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Chicago
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Theater Review: RICK STONE THE BLUES MAN (Black Ensemble Theater)
WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR SONG This time it’s up close and down home. Rick Stone the Blues Man departs from the Black Ensemble Theater’s standard tributes to superstars like Patti LaBelle or Dionne Warwick. Bringing things down to basics, B.E.T.’s new revue salutes their own singers in founder-playwright Jackie Taylor’s most personal musical labor of love. A…
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Theater Review: BUS STOP (Eclipse Theatre in Chicago)
RIGHT PLAY, WRONG STOP The plays of William Inge, featured this season by Eclipse Theatre Company, offer a bedrock realism that fuels the down-home decency of his small-town characters. But this closeted playwright made one emotion his particular domain — loneliness. In Picnic, Come Back, Little Sheba, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (to close the Eclipse…
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Theater Review: THE COLOR PURPLE (National Tour)
BLACK AND BLUE After winning a Tony last year for best revival of a musical, Oprah’s once and future movie-turned-musical has finally hit her home town, part of a national tour. As alive as the genre gets and as overwrought as the original Spielberg film, this sprawling saga of life for African-American women in the…
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Theater Review: EVERYBODY (Brown Paper Box Co. at the Pride Arts Center in Chicago)
SIN AS CRAZINESS You don’t see morality plays like Everyman anymore — and not just because it’s not the 15th century. We shy away from such absolutes as Death and even Good Deeds. Everybody, with its nonspecific title an improvement on the original, modernizes a hugely popular medieval masterwork. The anonymously written Everyman was an allegorical depiction of the titular Christian’s…
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Theater Review: HEARTBREAK HOTEL (Broadway Playhouse in Chicago)
BEFORE THE CROWN PRINCE BECAME THE KING Legends require reclamation and renewal: Created by Floyd Mutrux, the huge hit Million Dollar Quartet reprised a once-in-four-lifetimes recording session in a Memphis studio that brought together Sun Records’ once and future icons: Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash — and Elvis Presley. We see rock ‘n’ roll history…
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Chicago Theater Review: FUCKING MEN (Pride Films and Plays at the Pride Arts Center)
SERIAL SEX AS A CONTINUUM OF DESIRE There’s not much to learn from Fucking Men — an unabashed sexual merry-go-round and a late-night offering from Pride Films & Plays — but there’s a lot to like about it. Tony winner Joe DiPietro (creator of the musical Memphis) based his romp on 19th-century Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler’s much-imitated…
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Theater Review: THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA (Midsommer Flight at Lincoln Park, Touhy Park, Gross Park, and Chicago Women’s Park and Gardens)
IT’S LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT WITH THE BARD’S FIRST LOOK AT LOVE Happily, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare’s first play, is not like the first pancake — a test case to be thrown away. A trifle depicting the too-forgivable treachery of fickle Proteus to everyone around him — especially his faithful Julia — it employs…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE ROOMMATE (Steppenwolf)
REMAKE YOUR LIFE’”AT YOUR PERIL With some plays what doesn’t happen is the whole megillah. Jen Silverman’s two-character one-act The Roommate, now simmering in a Chicago premiere by Steppenwolf Theatre Company, plays with possibilities. As you watch Silverman’s character comedy turn into serious stuff, it’s easy to invent several dramas (or at least scenarios) percolating. Here,…
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Theater Review: AVENUE Q (Mercury Theater Chicago)
OPEN SESAME SEASON Peter Pan never grew up. Likewise Alice in Wonderland, the Hardy Boys, Freddy the Pig, Nancy Drew, Huck Finn, or Donald Trump. It’s a pity people do: Why must grown-ups leave behind innocence and imagination after we mistakenly blunder into adulthood? You can take it with you — when it’s Avenue Q. This 2003 musical…
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Chicago Theater Review: TILIKUM (Sideshow Theatre Company at Victory Gardens)
SEA WORLD AS A CITADEL OF CAUCASIAN COMMAND Orcas, it seems, can suffer for our sins. In Tilikum — a world-premiere from Sideshow Theatre Company — the struggle of indigenous people to reclaim their stolen land comes down to a giant fish tank. Playwright Kristiana Rae Colon imagines a white-supremacist version of Sea World. Its…
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Theater Review: THE VIEW UPSTAIRS (Circle Theatre)
A DIFFERENT LOOK AT THE VIEW Now a nearly forgotten but seminal gay tragedy, it happened after Stonewall but before AIDS and Orlando’s Pulse terrorist attack – a 1973 arson atrocity in The Big Easy. Powerfully premiered by Circle Theatre at the Pride Arts Center, The View UpStairs is Max Vernon’s 2013 musical, nominated for…
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Chicago Theater Review: GUARDS AT THE TAJ (Steppenwolf)
BEAUTY AND BLOOD Guards at the Taj is, in the very best sense, unavoidable. To appreciate this grim and great drama by Rajiv Joseph (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, The Lake Effect), it helps to recall the facts that inspire it: The Taj Mahal means “Crown of the Palace,” but this magnificent marble mausoleum and its…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE (Music Theater Works in Evanston)
PIRATES STEALS YOUR HEART Music Theater Works just unleashed 140 minutes of undiluted ecstasy and hilarious nonsense, and the lucky location is Northwestern University’s Cahn Auditorium in Evanston. True to the topsy-turvy twists and turns of Victorian satire, this gem sounds great with Linda Madonia’s 26-piece orchestra, looks great with awesomely accurate costumes by Jana…
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Chicago Theater Review: BURNHAM’S DREAM: THE WHITE CITY (Theater Wit)
OUR LOST DREAM CITY It’s possible to think that it never happened, that we imagined its splendor to exalt our past. It was the most transient of treasures, with only the Museum of Science and Industry and photos to suggest the Beaux Arts, alabaster magnificence of marvels that bejeweled Jackson Park and the South Side…
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Chicago Theater Review: FATHER COMES HOME FROM THE WARS (PARTS 1, 2 & 3) (Goodman Theatre)
THE UNCIVIL WAR Goodman Theatre’s current epic won’t be confused with other dramas. It explores the Civil War as seen and suffered by the slaves. Not the usual perspective but it delivers a very broad canvas for Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks. Running over three hours and requiring two intermissions, Father Comes Home from the…
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Chicago Theater Review: 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEAS (Lookingglass Theatre Company)
A LEAGUES OF THEIR OWN You can’t keep a bad man down. Especially when he’s Captain Nemo, the scourge of the sea. Returning to the watery roots of Moby Dick, Lookingglass Theatre Company launches 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. This 140-minute adventure on the low seas navigates the psyche of a world-wide terrorist in a…
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Chicago Theater Review: MIES JULIE (Victory Gardens)
STRINDBERG SET IN SOUTH AFRICA Yes, it’s Mies Julie, not Miss Julie, and it’s by Yaël Farber, not August Strindberg. And that makes a monstrous difference. Repurposed to depict a different divergence between two star-crossed and mismatched lovers, reset in an uprooted country torn between the curse of apartheid and the uncertainty of nationhood, Strindberg’s…
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Chicago Theater Review: BULL IN A CHINA SHOP (About Face Theatre)
A POWER COUPLE WORTH RECLAIMING Lest we forget two women who long ago shaped their future into our present, witness Bull in a China Shop. Written by Mount Holyoke alumna Bryna Turner, this concentrated one-act pays a conditional tribute to Mary Wooley and Jeanette Marks, radical academics and long-time lovers. The former was President of…
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Chicago Theater Review: A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (BoHo Theatre)
EINE KLEINE SWEDISH SOLSTICE Some 40 years after its birth, A Little Night Music feels like it’s always been here. Wisely and warmly, composer Stephen Sondheim and writer Hugh Wheeler, borrowing from one of Ingmar Bergman’s finest films (Smiles of a Summer Night), compassionately anatomize three mismatched turn-of-the-century couples. They’re midsummer fools of love caught…
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Theater Review: WAITING FOR GODOT (Druid Theatre)
STOOD UP YET AGAIN: “Birth was the death of him”: Terse to the point of cruelty, Samuel Beckett here devours the human experience in six words. Waiting for Godot, his minimalist masterpiece, takes nearly three hours for the same result. But Beckett succeeds in his life-long task: to “find the form that will accommodate the mess”…
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