Chicago

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…

A PAINTING IS A PORTAL Art is never still, not just still lifes but landscapes, genre scenes, even abstract configurations and, especially, portraits. Every painting is a time capsule that absorbed everything that was going around it as it was created—and since too. Multifaceted Rohrshack tests of perception, intuition, associations and imagination, they paradoxically measure…

ORWELLIAN OR TRUMPIAN?:  1984  MEETS 2017 Everything evil is new again: What George Orwell wrote 69 years ago still remains ahead of our time—but, with a President in power who purveys “alternative facts” and denounces “fake news” (that he can’t use), it’s not nearly as much as it should or used to be. However accurately Robert Tobin’s…

A THUG BECOMES A MUSE “Fish out of water†humor meets showbiz stereotypes—that’s the gag-winning formula in the 1994 film Â Bullets Over Broadway, starring John Cusack, Jennifer Tilly, Diane Wiest, Mary-Louis Parker, and a wonderful Chazz Palminteri. It was Woody Allen’s twisted Valentine to the “Great White Way†and the flappers, gangsters and dreamers who made…

FACING FATALITY It’s the last play written by John Millington Synge. This Irish minstrel-playwright died in 1909 at only 37 after penning stunning beauties—Riders to the Sea  and his masterpiece  The Playboy of the Western World. Synge never saw his final offering  Deirdre  of the Sorrows. (It was last done in Chicago 100 years ago.) So it’s not surprising…

A STUNNING RECLAMATION OF OUR 16th ’”AND BEST’”PRESIDENT Right now—bar none—the most stirring chronicle on a Chicago stage is Shattered Globe Theatre’s enthralling 155-minute  The Heavens Are Hung in Black  at Theater Wit. Whether history as drama or drama as history, this two-act offering from Pulitzer Prize nominee James Still distills 1862—a pivotal year in the Civil…

WHEN MEDICINE GETS SICK “First, do no harm.” A no-brainer, this unarguable warning in the Hippocratic Oath apparently defies and defines the medical profession in 2017.  Mercy Killings  and  Side Effects, well-targeted protest portraits written and performed by Michael Milligan, drive home its disillusionments, conflicts of interest, contradictions, betrayals and broken promises—both for patients and doctors. Determinedly directed…

BECOMING A “MAN” A brand-new musical about the past intersects the present with a vengeance. A world premiere from Permoveo Productions and Pride Films & Plays,  The CiviliTy of Albert Cashier, now in a powerpacking debut at Stage 773, delivers a searing perspective on today. Its story and score fearlessly engage the recent ban on transgendered…

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…