Lawrence Bommer

A SKIRMISH OF WIT THAT CAN ONLY BE SHAW In 1896, George Bernard Shaw planned to beat Oscar Wilde at his own playful plotting and acerbic wit, so he wrote his answer to the recently successful The Importance of Being Earnest. Based on how often Shaw’s You Never Can Tell’”which has a title suggesting a…

DOWN HOME TO HEAL UP It’s hard to make healing feel dramatic. But that’s the challenge to which Julie Marie Myatt mostly rises in this engaging Midwest premiere. In 90 minutes she depicts in fragments’”since these things must be done delicately’”the beneficent aftermath of a haunted veteran’s return to California. Jessica Thebus’ painstaking but pleasure-giving…

RETRO GERSHWIN STILL BESTS TODAY’S STANDARDS Like the unsurpassable Crazy for You, My One and Only is more than more than a dozen recycled Gershwin tunes. In the spirit of those daffy Jazz Age musicals and Gershwin’s own Princess Theatre offerings (here the model is Fred Astaire’s 1927 romp Funny Face), this Tony-winning song-and-dance spectacle,…

MINING MEMORIES Adam Guettel’s Floyd Collins remains the ultimate spelunking musical as it depicts a cave explorer entrapped by both hard rock and a media spectacle. The Burnt Part Boys, a 90-minute slice of coal by bookwriter Mariana Elder, composer Chris Miller and lyricist Nathan Tysen (originally premiered by Playwrights Horizon), is less ambitious and…

TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE PLAY Developed by Raven Theatre’s Workshop Series, these ten hit-and-run “playlettes” by John Weagly take only 52 minutes to rearrange reality into quirky juxtapositions and odd angles. Everything seems immediately familiar, then instantly not: An apparently innocuous wolfman refuses to be called a werewolf as he suffers a stomach ache from the…

KINETIC COOL IN MILLENNIUM PARK As evidenced at last night’s opening, Giordano Dance Chicago’s Fall Engagement’”a two-night gig at the Harris Theater’”is a major installment in the company’s very welcome 50th anniversary season. The most exciting part of the program is the world premiere of company member Autumn Eckman’s G-Force. Almost living up to its…

A RUSH TO DOOM As the breathless title suggests, there’s nothing placid or contained about Liz Duffy Adams’ hyper-poetic hybrid of interior monologues and frantic dialogue. The metaphorical/microcosmic setting is a speeding American train whose eight highly driven passengers represent Western culture literally hurtling to some unsought doom. A Midwest premiere, Adams’ “comi-threnody” gives Will…

LATE NIGHT CHUB THAT’S HARD TO SWALLOW The only excuse for reviewing this 70-minute trifle is that they’re charging $20 to see it when it would be worth twice as much to pay to get out. Mired in forced rhymes and scansion, forgettable tunes, lame lyrics, grade-school props, seemingly improvised dialogue, and a plot that…

GIVE IT  THE BOOT UNTIL IT WORKS OUT THE KINKS Prepare yourself for some disparate reviews of Kinky Boots, which had its pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago’s Bank of America Theater last night. One camp will see the sterling talent and the highly expensive glitz and glamour that many Broadway outings need to disguise mediocre writing and…

INTO THE TOILET The 1996 film Trainspotting was notorious for its spare-no-sensitivity, take-no-prisoners look at Edinburgh heroin addicts. Based on Irvine Welsh’s bottom-feeding novel, it traced the tailspins of a fractured family of junkies. Always meaning to go clean, these loud losers would do anything for their next fix: they stole and sold electronics, drugs…

EVIL WILL TRAVEL In his great works, like Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and even in his  lesser efforts, such as Broken Glass, Arthur Miller forces us to confess a greater loyalty than those based on our obvious ties to family, class, and country. He asks us to honor our ideals, and further challenges…

THE FORCE OF FAMILY Looming over this long multi-generational family epic by Adrianna Sevahn Nicholas is the shadow of genocide’”the 1915 slaughter by Turks of 1.5 million Armenians, a precursor, as the Nazis admitted, to their concept of a “final solution.” It haunts the matriarch of an extended family of Armenian expatriates, even after they’ve…

PASSION IN A POOL It took Ovidius Naso, a 1st century Roman poet, to do full justice to Greek myths. Metamorphoses assembled a panoply of gods, heroes and mortals into 15 books of Latin hexameter; the legends cover everything from the creation of the world out of chaos to the deification of Caesar and reign…

A PUB CRAWL FROM FOLKLORE INTO FANTASY The black-box stage on the sixth floor of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Navy Pier complex is now a Scottish pub. In these still-dark confines beneath the café lights, a sweet but scary story gets recounted among the tavern tables, on top of chairs, and’”representing hell’”all over Oriental carpets at…

A BIG KNIFE THAT ISN’T VERY SHARP Clifford Odets is justly famed for his agit-prop Depression-era New York-based protest plays (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Golden Boy), but The Big Knife, written a decade later, is more personal than polemical. If only to suit the California context of this 150-minute, rarely produced play, Odets…

SEE SCAPE A wonderfully questioning work from 1975, Edward Albee’s whimsical, Pulitzer-winning domestic drama literally reflects our world as seen by diametrical couples. Seascape meets landscape on the neutral ground of a coastal beach: The result is an inter-species double date. Albee first presents Nancy and Charlie: A mature terrestrial couple, they’re torn between spending…