Chicago

A RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN STYLED MUSICAL THAT ASKS AND TELLS Call it the new nostalgia. In most ways,  Yank! A WWII Love Story  is an unashamedly conventional book musical, as predictable as pleasant. These fast-paced 140 minutes burst with peppy tap-dancing, torch songs, production numbers, solo turns, and feel-good storytelling. This is World War II set to…

THE LOST–AND FOUND–BOY What resonates in each of the 90 minutes of TimeLine Theatre Company’s  Boy  is the play’s total absence of rage or recrimination. As compassionately told by Anne Ziegler, this deeply moving one-act recounts a true-life/true-love tale of what was once called in Louisiana a “crime against nature.”  Boy  could have degenerated into a feeding frenzy of…

MY LITTLE (PARANOID) PONY If you believe  The Antelope Party, a Theater Wit two-act world premiere, fascism could soon be coming to a neighborhood near you. The “party” reference is political, not social. The blatant thrust of Eric John Meyer’s new work is that purity is no defense against paranoia. Indeed, one kind of role-playing can…

YOU  STILL  CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN Plays about what  doesn’t  happen feel a lot trickier than the action models: Exhibit A (through Z) is Rachel Bonds’  Five Mile Lake, a group portrait of five twenty-somethings held back even in motion. (One calls it “treading water,” which of course fits the title.) It’s no accident that in Shattered Globe Theatre’s Chicago…

GET THE LEAD OUT “The majority is always wrong.” Norwegian disrupter Henrik Ibsen practically carved that credo into his 1882 potboiler  An Enemy of the People. In his still-seminal protest play, Ibsen lambastes the captious critics of his earlier sensation, Ghosts:  He forges a plot in which Dr. Peter Stockman, a village doctor, discovers that the mineral…

GOOFBALL GAMBLERS IN SIN CITY A troupe from Fayetteville, Arkansas has come to Chicago’s Theater Wit to showcase a new play about Las Vegas. That’s the download on  Flamingo & Decatur, a sporadically fascinating character study about low rollers in a mean town. At his best, playwright Todd Taylor—and director Kevin Christopher Fox—share with us their…

TERROR IN TRUTH In  For the Loyal  headlines become humans. A short but stirring piece of theatrical speculation, this new work by topical playwright Lee (A Walk in the Woods) Blessing condenses the recent Penn State sex scandal into a corrosive choice, a moral crisis impacting a “loyal” college couple. As with Arthur Miller, Blessing knows how…

BLKS  — IT’S ABOUT WHTS TOO Nowadays it takes very little “disruption” to make a play a provocation. As Steppenwolf Theatre’s press release tersely puts it, “F**ked up sh*t happens.” Indeed it does — for over two hours in the tersely titled  BLKS, a comedy of character crises by Aziza Barnes. Set in Brooklyn and Manhattan in…

WHAT KIND OF STAR AM I? Mr. Wonderful, the Rat Packer, Mr. Bojangles, the Candy Man — there was nothing “junior” about Sammy Davis. The latest retro reclamation by Black Ensemble Theater,  Sammy: A Tribute to Sammy Davis Jr.  is a pep-filled, song-packed, two-hour salute to an irrepressible entertainer. This pizzazz-packed phenom could sing, dance, act on…

I SAW  TREE  SHIPS! Anchors aweigh! Twenty-two years after its advent, this show has become as essential to Chicago’s Christmas as the LEDs on the Magnificent Mile, the parade on State Street, the “Zoolites” of Lincoln Park, the skating rink by the Park Café, or the Joffrey Ballet’s  Nutcracker  at the Auditorium Theatre. (I’d include  A Christmas Carol  at Goodman Theatre,…

TURANDOT MISSES THE PLOT It’s difficult to know what to make of Puccini’s Turandot, much less to pronounce the title properly. (Is the final ‘t’ silent? Who knows?) The composer’s last, unfinished opera is so unlike anything he had done previously. Turandot seems to have the epic historical sweep and musical grandeur of Tosca, yet…

BURNT BY THE TRAIL HE BLAZED What in theater is ever off limits? And, above all, who? Besides the probability of the part, are there bounds to the roles an actor can play? Believing that merit mattered more than credentials or cachet, Napoleon promised careers open only to talent. Color-blind casting is the logical extension…

HOLY HARMONIC HORMONES! Praise the Lord and pass the parody! Infernally ingratiating and devilishly disarming,  Altar Boyz  is also sweetly sardonic and packed with pep. This successful 2005 revue ’” music and lyrics by Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker and book by Kevin Del Aguila ’” both spoofs and celebrates a Christian boy-band on the final…

THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME If only by virtue of its title, you could call  Twelfth Night  a holiday love comedy: Epiphany, the twelfth  day of Christmas (January 6),  is for many in Europe the right time to give gifts, as it notably was for the three Magi at the stable. Moreover, in Elizabethan England the entertainments that closed the…

THE FICTIONS THAT MAKE FACTS This two-act comedy relishes a cruel contradiction: false facts. Rich with rancid exposés, its 150 minutes indict press-agent “puffery,” strategic lies that trigger self-fulfilling fates, colonialist xenophobia, and “collusions in deception” that are perversely preferable to proof. It all sounds ferociously familiar. But it’s not the gasbag bombast of a…

BLOOD’”AND WAR PAINT’”WILL OUT Superbly civic, the vast council chamber created by set designer David Zinn reeks of rectitude. With a coffered arched ceiling, it’s festooned with plaques, proclamations, a World War I-era mural of maidens, even a cabinet of curiosities including a skull. This imposing auditorium oozes continuity, respectability and local pride. Pre-show patriotic…

A ‘PERFECT CITY’—AND A MUZZLED PRESS They’re always eager to alert Chicago audiences to dangerous developments here and abroad: Silk Road Rising is a committed company which tells tales not usually seen on conventional stages. Their presentations, usually set in the Middle East and’”significantly’”here, sound a kind of stage siren for suffering, exposing racism, hypocrisy,…