Chicago

LOVE IN THE FAST LANE “Love will break your heart; sometimes you want it to.” That curious contradiction is the opening shot in  MIDSUMMER (A Play with Songs). This theatrical roller coaster merrily chronicles a weekend “stand” in Edinburgh between convulsively disparate thirtysomething partners, a quirky encounter that may indeed have a future. Now in a…

MAY HOWARDS END NEVER END “Only connect..! Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” Seldom has a classic novel so strongly followed its defining drive as  Howards End, E.M. Forster’s seminal 1910 good-will offering. As seen and…

THE SON ALSO RISES It’s always fascinating to be present at the creation of a crucial writer. Like James Joyce’s  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,  Eugene O’Neill’s  Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Tennessee Williams’  The Glass Menagerie, D.H. Lawrence’s 1913 coming-of-age classic  marks a metamorphosis: Sons and Lovers  chronicles a writer’s conditional emancipation from a home that…

THE WRONG WARDROBE? Clothes make the man — even if he dresses as a woman. An entire individuality, it seems, can hang in a closet, as transvestites have proven across the centuries. Casa Valentina, a 2014 period piece by Harvey Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy, Kinky Boots), explores a lost world of cross-dressers in the Catskills…

ALL QUIET MAKES A BIG NOISE One of the saddest truths about humanity is that we always need to be warned against war, so tempting is its license to kill.  All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel, was not, alas, the anti-war novel to end all anti-war novels. It arrived half-way between…

PUTTING THE FUN IN FUNK Taking us as far from death as is humanly possible, some shows just reward you for being alive. In perhaps their most joyous musical celebration yet, the 43-year-old Black Ensemble Theater continues its “Legends and Lessons” season with a major party:  You Can’t Fake the Funk (A Journey Through Funk Music)  is…

SECOND CHANCES NEED SECOND ACTS Sit — and calm — down and make yourself at show. A captivating work extolling rural redemption, The Spitfire Grill, a 2001 musical of the 1995 film, shows how, if a wound goes deep, even the healing is bound to hurt. Its tender focus is on a female parolee who…

SIBLING WARFARE Can lightning strike again after 37 years? In 1982 Steppenwolf Theatre Company put itself on the map with a landmark staging of Sam Shepard’s domestic disruption  True West starring Jeff Perry, John Malkovich, and Gary Sinise (in the Broadway transfer). Nearly two generations later, it’s back — in a rightly reckless reprise directed by…

MAN, OH MUSIC MAN If  ever a show spelled out summer, it’s Meredith Willson’s 1957 masterpiece  The Music Man. Throughout the rollicking story, the title character exudes sunny optimism, a flimflam that “Professor” Harold Hill wants to believe as much as the suckers who take it in. His buoyant drive fits the season like a picnic. It’s…

TEMPEST BELONGS OUTDOORS The words can get windblown or contend with sirens and such. But, just as food tastes different (better?) when eaten outdoors, so does the Bard. Embracing all, Shakespeare needs no roof and the sky’s no limit. Now in their eighth season of offering free performances in four Chicago parks through August, this…

GO-GO SEE THIS SHOW-SHOW It’s a marriage made in musical heaven: A ton of fun erupts from combining seemingly antithetical elements — a 16th-century fairy-tale/poem cycle by Sir Phillip Sidney and jukebox hits from the 1980s’ female rock band The Go-Go’s. As created by Jeff Whitty and adapted by James Magruder, the riotous result is…

AN APP-ETITE FOR AMOUR Sooner or later you knew an Internet application would get its own show, especially when it plays Dan Cupid, hooking up randy seekers of one-night stands or permanent pleasure. First produced in the U.K. last year, Grindr The Opera (An Unauthorized Parody) is an alternately cheeky and bittersweet salute to some…

THE WINNER BY AN INCH It’s a perverse Pride Month offering that cocks a snoot at authority and respectability: “I’m the new Berlin Wall — try to tear me down!” That defiant dare marks the flaming arrival of Hedwig Schmidt, survivor-heroine of John Cameron Mitchell’s riveting 1998 rock opera, a work that inevitably honors the…

A LITERAL STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Only 65 minutes long, British playwright Jez Butterworth’s spell-casting  The River  manages, as few plays have, to simulate a dream on stage. Heraclitus said that life was like a river because we never step into the same stream twice. Likewise this one-act’s obsessive quest for certainty in love amid the seemingly random…