Charles Smith and Chuck Smith, two venerable artists with a long and auspicious history in Chicago theater, don’t just have similar names. They’ve been friends and collaborators for close to 40 years. Anyone who knows them knows not to call Charles “Chuck,” or Chuck “Charles,” on pain of gentle correction.

Their latest, and let’s surely hope not their final, teaming up is for an American Blues Theater show called “Golden Leaf Ragtime Blues,” a play that goes back almost four decades, having first been developed at American Blues in 1987. As far as I am aware, though, the first full production of the final version did not take place until 2016, when the show, a piece about a pseudo-paternal friendship between an aging and crusty white vaudevillian and an African American teenager, was fir

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