon Theater botched the signature moment — the lighting of three Victorian wooden houses. Ok, so setting wood on fire isn’t RedMoon’s thing. I say put them to work building houses all over the city so we don’t have to worry about another Great Chicago fire. If you bring the family, get there half an hour early. Then, be prepared to answer your kids’ tough questions, like «Why isn’t anything happening?» and «What am I being punished for?»
Many think that celebrating a gruesome tragedy, like re-​heated Little Caesar’s, is completely tasteless. And some say remembering the 1871 fire by setting a bunch of other stuff on fire would be like having an air-​show to commemorate ⁹⁄₁₁. However, I don’t think the organizers went far enough. I would have liked to hear the children’s choir belt out «The Roof Is On Fire» and then see an illuminated list of the fire victims’ names in Word’s Charcoal font. But the event’s organizers insist this festival was about rebirth. And if you have ever lived in or visited Chicago’s far south or west sides, you’ll realize by «rebirth,» they mean less majestic Phoenix and more Pet Sematary. At the end of the day, though, we should be thankful we gave hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to some sham, fly-​by-​night theater outfit. By not investing that money in improving public schools, polluted water ways, or crumbling infrastructure, it guarantees we’ll have another tragedy to have a festival for in the near future.

I know it’s not the planner’s fault that it happened to be unseasonably cold on the night this happened. But unless you got here super here and knew where to stand, you had a good chance of seeing absolutely nothing.
After over an hour of standing with a few hundred other people in a spot that seemed like it could be prime real estate, I got tired of looking at a little cauldron of fire and left. I didn’t even get to see all the technical mishaps I read about on the way home.
It was a nice idea, but if you plan something to take place in the Chicago river, you can either:
A) send stuff up and down the river (see St. Patrick’s Day green dye)
or
B) do it really high up (like tightrope guy)
Otherwise, it’s not really well suited for an audience spread out several city blocks.

Poorly planned even if they had been able to get the structures they DESIGNED to burn to light on fire. Slow moving, no build up, and just a waste of money.

Watching our city burn in effigy on the river. Hooray!
Or that was the plan. What an abject failure. The houses took forever to ignite and went out before they completely burned down.
So they skipped to manual ignition, which took another 30 minutes to get started with the help of a little gasoline. And when that failed, they skipped straight to fireworks. Which, admittedly, were pretty awesome and saved this from being my first one-​star review.
A lot of issues to iron out for next year. If there’s a nexr year…