Chicago

BUG GETS UNDER YOUR SKIN Nineteen years ago, A Red Orchid Theatre launched the Midwest premiere of  Bug by Pulitzer-winner Tracy Letts. It unleashed a ferocious Michael Shannon and a self-destructing Kate Buddeke in the title roles. Back then I thought the play just an excuse for excess — the shock effects of wacko lovers dissolving…

I DON’T FEEL YOUR PAIN Lately a chronic lack of empathy–sensitivity to the feelings of others–threatens to become a liability as great as any budget deficit. Compassion has never felt less contagious. So maybe it’s time for Do You Feel Anger? No indignant expose of sociopathic alienation, this 2019 drama by Mara Nelson-Greenberg, now in…

SOPHISTICATED SWING FROM KING  ELLINGTON Some shows are just pure pleasure, delivering unpretentious delight with no plot to process or points to proclaim. Much like  Ain’t Misbehavin’, an infectious romp that salutes the music and mirth of Fats Waller,  Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies  is a 1981 confection conceived by Donald McKayle that enthralls audiences with two dozen hit numbers…

MANY FORKS IN MANY ROADS “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!” John Greenleaf Whittier’s bittersweet couplet is echoed in If/Then, a 2014 chamber musical. This sprawling, 160-minute speculation of a show wonders whether there are any accidents in life. Is chance just “probabilities playing…

LONELY HUBRIS “I want it all.” “The sky’s [not] the limit.” “You only live once.” “You can’t take it with you.”: We’re fascinated by all the pride that precedes a fall. We can conditionally identify with hyper self-assertion — then strategically withdraw our sympathies when it comes a cropper. That’s what still works, almost 40…

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…