Jack Helbig (1958-2025)
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.Jack Helbig, known as a tough-but-fair critic for Newcity, the Chicago Reader and the Daily Herald as well as a dedicated and much-loved teacher, has died at the age of 66 in Oak Park IL.
A playwright and trained improviser himself, Jack understood the artist’s life, and he was appreciated for attending show after show, becoming an inveterate defender of the small and struggling. His work brought with it an intense intellectual curiosity and deep empathy for Chicago artists and their struggles for excellence. He also had a decades-long fascination with risky theater and improvisational comedy and with the creative Chicagoans who produced such work here across the last quarter of a century. To those who knew him best, he was known as a generous, ego-free, warm-hearted spirit who enjoyed artists and other writers – and who often became friends with the very people whose work he may have loved or may have annihilated. Leaders in the Chicago Theater world from Second City’s Kelly Leonard to early Annoyance Theater member Mark Sutton to co-founders Jonathan Pitts and Frances Callier to Newcity Editor/Publisher Brian Hieggelke, took to the airways to celebrate Jack’s friendship and support of Chicago theater. His own work at playwright/author include: The Grouch 2003, Acorn Theater MI), Hotel D’Amour (1993 & 1996, Buffalo Theater Ensemble at College of DuPage), My Night at Jacques (2003, Light Opera Works) , and The Girl, The Grouch and the Goat (2009, Chance Theater Company CA). In his work as an English teacher, Jack rose to a beloved department Head over a 17-year career at Chicago’s Holy Trinity High School. Since 2022, he taught English at Rochelle Zell Jewish High School in Deerfield. Jack was born in St Louis, graduated from the University of Chicago in 1980 and later completed a master’s in education at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Jack is survived by his wife, Sherry Kent, the couple’s daughter, Margaret Helbig, and sister, Jordan Kirk. In a Chicago Reader review of “Kinky Boots” at the Paramount Theatre in Aurora right after the pandemic, Jack wrote gorgeously of the return of the art form he loved but also was uncharacteristically self-descriptive, accurately describing himself as “a once-young, hip iconoclast, known for sharp-tongued reviews, who slowly over the many years of writing became less, well, young and eventually became less often recognized for his sharp opinions than for his fan-boggling resemblance to George R.R. Martin Credit to the Chicago Tribune for additional content. |