Chicago

ROCKING THE BOAT When we enter the theater, we see two women in a small fishing boat. It’s surrounded by huge buckets depicting the shallows of an inlet in the Alabama delta. Overhead netting seems to catch the stars. For nearly ninety minutes, this seemingly static situation becomes the engrossing story-setting for  The Gulf, Audrey Cefaly’s…

TOUCHING BUT TRAPPED IN A TIME WARP Stop Kiss was a big 1998 hit at New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater. In 2000 it arrived in Chicago in a tepid local premiere by the Naked Eye Theatre Company. That misfire aside, Diana Son’s 95-minute one-act — a tale of two women who only discover they’re…

A LIGHTHOUSE SPILLS ITS SECRETS Isolation forces intimacy on its inhabitants, if only by its process of elimination. It can also foster secrets: Scattered souls protect their privacy by keeping stuff to themselves. In  The Secret Garden  or  The Turn of the Screw  what’s hidden must out — to respectively good and evil ends. This strategic formula works in  Whisper…

DANCING AROUND ADOLESCENCE It happened with  You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, that peculiar, often cloying, problem of adult actors playing unfledged kids. There’s an unavoidable condescension that’s not lost on grown-ups — even less so with young folks — when performers stoop to be small. But sometimes, as with Clare Barron’s 2017  Dance Nation (a Pulitzer…

ASHES TO THEATER It’s the spectacle that keeps on giving: No longer sprawling the width of the Neo Futurarium’s stretched-out stage or concentrated in Theater Wit’s proscenium hall, The Ruffians’ superb 100-minute Burning Bluebeard has now taken its glorious, dream-like make-believe and contagious magic realism to the Ruth Page Center for the Arts — in…

A GOLD RUSH NATIVITY You could call it a second coming of Christmas from our Golden West. Delivered with the grit and gusto of 19th  century raconteur Bret Harte,  The Christmas Foundling  is a likable tale from the California Gold Rush, specifically a late-blooming nativity on Christmas Eve. Norman Allen’s 2001 period piece, now warmed up by directors…

A MELLOW YULE Back in the day velvet-toned Nat King Cole practically owned Christmas. His TV specials were characterized by what his recreator Evan Tyrone Martin calls “bold simplicity.” His trademark was his famously smoky voice (ironic because he died at 45 of lung cancer). Nat King Cole made inroads where mainly white performers had…

A WELL-MEANING YULE CONFECTION THAT’S A BIT DIFFICULT TO SWALLOW For dogged seekers of sentimentality for whom  The Gift of the Magi  or  It’s A Wonderful Life  are insufficient tinsel treacle, help is on the way! You will  love  Raven Theatre’s unashamedly heartwarming, aggressively feel-good  Cold Town/Hotline: A Chicago Holiday Story. An 80-minute world premiere written and directed by Eli Newell, this…

ODDBALL OUTCASTS It pays homage to the goofy compassion exhibited by claymation holiday specials, especially the iconic classic where the inhabitants of the Island of Misfit Toys are rescued by Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Now a world premiere musical by Pride Films and Plays staged by director/choreographer Donterrio Johnson, America’s Best Outcast Toy — An…

REAPPRAISING A CASH COW Consider this a kind of conditional  mea culpa: In past reviews of Goodman Theatre’s A Christmas Carol, I’ve faulted the production’s trivialization of Charles Dickens’ 1847 ghost story, a tale intended to scare Victorian readers into avoiding the ugly life and dire fate of Ebenezer Scrooge. Rather than deal with a contemptible,…

THE PLOT THIN-ENS Can lightning strike thrice? Over two decades later, it’s happened again — a third collaboration between author/director Eric Simonson and the world-famous, nine-member Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Like The Song of Jacob Zulu  in 1992 and  Nomathemba  in 1996, Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s world premiere Lindiwe, co-directed with Jonathan Berry, is imbued with the ensemble’s seamless a…

DÉJí€ VU MEETS GROUNDHOG DAY “Birth was the death of him”: Terse to the point of cruelty, Samuel Beckett devours the human experience in six words, repeatedly juxtaposing graves with cradles.  Waiting for Godot, his minimalist masterpiece, takes nearly three hours for the same result. But Beckett succeeds in his life-long task — to “find the…

AN EDWARDIAN WAKE-UP CALL You can’t keep a good play down. Produced under the pseudonym of K.G. Sowerby, the Edwardian drama  Rutherford and Son  was a huge hit in 1912 — until the playwright was later revealed as a woman, Githa Sowerby. Perhaps due to male resentment of the play’s depiction of a brutish dad, it disappeared…

PICKED, PECKED, AND PACKED Some solo shows can be valued simply for their superb simulations of someone else’s story. Others succeed because we pay extra special attention when the chronicler actually experienced what they’re sharing. Packing, an About Face Theatre world premiere by and from Chicago theater artist Scott Bradley, has the best of both…