Chicago

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…

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…