Chicago

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…

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…