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Lawrence Bommer

  • Theater Review: MELANCHOLY PLAY (Organic Theater Company at The Greenhouse Theater)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 21, 2019
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    PRECIOUS NONSENSE MAKES MELANCHOLY PLAY A FORTRESS OF ARTIFICE If you ever feel “slightly dead,” you may be prey to the temperament of melancholy. Melancholy Play: A Contemporary Farce, a 2002 drama by the prolific and unpredictable Sarah Ruhl, treats the condition with singular intensity, delivering a histrionic polemic on the virtues and perils of…

  • Theater Review: SWEAT (Goodman Theatre)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 19, 2019
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    DIVIDED AND CONQUERED If the American Dream needs an obituary, Lynn Nottage’s 2017 Pulitzer winner is it. If Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty  celebrated the power and promise of labor unions, Sweat chronicles a worker’s nightmare. Creating nine palpable characters in crisis, a richly empathetic playwright plunges us into a harrowing tale of deindustrialization in Reading,…

  • Theater Review: A BRONX TALE (North American Tour)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 14, 2019
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    A BRONX CHEER Unpretentious and unpreaching in its streetwise survival lore, the gangster fable  A Bronx Tale is, as the name implies, just one of many small sagas from the lesser borough. Now on tour, this 2016 musical has a book by Chazz Palminteri, based on his semi-autobiographical solo show and the 1993 film directed by…

  • Theater Review: THE CHOIR OF MAN (National Tour)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 13, 2019
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    IN PRAISE OF THE PUB There’s no need for a plot, three-dimensional characters, or conflicts pending resolution — no, not when the setting and its songs sell themselves from the start. That feel-good premise pays off over 80 minutes in The Choir of Man, a British import now playing Chicago’s Broadway Playhouse on its first…

  • Chicago Theater Review: LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (Mercury Theater Chicago)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 11, 2019
    in

    THE HORROR…THE HORROR… THE FUN…THE FUN… You can see it as a modern parable of how the neglect that created Skid Row and its plethora of poverty brings its own revenge: A literally bloodthirsty plant gets sensationalized by rapacious promoters and proceeds to eat up the planet. The Bitch Goddess Success is here transmogrified into…

  • Theater Review: SOUTHERN COMFORT (Pride Films and Plays at the Pride Arts Center)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 5, 2019
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    TRANS-CENDENT Rather than dwell on the similitude of roses, Gertrude Stein might better have said love is love is love. It certainly is in one particular North Side storefront: A 2016 blue-grass musical with a heart and a half is now a warm and winning Chicago premiere from Pride Films and Plays. Southern Comfort  offers just…

  • Opera Review: ARIODANTE (Lyric Opera of Chicago)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 3, 2019
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    HANDEL WITH CARE It’s hard to believe that, following its Covent Garden debut in 1735, this glorious  opera seria  endured 191 years of neglect. It returned to the boards in 1926, even more so in the 1970s, selling its stuff with dazzling vocal pyrotechnics, courtly dances, and a hard-driving tale of innocence traduced and true love vindicated….

  • Theater Review: THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY (Lifeline Theatre in Chicago)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 25, 2019
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    IF IT’S THURSDAY, IT MUST BE LIFELINE Deemed a “metaphysical thriller,”  The Man Who Was Thursday  is religious writer G.K. Chesterton’s celebrated satire from 1908. Intentionally confounding its characters as much as its plethora of plots, it’s a very rational romp. Chesterton’s political parable conjures up a conspiratorial world of bomb-throwing anarchists, proletarian poets, and single-minded and…

  • Chicago Theater Review: ACT(S) OF GOD (Lookingglass)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 25, 2019
    in

    TOO MANY ACT(S) Even apocalypses, it seems, can be goofy, disruptive, and “meta” — if you go by Lookingglass Theatre Company’s irritating and overlong world premiere. With two intermissions that sprawl across 150 not so necessary minutes, this dark offering by ensemble member Kareem Bandealy indulges in some very cute doom. Before it’s over the…

  • Chicago Theater Review: TWILIGHT BOWL (Goodman)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 20, 2019
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    SHE STRIKES! SHE SCORES! WELL, BOWL ME OVER It’s only women who perform, design, direct, write, and otherwise shape this Goodman Theatre world premiere. Rebecca Gilman’s  Twilight Bowl  represents a healthy change of insiders. Making up for lost chances and time, this coming-of-age, slice-of-life depicts six small-town, twentysomething friends across several seasons. Their getaway time is spent…

  • Review: THE SCARLET IBIS (Chicago Opera Theater)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 17, 2019
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    A SMALL STORY SOARS IN THIS NEW OPERA Right now the Studebaker Theater houses a wonder. A chamber opera with a heart of gold,  The Scarlet Ibis, with a supple score by Stefan Weisman and lyrical libretto by David Cote, is based on a 1960 short story by the late James Hurst. In only 95 minutes…

  • Dance Review: ANNA KARENINA (World Premiere by Joffrey Ballet at the Auditorium Theatre)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 14, 2019
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    LEO TOLSTOY TURNED TO LEAPS AND TWIRLS IN THIS WORLD PREMIERE BALLET MILESTONE So many superlatives to savor. Newly created by 35-year-old  wunderkind  composer Ilya Demutsky, who replenishes the rhapsodic romanticism of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and genius choreographer Yuri Possokhov, who finds new depths in dance,  Anna Karenina, Joffrey Ballet’s first commissioned score, redeemed its promissory notes perfectly…

  • Chicago Theater Review: A DOLL’S HOUSE, PART 2 (Steppenwolf)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 13, 2019
    in

    A SEQUEL WITHOUT A SOUL Some nerve. It takes chutzpah on top of arrogance to dare to continue, let alone complete, another playwright’s stand-alone masterpiece. Lucas Hnath has the temerity to imagine a sequel to  A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen’s proto-feminist classic from 1879. It remains the still-controversial tale of a Norwegian wife who, refusing to…

  • Theater Review: HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE (Raven Theatre in Chicago)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 12, 2019
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    HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THEATER Some plays take time to come into their own but they’re well worth a wait. Over two decades after its Off-Broadway debut, Paula Vogel’s  How I Learned to Drive  is only now reaching full impact. That’s thanks to the consciousness-raising of #MeToo, among other seismic changes in the body politic. With…

  • Chicago Theater Review: PIPELINE (Victory Gardens)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 10, 2019
    in

    A PIPELINE TO GREAT THEATER The title of  Pipeline  refers to the much-reviled “school-to-prison” conduit that keeps minority kids from any outcome but incarceration, soft or hard. It’s driven by a fatal fusion of low and self-fulfilling expectations of failure, endless and pointless discipline, and inadequate encouragement or alternatives to crime. Disadvantage can take many forms. It’s…

  • Theater Review: THE FATHER (Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at Theater Wit)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 10, 2019
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    THE SOUND OF A BRAIN BREAKING Uncertainty is the default drive behind the 95 excruciating minutes of French playwright Florian Zeller’s  The Father. Seldom has a staged mystery shifted so suddenly and strongly between competing realities. As the protagonist Andre says, “There’s something funny going on here.” But it’s not amusing: Yes,  The Father  is crammed with mistaken…

  • Theater Preview: AN INSPECTOR CALLS (The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 5, 2019
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    SOCIETY UNDER CLOSE INSPECTION An Inspector Calls  was first performed in 1945 at a time of great change — both World Wars were fresh in the minds of the people, women had become more prominent in the workplace, and it was possible  to be  class mobile, which is the idea that people can move upwards in class through…

  • Theater Review: A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE & MURDER (Porchlight Music Theatre; Ruth Page Center)

    By Lawrence Bommer | January 30, 2019
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    A DEATH OF FRESH AIR It’s a tour de force times ten as Monty Navarro, distant heir to the D’Ysquith fortune, slaughters his way to an earldom and marriage, for better or worse, with a doting cousin. A romp where vengeance gets served up hot and cold,  A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder  is  convulsing the Ruth…

  • Chicago Theater Review: HOW TO CATCH CREATION (Goodman Theatre)

    By Lawrence Bommer | January 29, 2019
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    CONSIDER CREATION CAUGHT IN THIS SEMINAL WORLD PREMIERE It’s a tour-de-force to take home and reverently recall: A Goodman Theatre world premiere,  How To Catch Creation  lives up to a lovely title. In little more than two hours, Christina Anderson chronicles the intersected passions, both procreative and artistic, of three very different couples. They’re contrasted and combined…

  • Theater Review: US/THEM (Chicago Shakespeare)

    By Lawrence Bommer | January 24, 2019
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    OUT OF THE BLOOD OF BABES It’s a probably thankless and certainly unsettling undertaking:  Us/Them  is an hour-long performance piece by two young members of the Belgian troupe BRONKS. It dares to depict the 2004 Beslan school siege and massacre from the point of view of two child victims: One survives the take-over by 35 Chechen separatists….

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