Dan Zeff

THE ICEMAN  HATH ARRIVED Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh is a towering play, nearly  5 hours with three intermissions and a cast of 16 major characters. Yet its theme can be summarized in five words’”We need illusions to survive. The Goodman Theatre is reviving a basically uncut Iceman (one character has been dropped) in what certainly is…

A PRODUCTION TO TAKE PRIDE IN All of Jane Austen’s novels are built on the same premise. A woman meets and marries an eligible man after a series of usually comic difficulties. But Austen extracts a remarkable amount of drama, comedy, and human interest from her domestic tales through her witty, ironic prose and her…

THE ACTING IS DARK AND DEEP BUT THE SCRIPT GETS LOST IN THE FOREST In a Forest, Dark and Deep may not be top drawer Neil LaBute, but it does provide a showcase for two of the area’s best performers to rant and rave at each other with considerable gusto for 90 uninterrupted minutes. The…

THE LONG MARCH E. L. Doctorow’s The March was a fine Civil War novel and likely would make an excellent motion picture, but as a play it has problems. The ambitious adaptation at the Steppenwolf Theatre certainly gives the book a brave try, but at 2 hours and 50 minutes the production turns out to…

A PRODUCTION THAT IS THE VERY MODEL The comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan can be an acquired taste for modern audiences. The plots are inane and the satire, so cutting in Victorian days, means little to today’s spectators. Still, the music is superb and the lyrics delicious, though it takes a sharp ear to…

A PERFECTLY COIFFED HAIRSPRAY A successful revival of Hairspray demands pinpoint casting in two roles: Tracy Turnblad, the show’s central character, must be short, exceedingly stocky, look like a high school girl, and have a performing motor that doesn’t stop for more than two hours, and  Tracy’s mother Edna must be credibly played by a man….

SECOND CITY KNOWS EXACTLY WHO THEY ARE Second City calls its 100th mainstage revue Who Do We Think We Are? The question is rhetorical. For more than half a century, Second City has been the citadel of improvisational theater in the United States, with an astonishing alumni list that runs from John Belushi and Alan…

A LITTLE OUTDATED, ANGELS IS STILL MANNA FROM HEAVEN In 1994, Tony Kushner’s two-part Angels in America plays – Millennium Approaches and Perestroika – opened locally at the Royal George Theatre where they provided a stunning viewing experience. In two sprawling works Kushner brought alive the American national scene of the 1980’s and early 1990’s,…

I SAY YOU WANT THIS REVOLUTION After the Revolution is a chewy new play about family dynamics and the difficulty of making moral judgments, especially after the fact. For audiences thirsting for a literate, intelligent, stimulating, and accessible new play, it will fill the bill nicely. The Amy Herzog 2010 drama premiered Off Broadway to…

THE IDEA WORKS BETTER THAN THE ACTUAL PRESENTATION Jackie Sibblies Drury’s new play could have the longest title in the history of the theater: We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915. It came out of the Victory…

MUSICAL STRIKES AN UMBILICAL CHORD Motherhood the Musical doesn’t break any new ground in taking on the joys and tribulations of motherhood, nor does the 100-minute revue deliver any surprises, but that doesn’t lessen its entertainment value. This is one clever and witty show. Granted, the maternity material is aimed at the ladies, but menfolk…

IT’S NOT SAFE TO GO BACK IN THE KITCHEN Along with cutting meat for a living, Valerie, the butcher in Marisa Wegrzyn’s impressive The Butcher of Baraboo, is a middle-aged woman who is the center of an over-the-top dysfunctional family  that takes the audience on a funny, disturbing, sometimes harrowing ride at A Red Orchid Theater….

THE PLAY’S ACTING’S THE THING Plenty of negatives can be directed toward Lee Blessing’s Chesapeake, which suffers from personality disorder: Is it a satire? A comedy? A fantasy? Does it even know, or care? Fortunately, these critical reservations are mostly disarmed by Greg Matthew Anderson’s brilliant performance. This is a good thing because Mr. Anderson…

HAUNTINGLY INTIMATE Ghost stories are difficult to bring off on stage. The physical reality of flesh and blood actors works against the sense of the supernatural and the suspense and horror that give the genre its distinctive flavor. That’s why ghost stories are generally more effective on the printed page or in the movies or…

A FREUDIAN TRIP Freud’s Last Session at the Mercury Theater is a “what if” play. What if the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the English professor and author C. S. Lewis met in Freud’s study in London for a morning of conversation? What if that meeting took place in 1939 on the day World War…