Dan Zeff

NOTHING EQUIVOCAL ABOUT IT In Bill Cain’s entertaining, stimulating Equivocation, William Shakespeare (spelled Shagspeare in the play) doesn’t radiate awe-inspiring genius. Instead, he’s a regular guy with a considerable talent for writing commercial plays for his acting company, but he faces a problem that may endanger his career, if not his life. Cain’s play deals…

NEITHER WILLIAMS OR THE GOODMAN AT THEIR BEST Sweet Bird of Youth is not top drawer Tennessee Williams. The play has some of Williams’ lyricism and humor, and at least one sharply etched character, but its Southern Gothic excesses are a self-parody of the playwright’s Never-Never Land Deep South. The much anticipated Goodman revival’”largely based…

INTO THE  WOODY American folksinger/composer/political activist Woody Guthrie lived during the Great Depression of the 1930’s and the turbulent wartime and postwar years of the 1940’s. In his music Guthrie became the voice of the common man and woman and child in America, especially the oppressed, the exploited, and the dispossessed. Woody Sez celebrates the man,…

GOOD PEOPLE; GREAT PLAY; AMAZING PRODUCTION David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People is a wonderful play receiving a terrific production at the Steppenwolf Theatre and headed by a magnificent performance from Mariann Mayberry. Those are the facts. The rest is commentary. Good People is set in Boston, especially working class south Boston, where the playwright grew up….

THIS ISN’T GREAT THEATER, BUT IT’S TERRIFIC NOSTALGIA The American novelist Peter De Vries once wrote that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Maybe he would have modified his observation after seeing I Love Lucy, Live on Stage at the Broadway Playhouse. The I Love Lucy TV sitcom of the 1950’s clearly held affectionate…

THE DANE’S THE THING The oft-produced Hamlet demands countless choices by a director and Michael Halberstam has met all the challenges; instead of overloading the evening with grandiose directorial concepts, he resolves the script’s knotty problems with intelligent interpretation and theatrical savvy. Like nearly all revivals of Hamlet, the director takes some liberties with the…

ENTERTAINING, BUT  WITHOUT THE COMIC  SIZZLE In 2009, Xanadu opened in downtown Chicago that turned out to be one of the delights of the season. It was a silly musical, but hip, satirical, nostalgic, and loaded with energy and visual invention. Fast forward to today and the Drury Lane Theatre’s revival: While there is considerable entertainment value,…

YOU BETTER CATCH THIS BEFORE IT REALLY IS THE LAST SESSION Mike Nussbaum is probably weary of hearing himself called the Grand Old Man of Chicagoland Theater and a local treasure, like Wrigley Field. But consider the record. Nussbaum has provided local audiences with superior performances for nearly 50 years. Those unfortunates who missed him…

IT’S ALL GREEK TO MEE Charles Mee’s plays are audacious, imaginative, weird, sometimes funny, and more often than not, powerful and thought provoking; they are not for all tastes, but audiences willing to sign on for one of Mee’s dramatic flights of fancy are guaranteed a wild ride that likely will make the viewer laugh,…

UNRESOLVED USE OF STORY James Still’s 80-minute play, Illegal Use of Hands, set in an old rural-American home, opens in the middle of a late-October night; an old man is reading in an armchair while rock music blares away, when suddenly there is a banging on the front door and two young men barge in….

MORE THAN JUST VARIATIONS ON A THEME 33 Variations starts out with a character asking the question, “Why did the great German composer Ludwig van Beethoven write 33 variations on a trivial little waltz by a mediocre amateur composer?” On the surface, the question itself may seem trivial, but playwright Moises Kaufman expands the mystery…

THE CAST IS GREAT. THE BOOK AND THE STAGING? NOT SO DREAMY Dreamgirls is based on the rise of the Supremes, America’s premiere girl singing group of the 1960’s. The musical opened on Broadway in 1981, won six Tony awards, and ran for nearly four years. Since then, the Michael Bennett musical has only two…

A DINNER IN REAL TIME Richard Nelson’s Sweet and Sad at the Profiles Main Stage has six characters gather around a dining table for 95 minutes of uninterrupted talk on a Sunday afternoon dinner at the Apple home in upstate New York on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 disaster. The action is presented in…

A HEARTBREAKING, FUNNY, AND COMPASSIONATE TALE FROM A PLAYWRIGHT WHO IS SORELY MISSED The audience never sees Marvin, the title character in Marvin’s Room. He’s an old man ravaged by cancer and senility, living in a dark room in his Florida home. His caregiver is his daughter Bessie, a 40-year old unmarried woman dying of…

IT’S A PLEASURE TO BE IN HARMS’ WAY It’s been quite a year for veteran Chicagoland actor James Harms; after receiving critical acclaim nationally for his performance in The Iceman Cometh at the Goodman, he now gives a dominating performance leading the Light Opera Works revival of Man of La Mancha, in which Harms plays…

TRASHY FUN Audience expectations need to be adjusted for a show like The Great American Trailer Park Musical. The title lets patrons know what they are in for: The topic will be trailer trash’”meaning the musical will feast on stereotypes, low comedy, and political incorrectness’”and the music will not display Stephen Sondheim-ish urban sophistication’”meaning that…

REEFER MADNESS IS SUCH A HIGH THAT YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE STONED TO ENJOY IT In 1936, a church group sponsored a motion picture aimed at warning young people about the dangers of marijuana. The film, called Reefer Madness, was a cheesy combination of over the top acting by Hollywood bit players and laughable…