Lawrence Bommer

ENCHANTED FORGIVENESS When the sorcerer Prospero discards his magic staff and abjures his spellbinding ways, it is, of course, Shakespeare’s swan song too. (The play will no longer be the thing.) The Tempest, his final finished work, is a valedictory to the 35 or so splendid stage stories that precede it. If Prospero, perhaps to…

AN EVICTION NOTICE FOR THE 1% This is Brecht’s real Mother Courage, not “Canteen Anna,” the pointless survivor of the cautionary later play who thrives on war (which, Brecht implies, capitalism does as well). Written in 1930,  The Mother is an unashamed piece of agitprop, a more driven and optimistic successor to The Threepenny Opera of…

PARENTAL RIGHTS, GRANDPARENTAL WRONGS As with her hit debut drama Spinning Into Butter (1999), Rebecca Gilman’s newest agitation Luna Gale, directed by Robert Falls at Goodman Theatre, puts the versatile Mary Beth Fisher in the hot seat. Instead of playing a university dean coming to terms with her own racism, Fisher now depicts another authority…

AN EXALTATION OF LARK We all know Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, and The Children’s Hour, even the 1977 film Julia, based on her book Pentimento. But The Lark is easily the playwright’s least characteristic work. Perhaps that’s because this history play is a 1955 adaptation of L’Alouette, a 1953…

NO CLOSURE EVER A tangle of shifting sympathies and treacherous turns, Johnna Adams’ spare 75-minute, two-hander one-act teeters on a knife edge during every burning second. Its setting and situation are simple: a previously scheduled parent-teacher conference in a 5th grade classroom in Lake Forest. Yet at heart it’s no such thing. Profiles Theatre’s Midwest…

DONE TO DEATH A ton of fun gets dumped in this calculated musical spinoff from Mel Brooks’ funniest film. As with The Producers, Brooks’ expanded version of Young Frankenstein (with his own songs) was repackaged as a merry musical by director/choreographer Susan Strohman in 2007. No gags got left behind; there are at least ten…

DO TELL MAMA TO COME TO THIS CABARET Just as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show swallows Annie Get Your Gun, the Kit Kat Klub engulfs a backstage story that becomes a show within a show in Cabaret. The conflation of illusion and delusion cleverly mirrors the musical’s anti-heroine: the cocaine-snorting, high-living, lonely hedonist Sally Bowles,…

A BARD OUT OF WATER Here’s what we know for sure is the background for MadKap Production’s Midwest premiere: In 1933 Nobel laureate and, in his own estimation, the greatest writer in the world  George Bernard Shaw and his dutiful wife Charlotte Townsend Shaw  embarked on a self-declared “world tour” that took in Hollywood’”that is, after a…

ANOTHER BRIDGE TOO FAR Solstice offers a disturbing look at a chaotic class-ridden conflict, and British playwright Zinnie Harris delivers some ugly goods: She imagines’”and A Red Orchid Theatre pictures it all potently’”a violent neighborhood poisoned by a contaminated river and hemmed in by a barrier bridge upon which some obscure atrocity has occurred. The…

DISREGARD BEAUREGARD Much in the spirit of Ben Jonson’s salacious  Volpone  and  Giovanni  Boccaccio’s same-titled lascivious tale of irrepressible lust,  Niccolí²  Machiavelli’s  own political bombshell, his  only surviving farce  The Mandrake,  is a devastating diatribe.  Fueled by the same “the end justifies the means” mentality as his more famous  The Prince,  The Mandrake‘s  almost too-easy target is the all-too-human hypocrisies that deny nature  its due (of course, meaning sex). The…

NOW E.T. REALLY CAN GO HOME A justified hit, bright as any of the lights on Michigan Avenue, Lookingglass Theatre Company’s exhilarating adaptation of Antoine de St-Exupery’s classic and cautionary children’s tale may well run through the winter. Despite its total lack of holly or mistletoe,   David Catlin’s ingenious dramatization of this whimsical philosophic classic…

ONCE AGAIN, ATTENTION MUST BE PAID British playwright Nina Raine’s Tribes, which played Off-Broadway last year and has been produced regionally, depicts an oppressively intellectual British family, rich with colorful eccentricity and denied dysfunction. However, the real context for Steppenwolf Theatre’s bold new winter show’”no holiday play in any way’”is silence, the non-negotiable world that…

OLD LECHERS GET NO RESPECT Merrily set at Christmastide at the height of the swing era, Barbara Gaines’ sumptuous Navy Pier staging of Shakespeare’s slightest comedy is hilarious, certainly funnier than it has any right to be. As always with this company, it’s also as gorgeous to behold as to hear. Its nearly three hours…

CONSCIENCE KEEPING IN A CRACKLING PLOT Taut, true and richly wrought, this 1945 potboiler by unashamed socialist playwright J.B. Priestley remains, three generations later, a clarion call to a new century. Juicy with relentless revelations about a patrician clan who rule provincial Brumley, England, it’s just as much a wake-up call for social responsibility and…

JOFFREY’S JOYOUS JEWEL Now in its 26th annual presentation, the late Robert Joffrey’s evergreen staging of Peter IlyichTchaikovsky’s beloved Christmas ballet blesses both the Auditorium Theatre and the dance pilgrims who flock to it, eager to be astonished. Still sumptuous with Oliver Smith’s lavish and fast-paced scenery, based on the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo’s…

A GAY CHRISTMAS ALL OVER CHICAGOLAND In a major first, the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus just performed its Christmas concert at the prestigious Harris Theatre at Millennium Park in downtown Chicago. You can’t get more visible or prominent than this’”and it ain’t over yet. Today the CGMC moves to the ‘burbs to sing at the…

SOME SOULS THWART SAVING We Three Lizas, last year’s in-your-face gay holiday hit, is back with a purportedly new book and an expanded score. Relocated from the Steppenwolf Garage to Stage 773 (where the inferior acoustics of this unmiked show take their toll), it’s as iridescent as a migraine and unstoppably funky. Doggedly insistent on…

BURNING THE YULE LOG AT BOTH ENDS Striking a comfortable balance between sticky and sentimental, schmaltz and cynicism, five short plays by as many Chicago writers (and directed by another skilled quintet) combine to create the rightly named HoliDaze. Happily, none of these furtive glimpses of the holiday season’s well-chronicled underside, most set on Christmas…