Lawrence Bommer

YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LEND THIS PRODUCTION YOUR EARS Brutal and relentless, Julius Caesar chronicles a fateful course of envy and revenge defeating idealism and loyalty: Brutus and Cassius, the principal murderers of the titular dictator, are dogged to death by his avengers Marc Antony and Octavius Caesar. But the republic the assassinators…

VIRTUAL THEATER Teddy Ferrara, Goodman Theatre’s new commissioned work, is almost three hours long. That excess suggests that nobody had the courage to cut or, not knowing what it was about to start with, couldn’t know where to start or stop. The indulgent length also implies that Teddy Ferrara has a lot of plot to…

READY FOR HER CLOSE-UP, MR. DEMILLE From the start it seemed strange that anyone would make a musical out of a movie that embodies its medium so completely. Yes, the film All About Eve deserved to become the musical Applause; both were obsessed with the theater. But Billy Wilder’s consummately cinematic 1950 masterpiece was a…

SAD TRIUMPH OF HOPE OVER EXPERIENCE It’s like kicking a puppy dog to dislike Charity Hope Valentine. Charity is the cloyingly-named heroine of the 1966 musical by Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields and Neil Simon, a show once made famous by Gwen Verdon’s slinkiness and Bob Fosse’s choreography. Writers’ Theatre approaches this strange amalgam of high…

A CRY TO CARE The 85-minutes of this electrifying protest play begin with a lone microphone suddenly erupting in an ear-splitting feedback. The noise is intolerable, no less than what it ushers in. After this blast from the other side of the world, individual performer/protesters approach that mike, start to speak, back up and unfurl…

A DAISY CHAIN OF DEAD ENDS MAKES FOR INVIGORATING THEATER Shattered Globe Theatre has uncovered yet another tailspinning drama to live up to  its name. British playwright Lucinda Cox shows a strong good grasp of dead ends, whether in conversations or in characters. In this sardonic black comedy  – with the ironic and accusatory title Happy Now?  –…

BONDAGE IN EGYPT AND VIRGINIA Of the 150,000 Jews who lived in the U.S during the Civil War, twice as many (6,000) fought for the Union as for the Confederacy. Less well-known is the fact that hundreds of Southern Jews owned, sold, bought and interbred with slaves: One minority in effect profited from the miseries…

A CIRCUS BUT NO BREAD The theater space is a cavernous church gym with lousy acoustics. The intrepid thespians at Red Tape Theatre transform it into the title setting, an arena of death without dignity: It’s set in an American war zone (presumably to show the interconnection between the violence of reality T.V. and actual…

SLOW, SAD AND STRANGE Sooner or later (preferably the former), we expect a play to pay off – to deliver a “gotcha” revelation that makes sudden or accumulated sense out of what seemed to be aimless exposition. A less than engrossing Chicago premiere at A Red Orchid Theatre, Annie Baker’s slow-paced, torpidly talky and seemingly…

AMERICA’S BEST NOTES Beginning its first new season of self-generated musicals, the Mercury Theater has, true to its name, raised the temperature with A Grand Night for Singing, a heartfelt, if sometimes overwrought, salute which happily honors and delightfully reprises the glorious, all-American (in the best sense) Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals and their inexhaustible legacy…

FIXING WHAT WON’T HEAL Jon Robin Baitz’ Broadway drama Other Desert Cities depicts a crisis of apparent betrayal and imminent exposure that besets the Wyeth clan, a wealthy Jewish family sheltered in the oasis of Palm Springs. Viewed one way, Baitz’ Pulitzer Prize finalist is very much a two-act family fight. But, as Arthur Miller…

THAT KINKY KINESCOPE It’s a time trip that denies the original intent’”a live taping of a dead T.V. series. The iconic archetype of the boob tube’s “golden age,” I Love Lucy wasn’t just the longest-running T.V. show’”it set the standards and stories for domestic sitcoms until All in the Family changed the rules forever. Depending…

YOU ONLY DIE ONCE One of the great pick-up lines that soldiers and sailors on leave during World War II (and probably the Trojan War too) used to seduce a one-night standee was, “Let’s do it – I could be dead in a month.” Chicago playwright Mark Mason’s sardonic Allotment Annie gives this plea a…

LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD It’s easy to see what drew Cameron Mackintosh to revive Lionel Bart’s hit musical 18 years ago: Dickens is a lot like Victor Hugo. Like Mackintosh’ smash Les Miserables, the 1960 musical replays an entire novel at warp speed, with fully realized opportunities to depict a swarming cityscape and gloomy Victorian…

A DICKENS OF A PERFORMER It’s been two centuries since Charles Dickens’ birth. Miriam Margolyes, famed for her portrayals in Harry Potter, The Age of Innocence, and William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet offers a well-deserved homage in Dickens’ Women, a one-person tribute directed by Sonia Fraser now playing at Chicago Shakespeare only through Saturday. Dickens’…

A GILBERT AND SULLIVAN FOR 2012 The best show of the year has finally arrived. The Book of Mormon  is a perfectly packaged fusion of the satire we need in a sassy musical comedy  with the entertainment genre that America created and deserves. From the wizards who concocted the all-offending South Park series comes an equally irreverent…

MOLIÈRE FOR DUMMIES Attend David Ives’ The School for Lies’”a manic contemporary travesty’”if you want to fully appreciate Molière’s 1666 masterpiece The Misanthrope, as serious a comedy as the 17th century farceur ever attempted. Brashly brilliant, grotesquely scatological, industriously low-brow, and perversely wrong-headed, this Midwest premiere of The School for Lies at Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s…

FINDING NEW WAYS TO TURN A BODY The big news from Hubbard Street Dance Chicago as the intrepid troupe launches their four-day “winter series” at the Harris Theatre in Millennium Park? It’s the company premiere of Swedish choreographer Mats Ek’s ambitious 40-minute creation Casi-Casa. Full of glimpses of life caught in its ill-assorted acts, it’s…