Lawrence Bommer

A CATTY YULETIDE LAUGH RIOT Following the well-earned 15-year run of Rudolph the Red-Hosed Reindeer, Hell in a Handbag Productions replaces it with a worthy winner. David Cerda’s wicked holiday musical Christmas Dearest  is equally destined for Yuletide glory. This alternately crude and clever caricature, a raucous rouser, combines Cerda’s signature icon/diva/screen goddess/rotten mother Joan Crawford…

ASHES TO THEATER Now moving from Andersonville to Lakeview, the best production of 2011 is back to rival any currently playing: No longer sprawling the width of the Neo Futurarium’s stretched-out stage, The Ruffians’ superb, 100-minute Burning Bluebeard is concentrated in Theater Wit’s proscenium space. Its glorious, dream-like make-believe and contagious magic realism feel even…

LEGENDS OF THE HOMELESS As the title suggests, Naomi Iizuka’s uncompromising drama exposes snapshots of the urban underbelly. It focuses, so to speak, on homeless kids, prostitutes and hustlers, and the occasional Greek hero or god, such as Orpheus and Eurydice, who wander very plausibly into their midst. As recorded by the playwright 16 years…

FOR THE RECORD With only a matinee remaining today, it’s soon to be history, but this River North Dance Chicago is offering some stunning steps at the Harris Theater in their annual fall engagement, which includes two world premieres. The first, Get Out The Ghost, with choreography by Ashley Roland, delivers a seemingly chaotic tapestry…

A NEST OF VIPERS Don’t stop the presses. Yet another blatant spin-off (if not rip-off) of August: Osage County has splattered on the boards. What the world needs beyond peace and prosperity, it seems, is one more dysfunctional drama about a dysfunctional family. (Which is more defective, you may well wonder?) Unsolicited but eager to…

SNUFFING OUT SNOBBERY Preferring acting over setting, Gale Childs Daly’s joyously theatrical adaptation of Charles Dickens’ coming-of-age masterpiece uses six actors to play almost 40 characters. Only swift costume changes, vocal alterations and revolving set pieces confirm the variety of this sprawling novel. In 130 minutes, Strawdog Theatre’s swift-moving (and sometimes too rapid-fire)  Great Expectations traces…

GONE BUT NEVER SILENT Commemorating the 75th anniversary of “Kristallnacht,” the terrible nights of November 9-10, 1938 when Nazi thugs unleashed their most public assault on Jewish life and lives, this 70-minute one-act by Ron Hirsen creates an “elegy” from an unclaimed legacy. Earnestly staged by Victory Gardens founder Dennis Zacek in a sometimes insecure…

COMPASSION PLAY Forgetting the ineptitude of Larry Kramer’s 1988 farce Just Say No, it’s ripe to revive his 1985 masterwork about how a health crisis defined the gay community–as much by what it didn’t do as how it rose to the occasion. Unlike Just Say No ‘s driven attack on Nancy Reagan and the abstinence…

FAST, FURIOUS AND FUNKY Ending tonight at the Harris Theatre, the latest balletic blast from the newly renamed Giordano Dance Chicago delivers six hyper-kinetic pieces. This generous outpouring fully showcase the young ensemble’s dexterity, volatitility and, well, flash-dancing. Including world premieres by an Israeli-born and Philadelphia-based choreographer and an in-house artist, the recital offers a…

BOYS WILL BE MONSTERS William Golding’s 1954 cautionary thriller depicts a world on the edge of nuclear war. But when a plane crashes, a tiny portion of humanity is given a do-over. Tragically, reduced to feral bipeds, they succumb to our worst instincts. Lord of the Flies imagines a deserted tropical island’”a kind of modern…

A PUPPET IN THE WILDERNESS In The Table, a curious creation now on its first U.S. tour, three members of the U.K.’s Blind Summit puppet theater depict a garrulous Bunraku-style hand puppet, a vibrant invention who impersonates no less than the 120-year-old Moses on his dying day on the plains of Moab. The puppet, a…

INDIAN NIGHTS Earlier this fall the Joffrey Ballet revisited the uneasy birth of modern dance with a kinetic revival of Stravinsky’s still-shocking, century-old Sacre du Printemps in all its primitive vitality. As if to balance the ledger, the Auditorium Theatre is now filled with the gorgeous melodies of a late-blooming classical ballet from 1877. With…

THE STANDARD FOR STORYTELLING It’s a coup just to get the theatrical rights to this juicy work, the late, great Paddy Chayevsky’s Oscar-nominated 1956 screenplay. But it’s sensational to pull it off to perfection. Cinematic as its source, John Mossman’s adaptation and staging of The Goddess is a gem of make-believe, an engrossing cautionary tale…

A ZOMBIE MUSICAL THAT NEEDS BRAINS There’s something wrong with a show that demands you be drunk. On opening night the howling fans of this cult phenom, now in its fourth incarnation (if that’s the right word for a flesh-eating farce), managed to outshout even this screamingly unfunny offering. Literally buckets of beer flowed freely…

ROMANCE MEETS REALITY Written early but published posthumously (1817), Jane Austen’s most comical novel, Northanger Abbey, works equally well as a literary satire and a psychologically probing courtship chronicle. Inventively adapted by Tim Luscombe, who has as much fun as the author in contrasting thought and action, Remy Bumppo’s delightful U.S. premiere faithfully follows the…

CLUELESS CORRUPTION Much has been said about Neil LaBute’s work at Profiles, but there’s so much that can’t be given away about Wrecks (2005), a  70-minute solo show by the ever-controversial LaBute, now enjoying his 11th  production at this theater,  that this review will be sparingly short. The setting is a Chicago funeral parlor where the ashes of…