Chicago

A DIE WALKÜRE ON THE WILD SIDE The Lyric’s new production of Die Walkí¼re, the second part of Wagner’s Ring cycle (Der Ring des Nibelungen), is an engaging dramatic affair whose spare setting allows for the world-class singers and the fabulous Lyric orchestra to shine through. Despite some design missteps, the captivating acting of the…

PASSIONS OF A PITY PARTY We’re born alone. We die alone. But in between we need people’”for love or money. That’s searingly so for Jordan Berman. The gay anti-hero of  Significant Other  is a slightly overweight (and morbidly aware of it) advertising copywriter approaching 30. This New York survivor longs for a “significant other.” Love, not sex,…

THE ULTIMATE ‘PROOF OF PAIN’ “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” He certainly doth in the Book of Job. In this brief but telling chronicle, a catalogue of catastrophes is visited on the title character. The faith of Job, a stalwart soul from the “land of Uz,” is tested and triumphs’”for better or…

START THE PRESSES! Imagine the Hardy Boys times ten or Nancy Drew’s crew times five and you’re still not close to  Newsies, perpetual motion in a blast from the past. Never before witnessed “in the round,” the Tony-winning screen-to-stage sensation is currently rampaging through 2017 at Lincolnshire’s Marriott Theatre. Its unstoppable energy is both barely and…

HOME HEALING FOR BROKEN DREAMERS How much “home” can first-generation Americans abandon in order to make a new one? Acculturation, assimilation, adjustment’”they’re not necessary evils but they carry a cost. Over two centuries American plays have served as imaginative experiments to calibrate the challenges and sacrifices that Irish, Italian, African-American, Hispanic, LBGT and poverty-stricken families…

FREAK OUT Comedy writers have complained about the challenge of writing jokes during the Trump administration. There’s too much material. And the breakneck pace of news, scandals and crises coming out of Washington make a joke written in the morning likely to be no longer timely by the evening. The Second City refreshes its scripts…

VENGEANCE STALKS THE CENTURIES, OR  DO DO THAT VOODOO It’s a (forced) marriage made in musicals. You don’t immediately think of Marie Laveau and Medea as soul sisters with a common cause: New Orleans’ voodoo high priestess (1801-1881) and the avenging infanticide of Euripides’ domestic tragedy pursued different paths, even as the stigma of sorcery both…

THE SPARK OF LOVE, OR CURRENT EVENTS Sarah Ruhl’s 2006 drama  In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play ruefully wonders whether sex can be turned on like a light bulb. Or is love the best trigger after all? The setting is deceptively proper, a staid Victorian parlor and “in the next room,” a physician’s examination…

A SEX STRIKE FOR SMALL STAKES, OR JONESING FOR LESS Maybe—dammit!—we get the comedy we deserve, cut to fit and ready to wear. Take  Lysistrata Jones  (please). Aristophanes’ most famous satire,  Lysistrata, imagined a sex strike in Athens fifth century BC: Tired of over a decade of inconclusive warfare between that city-state and the warriors of Sparta, the…

HIS FALL FROM GREATNESS By 1980, Tom “Tennessee†Williams was on a constant skid: His last great play, The Night of the Iguana, had premiered two decades before. Ever since, the once-supreme author of The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Summer and Smoke, Camino Real, Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and, above…

DANCING OUT A DREAM Billy Elliot was born to dance; likewise his cinematic tale  just had  to become a musical. But it’s a case of apples and oranges: If you loved the Universal Pictures film from 2000, you’ll like the musical. If you never saw the movie, or wish it had been both more political and more…

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…