Lawrence Bommer

PUTTING THE FUN IN FUNK Taking us as far from death as is humanly possible, some shows just reward you for being alive. In perhaps their most joyous musical celebration yet, the 43-year-old Black Ensemble Theater continues its “Legends and Lessons” season with a major party:  You Can’t Fake the Funk (A Journey Through Funk Music)  is…

SECOND CHANCES NEED SECOND ACTS Sit — and calm — down and make yourself at show. A captivating work extolling rural redemption, The Spitfire Grill, a 2001 musical of the 1995 film, shows how, if a wound goes deep, even the healing is bound to hurt. Its tender focus is on a female parolee who…

SIBLING WARFARE Can lightning strike again after 37 years? In 1982 Steppenwolf Theatre Company put itself on the map with a landmark staging of Sam Shepard’s domestic disruption  True West starring Jeff Perry, John Malkovich, and Gary Sinise (in the Broadway transfer). Nearly two generations later, it’s back — in a rightly reckless reprise directed by…

MAN, OH MUSIC MAN If  ever a show spelled out summer, it’s Meredith Willson’s 1957 masterpiece  The Music Man. Throughout the rollicking story, the title character exudes sunny optimism, a flimflam that “Professor” Harold Hill wants to believe as much as the suckers who take it in. His buoyant drive fits the season like a picnic. It’s…

TEMPEST BELONGS OUTDOORS The words can get windblown or contend with sirens and such. But, just as food tastes different (better?) when eaten outdoors, so does the Bard. Embracing all, Shakespeare needs no roof and the sky’s no limit. Now in their eighth season of offering free performances in four Chicago parks through August, this…

GO-GO SEE THIS SHOW-SHOW It’s a marriage made in musical heaven: A ton of fun erupts from combining seemingly antithetical elements — a 16th-century fairy-tale/poem cycle by Sir Phillip Sidney and jukebox hits from the 1980s’ female rock band The Go-Go’s. As created by Jeff Whitty and adapted by James Magruder, the riotous result is…

AN APP-ETITE FOR AMOUR Sooner or later you knew an Internet application would get its own show, especially when it plays Dan Cupid, hooking up randy seekers of one-night stands or permanent pleasure. First produced in the U.K. last year, Grindr The Opera (An Unauthorized Parody) is an alternately cheeky and bittersweet salute to some…

THE WINNER BY AN INCH It’s a perverse Pride Month offering that cocks a snoot at authority and respectability: “I’m the new Berlin Wall — try to tear me down!” That defiant dare marks the flaming arrival of Hedwig Schmidt, survivor-heroine of John Cameron Mitchell’s riveting 1998 rock opera, a work that inevitably honors the…

A LITERAL STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Only 65 minutes long, British playwright Jez Butterworth’s spell-casting  The River  manages, as few plays have, to simulate a dream on stage. Heraclitus said that life was like a river because we never step into the same stream twice. Likewise this one-act’s obsessive quest for certainty in love amid the seemingly random…

THE ULTIMATE DRAG RACE It’s both louder than life and strident with substance. The perfect play for Pride Month and a deafening blast from the past,  Ms. Blakk for President, an uproarious and rambunctious rouser, gives a magnificent cause future reference. Created by ensemble members Tina Landau and Tarell Alvin McCraney for Steppenwolf, this 100-minute jubilee…

POINTLESS PERPLEXITY Sometimes what you see is much less than what you get. Case in point: Pride Films and Plays is closing its season with a daunting new work written by Ryan Oliveira and directed by Topher Leon.  Desire in a Tinier House  (its title as mystifying as most of its plot) is a two-hour, two-act, two-character…

SIX CHICKS REMIX TO NIX PRICKS Singing well is the best revenge, especially if you married the spouse from hell. So runs the cunning concept behind  Six. This raucous pop concert joyously restores to very loud life the six ex-wives of Henry VIII. The rampaging result, recalling the hip-hop irreverence of the Q Brothers’Othello: The Remix  and  Christmas…

SINGING UP STORMY STUFF With this theater everything good is new again — and never old. The latest homage from Black Ensemble Theater, Style and Grace: In Tribute to Lena Horne and Nancy Wilson honors stellar singers whose consummate talents we lost in 2010 and 2018, respectively. Incarnating “impeccable style and enduring grace,” these divas…