Lawrence Bommer

NEVER SAY “NEVER AGAIN” Survivor guilt is supposedly small-scale suffering, compared to the agonies of those who never get the luxury of remorse. It’s a tricky feat to accommodate near evil. Now in a searing Midwest premiere by ARLA Productions at Chicago’s Stage 773, Alan Lester Brooks’s post-war drama A Splintered Soul examines an open-ended…

A DOO-WOP DREAM He’s going strong for a guy who died 400 years ago today. This, of course, is easily William Shakespeare’s most popular comedy, if only because it delivers some magical goods: There’s an epiphany near the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when the mixed-up quartet of wayward lovers who’ve been confoundedly mashed…

PRODUCES  MORE LAUGHS PER MINUTE THAN ANY OTHER MUSICAL It’s always springtime for Mel Brooks, who really does write musicals the way they used to. Even before Young Frankenstein, his 2001 triumph The Producers (based on the sidesplitting 1968 film with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) reverts to the anything-for-a-laugh, neo-vaudevillian, politically incorrect musicals of its…

AND EVITA KEEPS ROLLING IN That  great balcony scene is back. No, not R&J. It’s the one with Eva Duarte Perón’s valedictory aria “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina.” As this princess of the pampas in a prom dress chokes, then belts out, the second-act opening of the 1978 musical, all the right buttons get pushed: The…

DON’T WALK ON BY THIS SHOW “You won’t get a career from singing: Singing will give you a career.” That was all the encouragement that Dionne Warwick needed to make it big over 54 years. Reprising artistic director Jackie Taylor’s 2006 hit as it celebrates the Black Ensemble Theater’s 40th anniversary (“The Season of Greatest…

AND I AM TELLING YOU — YOU ARE GOING I never saw the two touring revivals of the Tony-honored Dreamgirls that played Chicago’s old Shubert Theatre. But, like Marriott Theatre’s riveting 2012 production, they couldn’t have supplied more soul-stirring passion than this homegrown revival by Porchlight Music Theatre. Even lacking the original pyrotechnics and Las…

A GREEN-EYED RAP ROMP  ADDS  MOOR TO THE MIX Before Othello: The Remix it was only Shakespeare’s comedies that received the Q brothers’ trademark, rap-happy revision’”Funk It Up About Nothin’ and The Bomb-itty of Errors. Who would have thought a tragedy could take this “ad-rap-tation”? It can. Boldly applying a hip (as in hop) transformation to Shakespeare…

A STUDY IN SPITE BECOMES A PUERILE HISSY FIT The joke’s on us in Thomas Bradshaw’s 75-minute Carlyle. Goodman Theatre’s premiere is agit-prop theater, a trifle that contains  more guts and nerve than wit or heart. Purportedly a kick-off rally for the title character’s bid to be a Republican senator from Illinois, it opens with a…

CAN A CLONE HAVE AN IDENTITY CRISIS? We share 99% of our genetic material with every other human, 90% with each chimpanzee, and 30% with any bunch of lettuce. (Talk about “six degrees of separation.”)   Now playing the Royal George Gallery Theatre, Caryl Churchill’s two-person drama A Number wonders whether that’s too close for comfort….

PUZZLE PIECES OF A PERSON Snapshots from a family album, jump cuts from a movie, scattered entries from a constant journal’”it’s hard to get a fix on Mary Page Marlowe, a very different offering from Tracy (August: Osage County) Letts. It’s enthralling too–because this new memory play from Steppenwolf Theatre Company, captivatingly captured by Artistic…

DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL, DON’T GO Lucas Hnath, a disconcertingly popular scribe, writes playful, pseudo-historical, and narrative-heavy dramas crammed with deliberately stilted, primer-prose language. Composed of simple sentences, Hnath’s almost childlike dialogue teems with shock-effect revelations and marinates in methodical sentimentality. He’s “repurposed” Walt Disney, Isaac Newton and Anna Nichole Smith, trivializing them for our…

NOT IN MY DOWNTOWN Mosque Alert, an explosive world premiere, is seen’”and felt’”from all sides. Jamil Khoury’s culture-clashing creation depicts a suburban showdown, a battle over whether to replace a beloved old library with a state-of-the-art (Islamic) community center and mosque. The locale for Silk Road Rising’s invaluable offering is the huge village of Naperville,…

DISRUPTION 1633 It’s intriguing but frustrating that Bertolt Brecht refuses to dramatize the most potentially powerful moment in The Life of Galileo. (It’s like presenting Romeo and Juliet without a love scene.) That’s the setup and depiction of the Italian physicist/astronomer’s most infamous defeat’”when, in 1633, under threat of torture from the Inquisition, the great…

BOYS WILL BE PIGS Stop the presses for a late-breaking alert: Men can be crude, drunk, womanizing wretches. This astonishing revelation fuels the bottom-feeding 75 minutes of Caroline M. McGraw’s utterly unedifying exposé. The Bachelors, a Midwest-premiere black comedy from Cole Theatre at the Greenhouse Theater Center, would only be news on Uranus. Erica Weiss’s…

BEATEN UP FOR COMING OUT Awesomely authentic, Chelsea M. Warren’s setting for after all the terrible things i do isn’t just a character in itself’”it’s a cast. This designer has perfectly constructed the cluttered interior of an independent bookstore in a small Midwestern town. Comfortable chairs are set out for browsing. There’s a green banker’s…

MISS MATCH MISMATCH Though it’s usually the other way around, sometimes musicals actually improve on the sources that inspire them. Arguably, West Side Story is stronger stuff than Romeo and Juliet, She Loves Me a warmer show than Parfumerie, The Boys from Syracuse a fresher take on folly than A Comedy of Errors, and, most…

THE WIZARD OF NOTES For half a century Harold Arlen did to notes what Monet made with colors: He found ways to make them make us very happy, equally sad, and never bored. A warm new offering from City Lit Theater, I’ve Got the World on a String:  Harold Arlen’s Songs of Love and Loss is,…