Chicago

IT GETS WORSE TOO Teenage suicide due to cyberbullying deserves its storytelling: In just 70 minutes, Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill’s  Late Company  seems to cover the bases in a gamut of reactions. Like the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, it probes self-murder from all sides, inevitably making for a very painful play. Rich or rancid with survivor…

SONGS FROM THE BOTTOM OF A BOTTLE Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre really loves the sad songs of Jacques Brel. First came A Jacques Brel Revue: Songs of War and Love in 2005. Three years later they created Jacques Brel’s Lonesome Lovers of the Night, now revived by artistic director Fred Anzevino. Delivered by four ardently…

THE WHITE WHALE RETURNS! You can’t keep a good cetacean down. Buoyed by the success of their 2015 inaugural production and national tour, Lookingglass Theatre Company (in association with The Actors Gymnasium) has re-raised the Leviathan. Herman Melville’s exploration of mutual evil indicts both the obsessed, increasingly inhumane Captain Ahab (“Vengeance is mine!”) and his…

THE STAR WHO WAS A CONSTELLATION “Stardust” was the name for what made Bette Davis shine. With  playwright Jessica Sherr’s solo recreation of more than big eyes and flouncing cigarettes, the magic is back to cast a second spell’”if only for 70 minutes. Reimagining as much as recreating the cinema idol’s feisty hunger and jerky grace,…

PROVOCATION PLUS DISRUPTION’” 2017 GETS ITS PLAY! Ever since artistic director Anna Shapiro took over Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the Chicago mecca hasn’t been afraid to upset an audience. Subversive fare like Good People, Linda Vista, Grand Concourse and Straight White Men discouraged easy expectations and shook up conventional assumptions of right and place. Pushing this…

IS IT OK FOR PC  TO FIGHT BS  IN D.C. at the V.G.? (NOT WHEN IT’S TV:) There’s a cable series on the Investigation Discovery channel called Fear Thy Neighbor: It recreates real-life tragedies as tiny incidents explode into ugly violence between tenants or homeowners, across the hall or across the street. Unlike  Native Gardens, it doesn’t end…

A CLASSIC GOES GLOBAL It’s a marriage made in theater heaven: With a newly great Great Expectations, two very different Chicago theaters find common ground. The result is a cross-cultural version of Charles Dickens’ loss-of-innocence/coming-of-age novel written in 1860. Remy Bumppo, a troupe who deliver solid professional productions of “well-made” works by established authors, and…

NO TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL A broken, cash-challenged clan go on a road trip to California that somehow heals their hurt. It’s not the Joads, colorful Okies in a Ford pick-up, fleeing the dust storms in Depression-era 1939. No, here the vehicle of escape is a Volkswagen bus and the (temporary) migrants are the Albuquerque clan…

C’EST SI BON! She was infamous for her 1927 “costume” in Un Vent de Folie’”a girdle of bananas. In 1934 she became the first African American woman to have a major role in a film. Acquiring four husbands and lovers from both sexes, she became the toast of Paris’”rather than remain in America, a second-class…

FALLING WHILE RUNNING RISKS Domesticity and danger, it seems, don’t mix. The private and the public, small-scale versus big-issue matters, mingle uneasily in  Time Stands Still, now in a persuasive Aston Rep revival staged by Georgette Verdin at Raven Theatre. (The play was first performed in Chicago in 2012 at Steppenwolf Theatre’s upstairs stage in a…

CHOOSING BETWEEN FAMILY AND FUTURE In xenophobic times wracked by exclusionary panics, any immigrant’s odyssey speaks for millions of refugees, within as much as outside the U.S.. Truth-based and potent with ethical dilemmas, Objects in the Mirror (its title alluding to the fears that follow fugitives) is a Goodman Theatre world premiere that puts a…

BLOOD ON THE NOTES Jazz doesn’t just soothe’”it can bleed. Both acts happen throughout these 150 minutes, never more so than at the end. Paradise Blue brings the lyricism of Tennessee Williams, the glorious gab of August Wilson, and a hard-boiled, “film noir” tough love to an unrelenting tale of music, change, love, and death….

LITTLE SHOP OF HAPPINESS Who can’t love She Loves Me? This utterly unpretentious, easily adored chamber musical delivers the first word in entertainment and the last word in love. Completely captivating, Marriott Theatre’s welcome revival of Harnick and Bock’s 1963 masterpiece’”arguably Broadway’s most intelligent and warm-hearted musical’”gets it right, over and over. Perfectly propelled by…

STILL  THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL This reviewer has a confession to make: I don’t  particularly like musicals. I’ll happily laugh at the jokes and delight in the dancing, but the style of music isn’t my  favorite. That’s why I  prefer opera. But something about My Fair Lady grabbed me  from the get-go: its language. The musical is chock-full of…

PUNCTURING PREVARICATIONS We’ve seen a lot of lying lately’”enough to make Pierre Corneille’s 1644 comedy The Liar cruelly contemporary. An uncharacteristic farce from a famously tragic dramatist, it’s even more zany in David Ives’ “translaptation,” now on exhibit by the Promethean Theatre Ensemble at Chicago’s Athenaeum Theatre. Ives, who has similarly updated (for better or…

THINK GLOBALLY, DANCE LOCALLY Leaps of faith meet jumps for joy. Closing its 2016-2017 season with a bold new offering by Alexander Ekman, Global Visionaries is a salute to the future and the world. Billed as an antidote to today’s pervasive uncertainty, Joffrey Ballet delivers three works’”a 20th-century classic, a returning favorite, and an astonishing…

BEFORE ANY GLASS MENAGERIE, A PRISON SWEATBOX It’s not the “odor of mendacity” that wafts through this Tennessee Williams play’”it’s more like the whiff of tear gas. The “kindness of strangers” that seldom surfaces in A Streetcar Named Desire is totally absent in its cruel cage. Not About Nightingales is just what the title implies:…