Lawrence Bommer

FACELESS FOLLOWERS OF TWITTER AND MAO There’s a fascinating paradigm shift in the middle of The Hundred Flowers Project, Christopher Chen’s cautionary stage and video thriller. Whether you can believe it or not, the first-act rehearsal of a play about Mao Tse Tung’s propagandistic   “Hundred Flowers Project,” “Great Leap Forward,” and Cultural Revolution becomes, in…

LEAPING BIPEDS! There’s one more chance’”tonight’”to see five intriguing dances on display at the Harris Theater, exciting work from the reliable 52-year-old Giordano Dance Chicago troupe. Kinetic and percussive both in sound and steps, these are go-for-broke showcases of stamina as much as grace under literal pressure. The stand-out, as much for style as notability,…

IN SOME WAYS, THIS PARADE PASSED ITSELF  BY First performed in Chicago by Bailiwick Repertory, now dutifully revived by BoHo Theatre, the potentially pile-driving Parade by bookwriter Alfred Uhry and composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown reprises an ugly and evergreen tragedy. Their driven musical chronicles the reflexive racism that, a century ago, doomed a suspect stranger. Here…

LEAPS AND LAUGHS: A STRANGE AMALGAM It’s a worthy experiment, even if the eclectic results seem maddeningly inconclusive. For three more performances, two very different Chicago arts troupes share the same Harris Theater stage in a curious merger of movement and comedy. Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and The Second City, bastions of contemporary dance and…

A DREAM WITHIN A DANCE Borrowed from the Pennsylvania Ballet, Joffrey Ballet’s latest offering (running through Oct. 26 at the Auditorium Theatre) is not your usual Swan Lake. Not to be compared with the Trocks’ respectful travesty, the original 1877 production by the Bolshoi, or the psychodrama of the film Black Swan, Christopher Wheeldon’s invigorating…

STEALING CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE The Submission is a devious, double-edged title for Jeff Talbott’s equally transgressive play. It refers both to the cold (as in out-of-nowhere) entry of a script for production consideration in the prestigious Humana Festival, and to the endgame of an ugly quest for dominance between a black actress and a…

TWILIGHT IN TIVOLI Following their productions of Brecht’s The Mother and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, venturesome Oracle Theatre brings us another thespian rarity. This fall’s find is Gore Vidal’s adaptation of Romulus by Friedrich Dí¼rrenmatt (The Physicists, The Visit). Cleverly staged by Kasey Foster, this 90-minute curiosity is a playful, anachronistic, and subversive look at…

EARNING THEIR FUTURE At 25 years young, River North Dance Chicago is as old as its current dancers, most born when it began. They grew up to find the perfect home for their non-negotiable talent. Celebrating that quarter century at River North’s Harris Theater home, Frank Chaves’s troupe displays its wares with a program featuring…

CAPITOL CRIMES “A plague on both your houses!” Without naming either political party, that’s just what Maxwell Anderson wished over 80 years ago through his Pulitzer Prize-winning Both Your Houses. Retrieved from 1933 and given Last Week Tonight urgency by the ever exemplary Remy Bumppo troupe, this well-made play is quite a contemporary departure from…

AN ALL YOU CAN ETTA BUFFET A Black Ensemble Theater hit in 2005, At Last: A Tribute to Etta James is back in (the pleasure of) business. It’s also updated to reflect the last decade of “The Matriarch of R&B,” who died in 2012 at the age of 73. Known affectionately as “Miss Peaches,” this…

WINNING SMALL Still potent after 42 years, Caryl Churchill’s corrosive class comedy Owners pits two outlooks on life against each other. In one corner you have Churchill’s now-patented “top girl,” the protagonist and anti-heroine Marion. She’s a predatory user/owner who can never get enough. But for all her snarling self-entitlement Marion is lonely at the…

RED, WHITE AND PAS DE BLEU Marking the 125th anniversary of Chicago’s glorious and historic Auditorium Theatre, American Ballet Theatre, which used to come here every season, is all too briefly making a rare, weekend-only return engagement. They come bearing great gifts: an All-American Celebration of the New York company’s best known works, signature pieces…

SMOKEFALL GETS IN YOUR EYES It opened a year ago in Goodman’s smaller Owen Theatre. Due to rave reviews and popular demand, it’s now the fall opener in the larger Albert enclave. Clearly, Noah Haidle’s Smokefall struck a lot of nerves and vital organs. Its funky fame can put a critic who missed its 2013…

A WHISTLEBLOWER’S CONVENIENT SUICIDE Urgent, cinematic, and breathlessly intense in everything but its intermission, TimeLine Theatre Company’s true-life exposé of a truth-teller and his martyrdom delivers a heavy dose of thinking theater. Its rather un-ironic title accuses the audience as much as the authorities. Soon to become a feature film, Danny Casolaro Died for You…

LAUGHTER IS THE WORST MEDICINE Humor and hygiene play off each other in Sarah Ruhl’s much-praised but not altogether satisfying 2004 romantic comedy. Now fitfully revived by the new Bluebird Arts troupe, Luda Lopatina Solomon’s staging feels no less half-hearted than this mood-shifting script deserves. Bluebird’s two-act domestic drama is a strange amalgam of magic…

LOVE AS A MOVEABLE FEAST Conor McPherson’s plays are so rooted in the characters that plot is really revelation. With unforced warmth, he captures loneliness in the act of self-effacement and love as the best way to prove we’re really here. Steppenwolf Theatre’s fall offering The Night Alive is no nocturne’”it’s typically gritty, with self-inventing…

A BEDTIME STORY FOR EVERY ADULT With a justifiably extended run, Route 66 Theatre Company’s richly rewarding world premiere of Caitlin (A Twist of Water) Parrish’s The Downpour is a story as sweet as it is scary’”no easy feat in writing or staging. But director Erica Weiss has a Midas touch, and Parrish’s tantalizingly twisting…

OUT OF THE COUNTRY AND OUT OF LUCK Seldom has a title been more ironic: The World of Extreme Happiness, specifically the booming factory city of Shenzhen in urban China, is definitely extreme. You feel it in the particular pain endured by the rural poor who flock there, hoping to change or make their fortunes….

STAY FOR  A WEILL An impeccable labor of love, Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre’s heartfelt homage, A Kurt Weill Cabaret, pays unstinting tribute to a deft and dynamic composer. Kurt Weill’s impressive range stretched from the agitprop intensity of Three Penny Opera, the signature piece for the decadent Weimar Republic, to the Broadway sophistication of One Touch…

AFTER THE FALL IS OVER A Midwest premiere by Northlight Theatre, Amanda Peet’s topical domestic drama The Commons of Pensacola isn’t exactly about Bernie Madoff’s unimprisoned wife nor how her family deals with disgrace. But as inspired speculation, it will do’”at least until a tell-all Ruth Madoff exposé comes along. Apart from dramatizing the collateral…