Lawrence Bommer

YOU GOTTA HAVE FAITH The adventurous playwriting of Tarell Alvin McCraney, who  wrote  the successful “Brother/Sister Plays” (In the Red and Brown Water, The Brothers Size, and Marcus),  is the reason he is Steppenwolf’s newest ensemble member. Now  comes the  fervently meant Steppenwolf Theatre Company world premiere Head of Passes, directed by Tina Landau. The play, McCraney’s African-American version of…

A FAMILY HAUNTED BY ITSELF Even among dysfunctional clans – an apparently exhaustible topic for today’s theater – Jason Grote’s self-haunted family in Maria/Stuart gets laurels for looniness.   Unflinchingly depicted in Marti Lyons’ Chicago premiere for Sideshow Theatre Company, these six relatives hide more secrets that the two-act, 130-minute drama is willing to divulge. Instead…

THE FUN IN FRAUD Famed impresario P.T. Barnum banked on one cynical truth: No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. The undisputed master of the “noble art of humbug,” Barnum grew rich by providing the gullible, sensation-seeking public an inexhaustible series of “Unparalleled Attractions Never Before Seen,” many sheer flimflam,…

YOU HAVE TO MEASURE CAREFULLY At the core of this dark and fascinating tragicomedy is a situation seething with modern irony: Can you be both above the law and beneath contempt? Angelo, a sex-hating Viennese puritan, has been rashly entrusted with enforcing repressive vice laws by the supposedly absent Duke. But in Isabella, a chaste…

SMOKIN’ Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller – you may not recognize who they are but you sure know what they wrote: “Love Potion #9,” “Bossa Nova Baby,” “Kansas City.”   A team famed for their much-recorded singles rather than their Broadway songs, they churned out classics over the last 60 years in all pop styles  – rhythm…

MAY THE RAP BE WITH YOU Before Othello: The Remix it was only Shakespeare’s comedies that received the Q brothers’ trademark, rap-happy revision’”Funk It Up About Nothin’ and The Bomb-itty of Errors. Who would have thought a tragedy could take it? It can. Boldly applying a hip transformation to Shakespeare domestic tragedy, this much-acclaimed venture…

THE NEXT STEP(S) It’s an impressive lineup for this respected Chicago company’s annual “Spring Series”’”not just the always impressive Hubbard Street Dance Chicago but, here and elsewhere, the San Francisco-based Alonzo King LINES Ballet. That means that one dance features a sprawling expanse of 28 dancers on the Harris Theater stage, a crowd-control extravaganza to…

A DEATH IN THE UNION Hershey Felder has already regaled audiences at the Royal George Theatre with his uncanny and heartfelt recreations of George Gershwin, George M. Cohan, Frederic Chopin, Leonard Bernstein and Ludwig van Beethoven, honoring and invigorating the music as much as he concentrated their life stories. Now he delivers a solo tour…

WRITHING INTO REVELATION Alas, it’s over  – and way too soon. Luna Negra Dance Theater’s 2013 spring program celebrated works by two contemporary Spanish choreographers: guest artist Fernando Hernando Magadan and Luna Negra company member Mónica Cervantes.   Last night’s one-time-only performance at the Harris Theatre in Millennium Park, Made in Spain, confirms the troupe’s reputation for…

A TISSUE OF SONGS An ambitious and sporadically powerful entry in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s fourth annual “Garage Rep,” this 2005 musical by John LaChiusa is a Rashomon-like puzzle whose song pieces can’t quite be put together. But ardently produced in the Steppenwolf Garage this becomes a healthy, rather than pointless, challenge to the listener, despite…

SOME THINGS, BUT NOT EVERYTHING, IS ILLUMINATED “With writing, we have second chances,†declares Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything Is Illuminated, his well-received and dauntingly complex first novel from 2002. Taking leaps that have nothing to do with faith, this self-reflexive look at how writing about an event serves many different truths begins with a…

WINTER FLUFF “We’re all in the gutter/But some of us have our ear to the ground.” If you find this limp lyric endlessly repeated in this silly-ass, pun-crazed musical instantly amusing, read no further and see this show. For everyone else, Strawdog Theatre Company’s Midwest premiere of Arthur Riordan’s Irish musical will need to take…

MUSIC’S MANY BRIDGES It’s a proven power at the Black Ensemble Theater: No disease is so deadly, no crisis so catastrophic that a song can’t cure it within twenty bars. Add 20 more songs that bridge the generation gap, as happens in B.E.T.’s generous new offering, From Doo Wop to Hip Hop, and happiness becomes…

STORIES IN A SPIN CYCLE If ever the cliché “the plot thickens” justifies itself, it’s in this relentlessly inventive 1996 work by Australian playwright Andrew Bovell; anacondas after their bi-annual meal should thicken like this self-generating drama. Bovell’s well-named Speaking in Tongues employs four actors – flawlessly coordinated in Jeffry Stanton’s intricate staging for Interrobang…

25 SAINTS A 75-minute exercise in dead-end disaster tautly directed by Susan E. Bowen, this new work by Pine Box Theater ensemble member Joshua Rollins tightly fits the theater company’s action-oriented theatricality. It also delivers a pitiless look at the “forgotten world of Appalachia,” specifically a misery known as West Virginia. Corruption seems to grow…

PARADOXICAL DUALITIES It’s brainy almost beyond endurance and savvy in its approach/avoidance strategies of gaming love. Happily, Itamar Moses’ Completeness at Theater Wit is also engrossingly directed by Jeremy Wechsler as it chronicles a complicated, captivating relationship between two scientific searchers, Elliott and Molly. Easily and perversely, they can reason themselves out of what they…

TWO BATTLES IN ONE WAR As sturdily written and swiftly moving as it was in 1982, Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play remains an enduring testament to the homefront battles that African-American soldiers fought during World War II, within their ranks as well as with white comrades in arms. It’s the kind of upfront, downhome American…

SPRINGING INTO SPRING In Chicago, spring can never come early enough. But, alas, it’s February, so it has to be an indoor sport. Leave it to our homegrown dance company, the Joffrey Ballet,  to gloriously unleash spring fever in the bleak late winter. A quartet of dazzling works by Twyla Tharp, Jerome Robbins and the Joffrey…