C.J. Fernandes

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…

SEND IN THE CLOWNS Farce is not a style of performance one sees too often these days and that’s probably because it is extraordinarily difficult to pull off, requiring complete commitment from cast and crew to its sensibilities, razor-sharp comic timing, physical comedy chops, and tight pacing and direction. There’s a lot that can go…

COLOR ME DISAPPOINTED I came to see the Goodman Theatre’s current production of The Color Purple with a complicated history. I devoured Alice Walker’s novel three times as a callow teenager and recoiled from Spielberg’s 1985 Disneyfied cinematic adaptation, abandoning the VHS midway through. Since then, The Color Purple has been adapted into a Broadway…

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ What is theatre? This was the question that popped into my head as I took my seat in the tiny TUTA Theatre space in Chicago’s Ravenswood Manor neighborhood, ready to take in their production of Celine Song’s Tom & Eliza: a…

SICKENINGLY FUNNY Noah Diaz’s You Will Get Sick, which opened last night at Steppenwolf, is an odd bird of a play. It begins with an irresistible premise: a middle-aged woman, Callan, responds to a flyer promising “$40 $20″ to anyone who will receive a phone call from a stranger; the only requirement being that she…

STORYTELLING THAT LAUNCHES A THOUSAND SHIPS There is a moment in Court Theatre’s fourth (!) iteration of An Iliad where The Poet holds a flashlight below his chin—I immediately flashed back to memories of ghost stories told in a tent while lights were supposed to be out. The conceits of Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s…