Lawrence Bommer

FUTURE SHOCK FROM A PAST PRANK In less than 90 minutes this new one-act by Meridith Friedman plays hard: By show’s end we get an absorbing case history in situational ethics. Cautionary scenarios like this usually turn on the audience: What would we do? This is no exception: It’s premise enough for  The Firestorm  (too extreme a…

A VERY SELECTIVE SILENCE “Let hands do what lips do.” Shakespeare never meant the line so literally as it feels in R+J: The Vineyard. Red Theater Chicago delivers a bold resetting, moving the tragedy’s star-crossed lovers from 14th century Verona to Martha’s Vineyard in the 1890s. According to adaptors Janette Bauer and director Aaron Sawyer,…

TEA AND SYMPATHY–AND TRANSGENDERED KIDS It makes an irresistible transformation tale: Teachers shape students, then get golden too as a Midas touch reverses course. We love it in  To Sir With Love, Dangerous Minds, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Fame, Stand By Me, Glee, Teacher’s Pet, Boys’ Town, The Miracle Worker, White Squall, Dead Poets Society–even negative versions…

SAILING OF AGE Prepare to buckle your swashes, shiver your timbers and avoid Davey Jones’ locker. In a co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre Company sets sail on a major maiden voyage–Mary Zimmerman’s world premiere journey to  Treasure Island. Robert Louis Stevenson’s children’s classic remains a rip-snorting epic of tattooed pirates, buried doubloons, delayed revenge,…

A SYMPHONY OF QUIRKS An Evening of Work by William Forsythe  is a dull title for a frenetic program. This is kinetic dance, its percussive paces almost too fast for feeling. Three years in the making, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s action appraisal of Forsythe, a prolific educator, choreographer, former Joffrey Ballet dancer and director of the…

FROM MYTHS TO MOVEMENTS A kind of  Mulan  among major works of 19th-century ballet (it celebrates a young nymph’s coming of age), Leo Delibes’  Sylvia  is not as famous as his simpler, more domestic  Coppelia. But the Palais Garnier’s 1876 retelling of several Greek myths continues to deliver considerable charm. It holds it even in this 1997 reinterpretation for the…

CAPTURES EVERYTHING BUT THE COMEDY Two big ironies attach to the new show at the Broadway Playhouse in Water Tower Place. First, it’s called Unspeakable but it’s not afraid to say anything: Shock value is built into every scene. Second, it couldn’t be less funny, though it depicts Richard Pryor, one of the great clowns…

I DID IT FOR THE DAUGHTERS Does evil alter when it switches sexes? Right now the Storefront Theatre is hosting  No Beast So Fierce, adaptor/director Max Traux’s gender-bending exploration of equal-opportunity malevolence. In 95 minutes Oracle Productions’ free-form reinterpretation of  Richard III  (which, however truncated, also includes a Shakespeare sonnet and allusions to  Macbeth) turns Shakespeare’s hunch-backed monster, the…

I’M FEELING UNLUCKY The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence is Theatre Wit’s latest local premiere by Madeleine George, author of Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, a 2014 production that succeeded beyond its script. A wonderment and a puzzlement, George’s creation, rewritten for this production, is an action-based appraisal of how machinery shapes humanity….

OSCAR’S JUKEBOX It’s a title to win a crowd on the spot: The revue Hollywood’s Greatest Song Hits just requires the right arrangements for a cabaret showcase of four solid talents. Add to that a strategic song selection to do justice to seven decades, celebrated notes that chronicle a near-century of American life and love….

THE OLD TESTAMENT MEETS THE NEW WORLD A saga of American origins, John Steinbeck’s most ambitious novel was published in 1952 and, three years later, starred James Dean and Julie Harris in a seminal film version. Archly aphoristic, portentous with easy wisdom, East of Eden is a solemn and serious California update of the Biblical…

DRAMATIC PROFILING In the three years since American Theater Company debuted this corrosive cultural tragicomedy on the North Side, Disgraced has become a massive hit, with revivals on Broadway, slated productions at 10 major regional theaters, as well as 32 more in the next two years and a film version with HBO. Now, helmed by…

A TRAGICOMEDY WITH TRICKS Well, why not do The Tempest as a magic show? It comes with Shakespeare’s territory. During the Duke of Milan’s unhappy exile, deposed by his nefarious brother, with only his daughter and two supernatural beings as companions, Prospero has become a sorcerer on an empty island. He’s able to cast spells,…

COMING CHOREOGRAPHY Opening its 60th season, the Joffrey Ballet literally leaps into the future with Millennials, a three-part program at the Auditorium Theatre. Closing Sunday, it features many bold new moves within two world premieres and one Chicago debut. Even if the majority of Joffrey dancers  qualify as  millennials, the rationale to showcase  today’s  dance is reason enough to…

BOYS WILL BE PIGS The title can mislead: Dogfight is not about World War I flying aces Eddie Rickenbacker and The Red Baron doing loop-the-loops as they shoot each other out of the sky. Dogfight does take place during war, but the title refers to a  much more cowardly act. Conducted by raw Marines in 1963…

THEY DO IT ALL FOR US 14 years ago, terror became a date in the calendar. “9/11” casts an ever darker shadow onto the future. It also remains the latest official loss of American innocence. (Happily, we suffer from such convenient cultural amnesia that we’ll regain it soon enough.) Lest we forget, here’s a two-person…

WHEN GETTING THERE ISN’T HALF THE FUN Call it a combination of Locked Up Abroad and Coming to America. In 90 gorgeously pictured minutes, “multi-racial” performer Debra Erhardt thrillingly chronicles her escape to America 35 years ago when she was 18. Her riveting narration turns  a one-person odyssey into a lavish epic: It enlists our imagination…

DELIVERANCE FROM DROUGHT It’s a terrific recipe for powerful theater. Confront audiences with an unfinished situation amid a collective challenge–with seemingly no way out. Then introduce a mysterious stranger who, like a catalyst, changes everything, maybe even himself. It works wonders with The Music Man, The Petrified Forest, Holiday, Shane, The Lone Ranger, Peter Pan,…