C.J. Fernandes

TOLKIEN’S CLASSIC QUEST BECOMES INVENTIVE ENSEMBLE STORYTELLING A clever, resourceful adaptation that turns theatrical minimalism into maximum adventure. Taking you “There and Back Again” in the best possible way, this sparkling production is a delight. The first thing that hits you when you walk into the upstairs theater at the Greenhouse is Jacqueline Penrod’s gorgeous,…

A SAVVY, GLORIOUS UPDATE It took three productions, but Goodman’s Centennial Season has finally hit its stride. Pour one out for Richard Greenberg, one of the great American playwrights of the last several decades, who, even after his death last year, has graced us with a stellar update of a screwball gem from 1928. Philip…

It’s the little ways you try together; cry together; lie together—that make perfect relationships         – Stephen Sondheim, Company Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, in a high stone tower, there lived a beautiful woman who hated her husband of twenty-five years and waited every day for him…

“A teasin’ squeezin’ pleasin’ kinda time.” — Shania Twain As drama goes, you can’t get more low stakes than the driving event of Hugo Timbrell’s My Life as A Cowboy, now playing at the tiny Open Space Arts theater in Uptown, and extended to March. Conor, a seventeen-year-old gay man in Croydon, a dreary suburb…

This oral history of the Irish-American journey soars when it sings A history lesson masquerading as a jukebox musical, The Irish … and How They Got That Way is the creation of Pulitzer winner Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes) who wrote the book, and wove in a selection of standards spanning centuries old folk music from…

A DELICATE CHAMBER PIECE THAT WILL BREAK YOUR HEART One of the advantages of a small performance space is that, in the right hands, one can set the mood even before the play has begun. In the Chicago premiere of Anna Ouyang Moench’s Birds of North America, the seating area at A Red Orchid Theatre…

FOUR UKRAINIAN REFUGEES NAVIGATE WAR’S AFTERSHOCKS IN A NIGHTMARE OF BUREAUCRACY Natalka Vorozhbyt’s darkly funny, deeply bruising play finds Trap Door Theatre at its most urgent—and most human. Four women push mobile doorjambs around the stage as the audience filters in. Their movement is slow and halting, as if moving through fog. Once the theatre…

A HOLIDAY MYSTERY WITH VICTORIAN MISCHIEF ON ITS MIND Chesterton by way of Conan Doyle, wrapped in Wodehouse-style tomfoolery Arthur Conan Doyle wrote only one Christmas-themed Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle — coincidentally, the first Holmes story I ever read — which was adapted into a charming play by Michael Menendian…

A THRILLER THAT OUTLASTS ITS TWIST Even when we know what’s coming, the tension holds Let’s talk about the cojones required to mount a production of Gaslight nowadays. Even if we assume — a tall order, that assumption — that most of the audience has not seen, or does not know, the plot of George…

THE OG CHRISTMAS GHOST STORY The Goodman puts the chills back in the chestnuts ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ In some ways, it is remarkable that Goodman Theatre’s annual production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has persisted as a theatrical tradition during the holidays. Theatre is expensive as a…

NO GROWN-UPS ALLOWED — SORT OF CCT’s Beatrix Potter party charms kids, critics, and everyone in between ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ “Channel your inner three-year-old, not your adult,” was the advice given to me as I settled into my seat at Chicago Children’s Theatre. To which my immediate unspoken…

TOAD-ALLY DELIGHTFUL Ribbiting from start to finish, this Year goes by in a flash. ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad series has delighted generations of young readers for decades, beginning in 1970. In 2000, his daughter Andrea Lobel (a well-regarded theatrical scenic designer in her own…