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Chicago

  • Theater Review: TOO HEAVY FOR YOUR POCKET (TimeLine Theatre)

    By Lawrence Bommer | May 2, 2019
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    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…

  • Theater Review: THE CHILDREN (Steppenwolf)

    By Lawrence Bommer | April 29, 2019
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      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…

  • Theater Review: HAMLET (Chicago Shakespeare)

    By Lawrence Bommer | April 27, 2019
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    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…

  • Opera Review: MOBY-DICK (Chicago Opera Theater at the Harris Theater)

    By Lawrence Bommer | April 26, 2019
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    THE WHALE WINS There’s only one more performance — on Sunday at 3 at the Harris Theatre — of Chicago Opera Theater’s awesomely ambitious Moby-Dick, a nearly-three-hour 2010 epic with music by Jake Heggie and a libretto by Gene Scheer. As much an exercise in mounting hubris and ironclad obsession as was Captain Ahab’s pursuit…

  • Dance Review: ACROSS THE POND (Joffrey Ballet at the Auditorium Theatre)

    By Lawrence Bommer | April 25, 2019
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    BRITAIN’S BALLET FINDS CHICAGO Springing into the season, the Joffrey Ballet’s current visit to the Auditorium Theatre delivers very welcome art — two world premieres and a Chicago first. Across the Pond, with accompaniment by the Chicago Philharmonic conducted by Scott Speck, proves a stirring showcase for three cutting-edge choreographers. It’s an equal opportunity for…

  • Theater Review: TWO DAYS IN COURT: Benet’s THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER and Gilbert and Sullivan’s TRIAL BY JURY (City Lit)

    By Lawrence Bommer | April 24, 2019
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    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…

  • Chicago Theater Review: HANNAH AND MARTIN (Shattered Globe Theatre at Theater Wit)

    By Lawrence Bommer | April 15, 2019
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    CAN LOVE ENABLE EVIL? There is no last supper or cross on Golgotha but, yes,  Hannah and Martin  is a true passion play. What makes this even stranger is that it’s as much about clashing ideologies as characters in conflict. Both pile-driving and even-handed, it presents a true-life struggle between famous lover-thinkers caught up in the ugliness…

  • Chicago Theater Review: A CHORUS LINE (Porchlight)

    By Lawrence Bommer | April 14, 2019
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    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
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    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
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    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
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    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…

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