Lawrence Bommer

FLEECING A LEGEND The tickets are free in (re)discover theatre’s generously-meant new work by company member Jessica Shoemaker. Their too-fresh offering is an anachronistic, two-act take on the love story behind the legend of ancient Greek hero Jason and his witch wife Medea. Jason and (Medea) — the strange parentheses hinting at one partner’s curious…

GAY PRIDE AND PREJUDICE The Pride  is an invaluable offering for Pride Month, or any other for that matter. Deeply textured and perfectly enacted, this Olivier Award-winning script by British playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell shifts eras to look at whether sex improves or just persists with time ’” and I don’t mean as we get older….

KISS ME, COLE Just the songs are  blessing and bounty enough in A Cole Porter Songbook, Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre’s all-singing, much-dancing salute to Broadway’s suavest purveyor of perfection. Cleverly compiled in rich arrangements by music director Aaron Benham, hoofed up to period perfection by choreographer David Heimann, and, above all, seamlessly staged with inventive inevitability…

EXQUISITE SHARDS OF GLASS Never has the title of Tennessee Williams’ early masterpiece, The Glass Menagerie, been so thoroughly embraced by the set designer. Grant Sabin takes the name of this 1944 memory play very seriously. Unlike past productions where the late 1930s Saint Louis cramped Wingfield apartment is fully realized, fire escape and all,…

THE  TITLE CHARACTER IS  TOO PURE FOR PEOPLE, BUT THIS PURE PRODUCTION IS FOR EVERYONE Of all Moliere’s comedies, The Misanthrope (1666), now gloriously and faithfully revived at Court Theatre, is the one literary critics and Moliere fans most take to heart. The master’s most personal and most ambiguous work, The Cantankerous Lover (its telling subtitle) delivers…

THE PLAY’S NOT REALLY THE THING, THE PRODUCTION IS Further earning a proud name, Chicago Shakespeare Theater has produced Henry VIII for the first time in professional Chicago theater history. The history cycle is finally finished. Fortuitously, all this happens exactly 400 years after it premiered at the Globe Theatre when, alas, an accident with…

SECONDS WHICH SHOULD BE SKIPPED, NOT SPLIT Within the messy, overwritten and frustrating new script, If You Split A Second, is a potentially interesting premise: In an instant of unthinking and reflexive violence a man can obey his demons; yet in doing so, he can destroy not just his future but the welfare of his…

PLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MOOR Alas, this is mainly a review of record: This is the final weekend to savor the triumphant revival of the Joffrey Ballet’s Othello. Originally given its world premiere by the American Ballet Theatre in 1997, this “dance in three acts” is fueled by a suitably ferocious score by still-young…

WHEN UNIONS RULED THE EARTH Outrageously overdue for revival (the last one was at Marriott Theatre in 2004), this irresistible 1954 Broadway classic harks back to a time when producers could actually pin a plot on a threatened strike by union workers in the Sleep Tite Pajama Factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (Solidarity, alas, isn’t…

CHICAGO CAD MAKES BAD LOOK GOOD Sassy and brassy Pal Joey is  a wondrous rouser that spins the tale of a roué gone rotten in Depression-era Chicago. Porchlight Music Theatre gained the exclusive rights to Rodgers and Hart’s original 1940 version of their masterwork, and is staging a  glorious revival at Stage 773 (they’ve even restored “I’m…

ALICE FALLS THROUGH  AT LOOKINGGLASS “I miss myself.” That’s the plaintive cry from  the titular character of  Still Alice, adapted from Lisa Genova’s book, and presented by Lookingglass Theatre Company.  The didactic  new work recalls Arthur Kopit’s Wings as it shares the struggle from the inside out of Prof. Alice Howland, a 50-year-old brain researcher who senses – but can’t…

A FISH OUT OF WATER Ten years ago, the Tim Burton film Big Fish with Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney, based on Daniel Wallace’s 1998 “novel of mythic proportions,” charmed audiences with its depiction of tall tales turned true. A tribute to storytelling as a gift from one generation to the next, Big Fish is…

THEATER OF CRUELTY (TO THE AUDIENCE, THAT IS) A blast from the past, this 1963 curiosity from the once-living Living Theatre is a tribute to author Kenneth H. Brown’s total recall and recreation of a very ugly world. Written when Brown was a 27-year-old former U.S. Marine, The Brig is his attempt to replicate the…

COMPRESSED CRUELTY IN A SMALL STRINDBERG SHOCKER August Strindberg, the “father of modern psychological drama,” told his publisher that Creditors, a drama that he prized as much as he did his masterpiece Miss Julie (also written in 1888) was “humorous, loveable, all of its characters sympathetic.” Nothing could be further from the truth – as…