Chicago

THE BELLE OF COAL YARD ALLEY LEAVES YOU GWYNNING FROM EAR TO EAR When you’re mistress to a monarch, your perch is precarious. Envy supplants praise as, moving from “rags to royalty,” your origin pursues you through slander and shaming. Lacking the protection of marriage, seldom measured by your merit (just your maneuvers), the royal…

FORGET STICKS AND STONES: WORDS WILL  ALWAYS  HURT YOU Who says words can’t kill? In  BigMouth, flawlessly intoning English, Walloon, French, and German (with captions), Belgian solo performance artist Valentijn Dhaenens pours a dozen passions into nine alternating microphones. In little more than 70 minutes, this creator-performer conflates disparate speeches from sources as diverse as the innocent but…

THE RIGHT TO DO WRONG Count this among the finest offerings from a Chicago theater: Shattered Globe Theatre’s kinetic staging of Chris Hannan’s adaptation of Crime and Punishment is flawlessly directed by Louis Contey, Eleven actors simultaneously attain personal bests in 155 minutes. First, however, a look at the roots of this wonder: Following his…

TRAPPED IN A DREARY DRAMEDY There’s a tender scene at the start of HOMOS, OR EVERYONE IN AMERICA (a perversely paradoxical title) that wants to convince us that Jordan Seavey’s lads really are  lovers. Brooklyn’s streetlights are dark from a power failure, so one guy comforts the other by playing some vinyl Vivaldi and holding him…

NO CLOSURE FOR GENOCIDE Family is how history happens. As Arthur Miller wisely showed in  All My Sons,  The Gift  and  The Crucible, change radiates outward. Even, or especially, an immense abomination like the Holocaust can’t be measured in six million dead as powerfully as in one family crushed and confronted by what was, what might have been, and…

A WAY TO GHOUL OFF THIS SUMMER It’s not easy for a frightfest to work (or play) just as well as a laff-fest, let alone to be both: A delightful exercise in creepy-crawly quirkiness,  Nightmares and Nightcaps: The Stories of John Collier  pays hilarious homage to a British-born master of the macabre. Collier (1901-1980), a long-time  New Yorker  contributor…

CLASSICAL MARTYRS AS NEW JERSEY HOUSEWIVES MYTHS SOMETHING Imagine Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone, and Cassandra transported to a New Jersey suburb in 1960. There the same cycle of repression and revenge repeats itself. The ancient victims — two anti-heroines with loathsome mates, one religious martyr, and a disrespected prophetess — are now, respectively, two pill-popping, grievance-nursing…

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…

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…

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…

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…