Chicago

SYMPATHY FOR SCUMBAGS How can two white-trash lovers—“small town nobodies,” as the press release puts it—“search for meaning at the height of the Great Depression”? Patronize a soup kitchen, sell apples, get a job, hope for a “new deal”? Naw’”that’s suckers’ stuff. How about robbing stores and banks, shooting to death a dozen folks (cops…

A PRETTY WOMAN GETS AN INDECENT PROPOSAL’” AND IT’S A MUSICAL! Some marriages get tested  before  they tie the knot. That’s trenchantly the case with naïve fiancés Jack Singer and Betsy Nolan, untried Brooklyn lovers whose plan for a honeymoon in Vegas goes artfully astray. A 1992 film with James Caan, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Nicholas Cage,  Honeymoon…

TUESDAYS WITH ELIZABETH IN A NOT SO PRIVATE PALACE Peter Morgan is the proverbial fly on the wall: Commanding the realm of royal fiction and other historical speculation, this British writer has penned the Netflix series  The Crown, as well as the astute films  The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland,  and  The Other Boleyn Girl. The ultimate…

TOO MANY SAILS AND NO RUDDER How have the mighty fallen! It’s hard to believe that, 17 years after  The Weir  fascinated Steppenwolf Theatre audiences, not to mention all-absorbing Chicago productions of  Shining City  and  The Night Alive, the passionately poetic Irish playwright Conor McPherson has wrought  The Veil. Now at Edge Theatre in a technically polished and competently helmed Midwest…

TOUGH LOVE GONE HAYWIRE Some  people’”hey, that could be a song title!’”say  Gypsy  is the greatest Broadway musical ever written. And, calibrators of showbiz greatness, these folks may well be right. It’s not just a stirring story of a prodigal daughter making good or a harridan matriarch morphing into a humble fan (confessing that for 20 years she…

LOVE AS A VERY MOVEABLE FEAST Love may be blind but it can certainly sing up a storm. Not to be confused with the John Cusack film about a Chicago vinyl record shop,  High Fidelity: An Operatic Farce  is a silly but very melodious two-act confection now in a high-pitched Chicago premiere. The 140-minute trifle blithely interweaves…

MURDER—A REFUSAL TO SUBMIT? You could call  Machinal  a nightmare under stage lights. Still potent after nearly ninety years, Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 drama can’t be dismissed as a victim’s vindication or as the proto-feminist defense of an angry housewife’s license to kill. It goes beyond blame-throwing and special pleas: Treadwell’s 90-minute indictment, here revived in a powerhouse…

SCHADENFREUDE GETS ITS SHOW We learn from fear, even if it’s the wrong lessons. Well before Mark Twain’s “Slovenly Peter,” let alone Edward Gorey, Roald Dahl or Tim Burton, there was Heinrich Hoffmann. Written in 1845, his sardonic masterpiece  Der Struwwelpeter  was a children’s book meant to scare little readers into good deeds’”or at least into phobias…

WHEN LOVE SEEMED ALL A half century can wreak a ton of change, especially when it takes us from 1967’s Summer of Love to 2017’s Winter of Trump. It’s impossible to imagine two more different destinies for the same nation’”antiwar protests mellowed by free love and diverse drugs versus hardline xenophobia, race hate and jingoism…

DRIVEN DANCES FOR JOY AND JUSTICE Their “dance card” is filled to bursting. Departing from Black Ensemble Theater’s usual blast-from-the-past musical reclamations (Nicholas Brothers, Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald),  Last Dancer Standing (More than Hip Hop)  is a character-driven jubilee that makes all the right moves. It faithfully mimics an imaginary “reality-TV” dance competition. With a prize of…

BLUES WITHOUT NOTES It takes a play to raise a village. Here it’s East Harlem, a killing field with 8 homeless shelters, 36 drug and alcohol treatment centers, and 37 mental health treatment facilities underserving a needy neighborhood. Cursed with N.Y.C.’s greatest unemployment, it contains, as the New York Post says, “the most dangerous blocks…

DOMESTIC DISRUPTION From the start, a classic curtained proscenium conceals the utter disorder that detonates on Steppenwolf Theatre’s sprawling mainstage.  Hir, now in a Chicago premiere, is both the title and a gender-neutral pronoun combining “his” and “her” (and pronounced “heer”). Its relentlessly radicalized world is the creation of singer-songwriter/performance artist/playwright Taylor Mac (who prefers to…

BIGOTRY AT THE BURLESQUE Some swan songs will never sound sweet. Take the fade-out of female impersonators in Elizabethan drama. Or the final white thespian to wear blackface. Or’”well, witness the demise of the “nance,” an effeminately nelly, stereotypically gay travesty (often a self-mocker like the African-American entertainers who “corked up” in minstrel shows). Every…

HAPPY DAY’S JOURNEY INTO LOVE It’s a dramatic “one-off”: The same Connecticut domicile supplies the site of two enormously different plays by the same author. If Eugene O’Neill imagined a darker youth than his actual childhood in  Long Day’s Journey into Night  (a tragicomedy the playwright never meant to be seen), he doles out nostalgia for a…

A KURT WEILL COMEBACK Here’s another triumph worth the wait. Recently revived, City Lit’s London Assurance took 120 years to return’”hilariously’”to a Chicago stage. Even more inexplicably absent and a much more recent treasure, Kurt Weill’s 1936 anti-war musical Johnny Johnson has never played the town till now. With libretto and lyrics by Paul Green,…

REST ASSURED: THE LIES LOVE LIVES ON You can’t keep a good comedy down. Wildly popular in its time, Dion Boucicault’s 1841 London Assurance is a mating romp that, inexplicably, has not been performed in Chicago for 120 years. Thanks to City Lit, the city’s amazing patience since 1897 is now richly rewarded. An Irish…