C.J. Fernandes

AN OAK WHOSE ROOTS WON’T LET GO A flashlight illuminating a face from below: what else could follow that image but a ghost story. And what better time for a ghost story than the month that culminates in Halloween, that night when the boundary between this and the other world is at its thinnest, when…

ON THE THIRD RAIL: STRONG ACTORS KEEP THIS DUTCHMAN FLYING The Trap Door Theatre is a quintessential Chicago storefront theatre — it’s housed in a converted garage, accessed through a narrow walkway, almost invisible from the street — that has built its reputation on offbeat, experimental productions. Their previous production was the divisive Ghost Fetus,…

SINK YOUR TEETH INTO THIS BLOODY CUT OF MEAT At some time in the future, a band of rebels have staged a successful coup against the United States. The prevailing system of order has been violently overthrown. Cities are razed to the ground, with surviving citizenry housed in camps. Food is scarce. Medicine is scarcer….

CARB-LOADERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! “For the gods know I speak this in hunger for bread…†Alright, so that’s not from Julius Caesar but Coriolanus, that other Shakespeare play about a politician undone by his own ambition and hubris (and that coincidentally also features a character called Brutus), but in this “ad-rap-tation” of the Bard’s…

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. — John Keats Sleep-deprived and fortified with four cups of coffee, I hauled my cranky, cynical self on a Sunday morning to the Chicago Children’s Theatre in the West Loop to watch the opening production of their 20th season: a musical of Leo Lionni’s Frederick, a Caldecott Honor…

TWO CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR An aging, reclusive movie star strikes up a relationship with a struggling writer. It may sound familiar but this isn’t Sunset Boulevard, more’s the pity. The star in question is screen legend Ava Gardner, who, in the late 1980s, contracted British journalist Peter Evans to ghostwrite her autobiography….

THREE WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL In 1978, five women gather in an upper-middle-class home in Karaj, Iran, to primp and prepare themselves; one of them is getting married and being that they are her closest friends, the others are there to make sure she is at her best, both aesthetically and emotionally. It’s a scene…

NOBODY PUTS THIS BABY IN A CORNER A set doesn’t get any sparser than the one for Gangsta Baby, in the sense that there isn’t one. You step in off the street into a basement with two dozen chairs arranged along the walls. In a corner is a small built-in kitchenette, original to the building….

A STAR VEHICLE ON THE ROAD TO FRANCIS GUINAN I confess to some amount of trepidation as I settled into my seat at the Goodman Theatre, launching its centennial season with the world premiere of Lee Kirk’s Ashland Avenue, directed by Susan V. Booth. For weeks I’d been inundated with promotional images of television star…

A CLIFFHANGER For the Midwest premiere of TL;DR: Thelma Louise: Dyke Remix, a rock musical by Ellarose Chary (book & lyrics) and Brandon James Gwinn (music and lyrics), the entirety of the Theo Ubique space is transformed by set designer Rose Johnson into the world’s coolest garage; an entirely appropriate location for the world’s coolest punk rock garage band; they don’t have a…

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE… Early in the proceedings of Things with Friends, the new play by Kristoffer Diaz (Hell’s Kitchen, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity) a character dismisses another’s trauma with a snide, “I’m sorry. We all wish we didn’t see things fall”, to which the other responds, “Some of us actually wish that things…

WHO NEEDS A HEALTHY CORTEX WHEN YOU’VE GOT THIRTY-TWO SHOWSTOPPERS? The urge to create has served as a muse for countless forms of art: literature, opera, film, and theatre are littered with examples of the form. Opening the new season of Pride Arts at Center on Halsted A New Brain, a musical by multiple Tony winners,…

The circus is in town! The entrance to the Cambria Hotel on West Randolph Street in Chicago is so nondescript as to be almost invisible. Barely wider than its revolving door, you could walk right past it and not even know it was there. Once inside the tiny lobby, you’re directed to the back where…

MUFFLE THIS MUFFED; IT’S COMEDY LOST IN THE NOISE The films of Christopher Guest are sui generis. From hundreds of hours of improvisation, his talented troupe of actors create memorable characters whose consistent hallmark is their sincerity of purpose. There is nary a wink at the audience nor a trace of self-consciousness. These characters are…

RIDE THIS TRAIN TO THE END OF THE LINE One of Chicago’s oldest store-front theaters, City Lit, opens its 45th season with a production of Pulitzer winner, Stephen Adly Gurgis’ Jesus Hopped The ‘A’ Train. The play debuted almost twenty-five years ago to mostly strong reviews and has been revived frequently; its minimal set and…

FROM TWEE TO TRÈS MAGNIFIQUE It’s fascinating how some stories lend themselves better to one medium than the other. In 2001, the French romantic comedy, Amélie was an unexpected worldwide hit and briefly made an international star of its beguiling lead, Audrey Tatou. I’d watched it on release (in the theatre, natch) and thought it…

GAME. SET. NOT QUITE MATCH. Tennis great and feminist icon Billie Jean King gets the biography treatment in Billie Jean by Lauren Gunderson. Opening the new season of Chicago Shakespeare, this crowd-pleasing world premiere follows Billie Jean from her childhood in the 1950s through to the US Open in 2006 when the USTA National Tennis…

A FITFULLY AMUSING THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM IN SKOKIE A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a glorious farce, a 20th-century construction based on the characters and situations from the works of the old Roman playwright Plautus. The book is by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart (who…