Chicago

A SHOW THAT CASTS A SPELL Whether it really works or it’s just self-fulfilling wishful thinking, magic can misfire.   Detailing a downhome tragedy set in Memphis during the Depression, Hoodoo Love, Katori Hall’s 2007 musical drama tells a sad and simple story of thwarted and twisted passion so strong it needs the blues to chronicle…

IT WOULD BE A CIN TO MISS THIS Forty-three years ago, the Black Ensemble Theater produced their first and most definitive musical, a promissory note that’s been richly redeemed over five decades. Just as  The Wiz  opened up a childhood classic to even more make-believe, in 1976 –and now–The Other Cinderella  represented playful revisionism in action. Created, composed…

THE HURT OF HATE Dirty laundry demands an airing. Given the disunion afflicting our republic, a play like  N  (short for the “N word”) has healing to share. A provocative world premiere by Chicago writer David Alex at the Greenhouse Theater Center, this 100-minute character piece stirs up the sometimes static tale of an evolving relationship between…

HATE CRIMES ROCK A SUBVERSIVE COMEDY This show can never be nice: Along with  The Taming of the Shrew, a comedy built squarely on misogyny,  The Merchant of Venice, a tragicomedy festering with anti-Semitism, remains the Bard’s most problematic play. But Shakespeare wrote it. Felt from all sides, there’s humanity to spare. Truth overcomes prejudice as an…

UP CLOSE, SHE’S BIGGER THAN EVEN PEANUT BUTTER 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 cautionary…

A FAMILY IN KEY SIGNATURES As she showed in Â Five Mile Lake, Â Rachel Bonds works with a small brush. She lays low before her subject in order to convey tender, unassuming connections between the characters. The result: inconclusive plots that suggest so much more life around these souls — ones that we can only assume but nonetheless…

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME Terry McCabe, artistic director of City Lit Theater, knows Sherlock Holmes and his shadow sleuth Dr. Watson almost as well as author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His adaptations of their adventures combine storytelling urgency and narrative drive with crime solving at a perfect fever. Ever at…

WELL, LERNER & LOEWE ME DOWN Seldom has a dream team had a shorter span: It was all over in only 13 years. But between 1947 and 1960 Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe ran a glorious gamut. It happened both on Broadway and in Hollywood transfers of five very different successes. The powerful partnership…

TO BE OR NOT TO BE SARAH BERNHARDT Well, with “Bernhardt” and “Hamlet” sharing the marquee, Goodman Theatre’s season-opener must be larger than life if not literature. Sprawling and stuffed at 150 minutes, Theresa Rebeck’s multi-focused 2018 drama  Bernhardt/Hamlet  takes a quizzical look at a bizarre chapter of theater lore. We’re witness to the sensation-seeking choice of…

A MUSICAL CIRCLE JERK You could call it a daisy chain of horizontal encounters, this chronicle of sexual partisans whose sleeping around creates a sort of chain letter of lust. A ton of talent reduced to silly shenanigans — a miscalculation dogs director/choreographer Brenda Didier’s revival of  Hello Again, Michael John LaChiusa’s 1993 musical trivialization of…

MY FAIR MONARCH We love levelling. Mark Twain’s prince and the pauper, Queen Victoria and her Scottish and Indian boyfriends, Queen Anne and her favorites, a British schoolteacher and the King of Siam, King George III and his equally mad doctors — these equalizing polarities keep history real. Add to these opposites that attract another…

DANCE OF DIPLOMACY Clandestine and volatile, high-stakes diplomacy can be as taut as any courtroom drama. It’s hard to imagine a story more intrinsically theatrical than the real-life crises and complications that transform  Oslo  into a foreign-affairs thriller. Now at the Broadway Playhouse in a crackling collaboration between TimeLine Theatre Company and Broadway in Chicago, it’s history…

HOOP DREAMS IN THE CELESTIAL KINGDOM No question, Lauren Yee is a wonderful new voice in theater. With Cambodian Rock Band  she made crucial connections between iconic survivors and unspeakable genocide. Victory Gardens Theater’s 2018 local premiere was a powerful work of witness and redemption. Just as remarkable in its fusion of sport and history, people…

A CONVERGENCE OF HISTORY It was supposedly the “end of an era,” the memorial service for Richard Nixon in the Nixon Library in his birthplace Yorba Linda, California, on April 27, 1994. And we are there:  Five Presidents, a recently revised 2015 drama by Chicago favorite Rick Cleveland, delivers 85 minutes of fascinating “fly on the…

NOT DEAD YET It’s at least a chuckle a minute. Half the hilarity is verbal sallies, half sight gags. This cheeky, subversive, and unashamedly sidesplitting  Spamalot, described in the press release as “ridiculous men in tight pants,” is a labor of laughter. Its irreverence feels contagious, its target-shooting flawless. Nothing is spared its satire as it…