C.J. Fernandes

A REVOLUTION LOST IN THE (BEAUTIFUL) NOISE Revolution(s) is the first Owen Theatre production of Goodman’s centennial celebration. With a book by Zayd Ayers Dohrn and music and lyrics by multiple Grammy winning, rap-metal legend Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave), the musical examines the effects of transgenerational economic and racial injustice in modern…

All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.     — Leo Tolstoy The most remarkable thing about Joel Drake Johnson’s Four Places is how it prepares you for what’s to come in its very first scene and still manages to surprise you. Opening in an intimate black box…

DON’T KILL THE FATTED CALF JUST YET — THE PRODIGAL SON RETURNS EMPTY-HANDED “I was fifteen. Do you remember fifteen? For me, it was a special, beautiful room in Hell.” That brilliant line opens Prodigal Son, an autobiographical play from Oscar, Tony, and Pulitzer Prize winner John Patrick Shanley (Doubt, Moonstruck). First opening Off-Broadway in…

A BEAUTIFUL NIGHTMARE IN A HOUSE THAT BLEEDS ART As a fan of the horror genre in every medium, how could I resist the chance to review something as delightfully titled as House of the Exquisite Corpse. That said, given my predilection—some would say, obsession—for avoiding all information about a show prior to viewing it,…

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…