Chicago

CHARLES DICKENS, RINGMASTER EXTRAORDINAIRE This exuberant offering first appeared 16 years ago: Lookingglass Theatre Company reinvented Charles Dickens’ tough-loving and always topical  Hard Times (for These Times). Whenever this cunning ensemble tell a cruel story truly, you can practically cut the chill in the house. Embracing Dickens’ tenth and shortest novel, a sadly contemporary cautionary tale…

LOST IN TRANSFUSION Halloween is dangling out in the future, which means that Washington D.C. is finally getting competition in the terror market. The indefatigable Sean Graney, disruptive director/adaptor of The Hypocrites’ thinking theater, just jumped on the scream wagon. He offers us the latest variation on a theme by Bram Stoker (via Vlad the…

A TWENTY-YEAR ALIEN INVASION The azure takeover began in 1991.  Six years later,  Blue Man Group—the company that is a show—debuted in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. 20  years later, now the longest running production in the city, it still plays the Briar Street Theater (which used to be the stable for Marshall Field’s delivery horses). Clearly, in the right…

THORNTON WILDER’S SURVIVAL SAGA It’s a play for all seasons and all sorrows: Writing during the uncertainty of a world war, Thornton Wilder intended  The Skin of Our Teeth  to be a three-act reassurance. A promissory note to be redeemed during misfortunes, it would remind mortals of their better angels. This winner of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize…

QUINN KELSEY AND MATTHEW POLENZANI SHINE IN CLASSIC ITALIAN OPERA After the novelty of Lyric’s season-opening production of Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice, this more traditional production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto is welcome indeed. In Rigoletto, Verdi’s score is as delightful and charming as ever, with such memorable songs as “La donna è mobile” and “Caro…

FEAR FACTOR: 1692 = 2017 325 years ago, a witchhunt gave this continent one of its most chilling and cautionary cases of panic-peddling and persecution: In assorted “witch trials” the supposedly godly townsfolk of Salem, Massachusetts executed 19 innocent fellow humans. Part class-ridden repression, part naked plunder (these hangings facilitated some very convenient land grabs),…

HE STILL GOT THAT SWING In his 75 years of marvelous music-making, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington really was American nobility if not royalty. The sultan of swing was also the jazz king, a sophisticate with the common touch who merged Broadway with Main Street, a composer of countless songs that launched dozens of careers. And…

SINGING, SURVIVING, AND SPIRIT It’s a fine fit: As much as molding character is the goal of the imaginary Charles R. Drew Prep School for Boys in  Choir Boy, it’s also the purpose of Chicago’s very real Raven Theatre—where make-believe manages to matter. The characters on this stage—seen from every side—are forged in the script, transforming…

MORE “FUN” THAN THE FIRST TIME AROUND Wise and warm, the 100-minute family memoir  Fun Home  charts the twisted courses of two generations of the Bechdels—a self-shaming gay father and a self-affirming lesbian daughter—from her coming out to his suicide. Based on Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic novel, this intimate 2015 Broadway one-act chamber musical, winner of five…

A PAINTING IS A PORTAL Art is never still, not just still lifes but landscapes, genre scenes, even abstract configurations and, especially, portraits. Every painting is a time capsule that absorbed everything that was going around it as it was created—and since too. Multifaceted Rohrshack tests of perception, intuition, associations and imagination, they paradoxically measure…

ORWELLIAN OR TRUMPIAN?:  1984  MEETS 2017 Everything evil is new again: What George Orwell wrote 69 years ago still remains ahead of our time—but, with a President in power who purveys “alternative facts” and denounces “fake news” (that he can’t use), it’s not nearly as much as it should or used to be. However accurately Robert Tobin’s…

A THUG BECOMES A MUSE “Fish out of water†humor meets showbiz stereotypes—that’s the gag-winning formula in the 1994 film Â Bullets Over Broadway, starring John Cusack, Jennifer Tilly, Diane Wiest, Mary-Louis Parker, and a wonderful Chazz Palminteri. It was Woody Allen’s twisted Valentine to the “Great White Way†and the flappers, gangsters and dreamers who made…

FACING FATALITY It’s the last play written by John Millington Synge. This Irish minstrel-playwright died in 1909 at only 37 after penning stunning beauties—Riders to the Sea  and his masterpiece  The Playboy of the Western World. Synge never saw his final offering  Deirdre  of the Sorrows. (It was last done in Chicago 100 years ago.) So it’s not surprising…

A STUNNING RECLAMATION OF OUR 16th ’”AND BEST’”PRESIDENT Right now—bar none—the most stirring chronicle on a Chicago stage is Shattered Globe Theatre’s enthralling 155-minute  The Heavens Are Hung in Black  at Theater Wit. Whether history as drama or drama as history, this two-act offering from Pulitzer Prize nominee James Still distills 1862—a pivotal year in the Civil…

WHEN MEDICINE GETS SICK “First, do no harm.” A no-brainer, this unarguable warning in the Hippocratic Oath apparently defies and defines the medical profession in 2017.  Mercy Killings  and  Side Effects, well-targeted protest portraits written and performed by Michael Milligan, drive home its disillusionments, conflicts of interest, contradictions, betrayals and broken promises—both for patients and doctors. Determinedly directed…

BECOMING A “MAN” A brand-new musical about the past intersects the present with a vengeance. A world premiere from Permoveo Productions and Pride Films & Plays,  The CiviliTy of Albert Cashier, now in a powerpacking debut at Stage 773, delivers a searing perspective on today. Its story and score fearlessly engage the recent ban on transgendered…