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Chicago

  • Chicago Theater Review: A CHORUS LINE (Porchlight)

    By Lawrence Bommer | April 14, 2019
    in

    GOTTA DANCE! Now 44 years old, which means that a third generation of hoofers is now recreating it,  A Chorus Line remains the late Michael Bennett’s breakthrough backstage musical, winner of nine Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. In this show before a show, the parts — 17 dancers auditioning for a Broadway outing — outweigh…

  • Chicago Theater Review: CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND (Victory Gardens)

    By Lawrence Bommer | April 13, 2019
    in

    HATE VS. MUSIC It’s impossible to grasp a monster evil like genocide as a whole, to weigh it as so many calculable, tangible acts of human failure that yield a vast vileness and a terrible waste. To hold it hard, it has to be broken down into the choices and values of flawed or heroic…

  • Theater Review: JERSEY BOYS (2018-19 National Tour)

    By Lawrence Bommer | April 3, 2019
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    THE BOYFRIENDS ARE BACK Back by popular demand but for only one week at the Auditorium Theatre,  the mega-jukebox musical  Jersey Boys continues to stir up a perfect storm of industrial-strength nostalgia. Replete with doo-wop harmonies, pile-driving rock anthems and blue-collar verismo, the trademarks of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, this well-packaged blast from the past…

  • Chicago Theater Review: ADMISSIONS (Theater Wit)

    By Lawrence Bommer | April 2, 2019
    in

    AFFIRMATIVE RE-ACTION Don’t let the title fool you. Produced last year at Lincoln Center Theater, Admissions arrived too early to address the recent scandal involving illegal offenses in college admissions — bribes, cheating and gaming the system by rich parents with underachieving children. Felicity Huffman was still in the future (and past). But this one-act…

  • Theater Review: AFTERGLOW (Pride Films and Plays)

    By Lawrence Bommer | April 1, 2019
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    DOES LOVE NEED A LEASH? “The heart wants what the heart wants.” Emily Dickinson’s seemingly simple saying (akin to Gertrude Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose”) in fact packs a lot of wary resignation into a vote of confidence. So does the 2017 off-Broadway hit  Afterglow, 80 minutes of theatrical “comfort food” that…

  • Theater Review: YEN (Raven Theatre in Chicago)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 27, 2019
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    TODAY’S LOST BOYS Theater takes us places and shows us stuff that we might never freely choose to go or see. Exhibits A-Z are Yen, a 2013 visit to Gorki’s “lower depths” by British playwright Anna Jordan. Depicting marginalized misfits in a broken west London neighborhood, Yen  impressively manages to both chronicle the outrages of outcasts…

  • Chicago Theater Review: BRIGHT STAR (BoHo Theatre at Greenhouse Theater Center)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 24, 2019
    in

    A BRIGHT STAR ISN’T ON THE HORIZON; IT’S RIGHT HERE You can savor heart and hope in every scene in  Bright Star,  BoHo Theatre’s new triumph in their upstairs home at the Greenhouse Theater Center. Nostalgic without escapism and redemptive with utterly earned emotions, this 2014 bluegrass musical by phenoms Steve Martin and Edie Brickell spins an…

  • Theater Review: MELANCHOLY PLAY (Organic Theater Company at The Greenhouse Theater)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 21, 2019
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    PRECIOUS NONSENSE MAKES MELANCHOLY PLAY A FORTRESS OF ARTIFICE If you ever feel “slightly dead,” you may be prey to the temperament of melancholy. Melancholy Play: A Contemporary Farce, a 2002 drama by the prolific and unpredictable Sarah Ruhl, treats the condition with singular intensity, delivering a histrionic polemic on the virtues and perils of…

  • Theater Review: SWEAT (Goodman Theatre)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 19, 2019
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    DIVIDED AND CONQUERED If the American Dream needs an obituary, Lynn Nottage’s 2017 Pulitzer winner is it. If Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty  celebrated the power and promise of labor unions, Sweat chronicles a worker’s nightmare. Creating nine palpable characters in crisis, a richly empathetic playwright plunges us into a harrowing tale of deindustrialization in Reading,…

  • Theater Review: A BRONX TALE (North American Tour)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 14, 2019
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    A BRONX CHEER Unpretentious and unpreaching in its streetwise survival lore, the gangster fable  A Bronx Tale is, as the name implies, just one of many small sagas from the lesser borough. Now on tour, this 2016 musical has a book by Chazz Palminteri, based on his semi-autobiographical solo show and the 1993 film directed by…

  • Theater Review: THE CHOIR OF MAN (National Tour)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 13, 2019
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    IN PRAISE OF THE PUB There’s no need for a plot, three-dimensional characters, or conflicts pending resolution — no, not when the setting and its songs sell themselves from the start. That feel-good premise pays off over 80 minutes in The Choir of Man, a British import now playing Chicago’s Broadway Playhouse on its first…

  • Chicago Theater Review: LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (Mercury Theater Chicago)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 11, 2019
    in

    THE HORROR…THE HORROR… THE FUN…THE FUN… You can see it as a modern parable of how the neglect that created Skid Row and its plethora of poverty brings its own revenge: A literally bloodthirsty plant gets sensationalized by rapacious promoters and proceeds to eat up the planet. The Bitch Goddess Success is here transmogrified into…

  • Theater Review: SOUTHERN COMFORT (Pride Films and Plays at the Pride Arts Center)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 5, 2019
    in ,

    TRANS-CENDENT Rather than dwell on the similitude of roses, Gertrude Stein might better have said love is love is love. It certainly is in one particular North Side storefront: A 2016 blue-grass musical with a heart and a half is now a warm and winning Chicago premiere from Pride Films and Plays. Southern Comfort  offers just…

  • Opera Review: ARIODANTE (Lyric Opera of Chicago)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 3, 2019
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    HANDEL WITH CARE It’s hard to believe that, following its Covent Garden debut in 1735, this glorious  opera seria  endured 191 years of neglect. It returned to the boards in 1926, even more so in the 1970s, selling its stuff with dazzling vocal pyrotechnics, courtly dances, and a hard-driving tale of innocence traduced and true love vindicated….

  • Theater Review: THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY (Lifeline Theatre in Chicago)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 25, 2019
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    IF IT’S THURSDAY, IT MUST BE LIFELINE Deemed a “metaphysical thriller,”  The Man Who Was Thursday  is religious writer G.K. Chesterton’s celebrated satire from 1908. Intentionally confounding its characters as much as its plethora of plots, it’s a very rational romp. Chesterton’s political parable conjures up a conspiratorial world of bomb-throwing anarchists, proletarian poets, and single-minded and…

  • Chicago Theater Review: ACT(S) OF GOD (Lookingglass)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 25, 2019
    in

    TOO MANY ACT(S) Even apocalypses, it seems, can be goofy, disruptive, and “meta” — if you go by Lookingglass Theatre Company’s irritating and overlong world premiere. With two intermissions that sprawl across 150 not so necessary minutes, this dark offering by ensemble member Kareem Bandealy indulges in some very cute doom. Before it’s over the…

  • Opera Review: LA TRAVIATA (Lyric Chicago)

    By Barnaby Hughes | February 24, 2019
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    MISSING A FEW NOTES It’s quite a treat to have two Verdi operas in one season, especially two of the composer’s best. Yet neither of these similarly named operas gets a new production. Whereas Il Trovatore had first been performed during the 2014/15 season, so La Traviata was performed in 2013/14. I did not see…

  • Chicago Theater Review: TWILIGHT BOWL (Goodman)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 20, 2019
    in

    SHE STRIKES! SHE SCORES! WELL, BOWL ME OVER It’s only women who perform, design, direct, write, and otherwise shape this Goodman Theatre world premiere. Rebecca Gilman’s  Twilight Bowl  represents a healthy change of insiders. Making up for lost chances and time, this coming-of-age, slice-of-life depicts six small-town, twentysomething friends across several seasons. Their getaway time is spent…

  • Review: THE SCARLET IBIS (Chicago Opera Theater)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 17, 2019
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    A SMALL STORY SOARS IN THIS NEW OPERA Right now the Studebaker Theater houses a wonder. A chamber opera with a heart of gold,  The Scarlet Ibis, with a supple score by Stefan Weisman and lyrical libretto by David Cote, is based on a 1960 short story by the late James Hurst. In only 95 minutes…

  • Dance Review: ANNA KARENINA (World Premiere by Joffrey Ballet at the Auditorium Theatre)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 14, 2019
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    LEO TOLSTOY TURNED TO LEAPS AND TWIRLS IN THIS WORLD PREMIERE BALLET MILESTONE So many superlatives to savor. Newly created by 35-year-old  wunderkind  composer Ilya Demutsky, who replenishes the rhapsodic romanticism of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and genius choreographer Yuri Possokhov, who finds new depths in dance,  Anna Karenina, Joffrey Ballet’s first commissioned score, redeemed its promissory notes perfectly…

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