Chicago

THE ULTIMATE DRAG RACE It’s both louder than life and strident with substance. The perfect play for Pride Month and a deafening blast from the past,  Ms. Blakk for President, an uproarious and rambunctious rouser, gives a magnificent cause future reference. Created by ensemble members Tina Landau and Tarell Alvin McCraney for Steppenwolf, this 100-minute jubilee…

POINTLESS PERPLEXITY Sometimes what you see is much less than what you get. Case in point: Pride Films and Plays is closing its season with a daunting new work written by Ryan Oliveira and directed by Topher Leon.  Desire in a Tinier House  (its title as mystifying as most of its plot) is a two-hour, two-act, two-character…

SIX CHICKS REMIX TO NIX PRICKS Singing well is the best revenge, especially if you married the spouse from hell. So runs the cunning concept behind  Six. This raucous pop concert joyously restores to very loud life the six ex-wives of Henry VIII. The rampaging result, recalling the hip-hop irreverence of the Q Brothers’Othello: The Remix  and  Christmas…

SINGING UP STORMY STUFF With this theater everything good is new again — and never old. The latest homage from Black Ensemble Theater, Style and Grace: In Tribute to Lena Horne and Nancy Wilson honors stellar singers whose consummate talents we lost in 2010 and 2018, respectively. Incarnating “impeccable style and enduring grace,” these divas…

THE MONSTER WITHIN It was a dark and stormy night. Escaping a tempest by seeking shelter in the Villa Diodati on a summer night in 1814, good friends Mary Shelley (as she would later be called), her future husband and Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the infamous George Gordon Lord Bryon, affable Dr. John Polidori,…

DÉJí€ VU VS. NEVERMORE A very prolific playwright, Steven Dietz can deliver dense dramatic homage. In his 2013  Mad Beat Hip & Gone, now playing at The Edge Theater Off Broadway, his dialogue dives into a recreation of beatnik Jack Kerouac’s road-trip fantasies. Another very recent work, his 2016  Bloomsday, incarnates and embodies James Joyce, specifically the…

KEEPING ROCK REAL Letting a good thing go is a hard fate: Change is always constant but it’s never guaranteed to be good. A tough transition in Chicago’s indie rock scene is feelingly chronicled in Laura Eason’s  The  Undeniable  Sound  of  Right  Now, a Chicago premiere at Raven Theatre. The title sounds like a visceral response to an expiration date —…

TAKE TO THE ROAD Walt Whitman may have patented the “song of the open road,” but the Beat Generation gave it their own course correction and made it into a map. These writers of the Eisenhower Era, most notably Jack Kerouac in  On the Road, turned bittersweet  wanderlust into their own manifest destiny. In a time before…

ANOTHER DREAM DEFERRED The price of progress is no abstraction, not during the fully-freighted 160 minutes of Jiréh Breon Holder’s civil rights drama Too Heavy for Your Pocket. A TimeLine Theatre time capsule thrillingly staged by Ron OJ Parson, this blast from the past goes beyond yesterday’s infamous clash of activists against fire hoses to…

  THE PARENTS CRUSADE The setting  is  the story in  The Children, Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Chicago premiere. Set designer Chelsea M. Warren depicts a cluttered seaside cottage off the east coast of England. It’s seen from across a cliff, as if an exhibit in a human zoo. This remote shelter is located just outside an “exclusion zone,” the site…

THE PARALYZED PRINCE Century after century, thespian tyro after marquee headliner, something remains rotten in the state of Denmark. A defining challenge for thousands of careers, Hamlet  persists as both a title and a test, Shakespeare’s longest if not deepest tragedy. At nearly three hours, Barbara Gaines’ magisterial modern-dress revival is a valuable and workmanlike continuation…

TWIN TRAVESTIES (OF JUSTICE) ARE DOUBLE THE FUN Order in the court! Closing its season with dueling gavels, City Lit Theater offers  Two Days in Court in only 90 minutes. Merrily combining Gilbert and Sullivan’s first hit, the “dramatic cantata” Trial by Jury, with Stephen Vincent Benet’s historical romp  The Devil and Daniel Webster, it’s a charming…