Lawrence Bommer

HUMOR CAN BE HOLY When, earlier this year, I saw Bluebird Arts’ revival of Sarah Ruhl’s magically realistic domestic drama, I couldn’t grasp the buzz behind her successful whimsy. Yes, it had played Goodman Theatre and a previous production at the Athenaeum Theatre, but it seemed consumed by its own quirks. Happily, a definitive delivery…

HANDEL WITH CARE Talk about a 135-year labor of love! This all-volunteer choir’”founded in 1872 after the Great Chicago Fire and performing at the opening of the Auditorium Theatre in 1899 and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition’”must sing. Since 1879 they’ve devoted untold hours of rehearsals and performances to their signature rendition of Handel’s masterpiece,…

CHRISTMAS CHESTNUTS NEED A NUTCRACKER Even though the second half of this holiday favorite actually seems set in spring (with the “Waltz of the Flowers” as chief evidence), its warmth is never more welcome than in winter. Tchaikovsky’s tale of plucky Clara’s defeat of the wicked mice and her rescue of a now-human Nutcracker born…

NOT TOO FAST TO FEEL This latest revue from Chicago’s comedy empire won’t be confused with its 102 predecessors. The Second City’s Panic on Cloud 9 isn’t half as frenzied as the title implies. For one thing, there are fewer and longer sketches, and they don’t all end in punch lines or exit laughs. Often…

IF THERE’S A BUDDY COP 3, THEN THERE IS NO GOD Strange doings happen for arbitrary reasons in the police station in Shandon, Indiana, the setting for an inconsequential one-act called Buddy Cop 2. Penned by the Brooklyn-based playwriting team of Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen (who call themselves the Debate Society), this Midwest premiere…

EPIPHANY CENTRAL Winner of this year’s ATCA Steinberg Award, Lauren M. Gunderson’s I and You is even more a gift to actors than to audiences. Her taut, 85-minute, two-character drama offers loud and lively exchanges between teenagers Caroline and Anthony. They are mired in adolescent angst and pubescent pipe dreams but blessed with impulsive honesty….

SCROOGE GETS RAPPED These eighty glorious minutes of boom-box beats get into your blood and bones’”and inevitably they reach the heart. Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s latest “ad-rap-tation” from the Q Brothers and Rick Boynton (creators of Funk It Up About Nothin’ and Othello: The Remix) plays the Dickens with a Christmas classic. Inventing perpetual motion as…

CURSES! SAVED AGAIN! Thanksgiving hasn’t happened but, yes, it’s time for the 37th second coming of Goodman Theatre’s beloved cash cow. A Christmas Carol remains their venerable, popular and’”to addicted theatergoing Chicagoans’”invaluable, holiday hallmark. After so many Scrooges and Marleys over two generations, the slightest changes loom large: That, of course, provides the best excuse…

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER MADE BETTERER AND BETTERER A signature work ripe for revival, the eponymous Lookingglass Alice is back for the holidays and New Year, brilliantly tricked-up with the most aggressive and interactive make-believe this side of Disney. In 100 minutes, adaptor David Catlin’s hip and arch, sine qua non staging of Lewis Carroll’s Through…

JUST A CLOSER WALK WITH PATSY Patsy Cline, the once and future crossover country icon who made audiences “fall to pieces,” couldn’t be more fondly or accurately recalled. It happens weekly in Rogers Park’s No Exit Café through at least December. Sweet, spunky, and sincere, Fred Anzevino’s revival of the tribute Always: Patsy Cline sums…

A NOT QUITE FRACTURED FAIRY TALE A late bloomer, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale belies its adage that “A sad tale’s best for winter.” This tragi-comedy has a spring to it as well, contrasting the first act’s stern Sicilian-set tale of one ruler’s instant jealousy (which kills his wife and child) with, 16 years later, a…

GETTING THERE IS HALF THE FUN One of Chicago’s longest running, righteously rooted hits, Hellcab follows a strong and simple formula: Depict the encounters a Chicago cab driver experiences on a very cinematic Christmas Eve. We watch this tried and true cabbie in an actual yellow car (with the top cut away for an unobstructed…

THE SLEUTH, THE DIVA, AND THE NAPOLEON OF CRIME Over many seasons P.G. Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle have been very good to City Lit, rightly since the theater fully returns the compliment. Reviving a past pleasure, director Terry McCabe’s sprightly adaptation of Holmes and Watson puts the cocaine-snorting, deduction-delivering master detective and his brusque…

GETTING ROOTS WRONG The Dark Continent just got a bit less light. Concluding their all-Lynn Nottage season (which featured Ruined and Intimate Apparel), Eclipse Theatre Company offers the sardonic parable Mud, River, Stone, a culture-clashing drama. Nottage stalwartly addresses the challenges faced by African-Americans who want to be both, specifically two upscale New York tourists…

WE SHALL DANCE! It’s no puzzlement why this sumptuous reclamation of Broadway greatness, Marriott Theatre’s The King and I, is such a grand night for singing, an enchanted evening, and, like its song, “Something Wonderful.” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s semi-historical domestic drama’”the unlikely alliance between a Siamese monarch in the 1860s and a British governess/tutor’”shows how…

PRIDE COMETH BEFORE AN ICEBERG Griffin Theatre Company’s total triumph is a strange success. It’s odd that a more intimate version of a musical called Titanic can so succeed. The cast is reduced from 45 to 20, and Jonathan Tunick’s original orchestrations, updated by Ian Weinberger, are closer to the actual ship’s itinerant band. Not…