Chicago

PERFECT IMPERFECTIONS Growing up on a steady diet of animated and live-action Disney films and in the shadow of the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, which I visited every year until I was 16, the magic and imagination of Walt Disney permeated my childhood, as it did so many others. Disney imagined worlds where anything…

DISCO DESPAIR Now festering at Chicago’s A Red Orchid Theatre, 3C, David Adjmi’s 90-minute one-act, is perversely perky, as zany as a zombie. With rapid-fire non-sequiturs and six crazy/needy characters spouting stream-of-consciousness nonsense, it purports to subvert 70s’ sitcoms and “jiggle television” in general, skewering their excesses and, above all, denials. Perhaps the 70s sucked’”but…

HAPPY HOAX OR LITERARY LARCENY? Can we really separate a creator from his art? Can our sense of Shakespeare feel more real to us than his characters do? These aren’t rhetorical questions: A 1998 screenplay by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman, Shakespeare in Love takes more liberties than the Bill of Rights ever granted, utterly…

HIVE AGAINST HIVE Bees, it seems, are humming their last. In the future, honey could well be synthetic. Appropriately debuting on Earth Day weekend, this world premiere from Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater tackles many issues in 90 minutes: the fate of endangered honeybees around the world; the purity of scientific research; the moral dilemma of…

SONDHEIM’S CARE PACKAGE FOR LOST LOVERS In a melodically and lyrically mediocre time like, for instance, 2017, even lesser songs by Stephen Sondheim beat half the musicals at large. In 1981 Craig Lucas and Norman Rene created a songbook musical Marry Me a Little that took its conditional title from a haunting ballad in Company….

“IT’S A FREE COUNTRY!” It’s one of the seven wonders of the American theater: Few sights on stage are as magical as watching Billie Dawn wise up. This dumb-as-a-rock good-time girl slowly warms to the whistle-blowing power that comes when she takes “We the people” personally. Judy Holliday, two years after standing up to Paul…

AN IDENTITY QUEST COMES UP EMPTY As the cops say, “Nothing to see here, folks. Move right along.” Or, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there is no “there there.” Both cautions apply to Goodman Theatre’s wrongly commissioned world premiere King of the Yees. (produced in association with Los Angeles’s Center Theatre Group; the play…

DEATH BY ANECDOTE A playwright dredges up her past at her peril. As with  Goodman Theatre’s current confusion King of the Yees, Sarah Ruhl’s For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday  is a very personal testament, a mirror held up by its author to its writer. Basically a (one) act of remembrance, this Chicago premiere from Shattered…

FINDING FOCUS Linda Vista is billed as “an adult comedy about immature behavior.” Surprisingly tender, Tracy Letts’ Steppenwolf stunner examines one man’s mid-life crisis from all sides and, best of all, from inside out. Sardonically struggling against himself as much as the world, Dick Wheeler is Letts’ most developed anti-hero. Named after the San Diego…

A SPADEFUL OF SUGAR As the supplicating ballad puts it, “Let’s hope she will stay.” Not just the quintessentially “practically perfect” nanny, Mary Poppins is a kind of cosmic cure. Given the state of our disunion, we probably need to swallow helping and heaping spoonfuls of sugar: Disney’s aggressively buoyant movie musicalization cavorts across the…

TOIL AND TROUBLE There are no miniaturized marvels, no surprises sprung from trap doors, no white rabbits from a hat. Beyond Caring bears none of Lookingglass Theatre Company’s vintage make-believe. In a major departure from the usual grand illusions, Chicago’s relentlessly undefinable troupe is currently exposing Gold Coast audiences to a reality as bleak and…

A SEASON OF SOAPS IN ONE SHOW An exhilarating, over-the-top, floridly artificial romp, Destiny of Desire is as wonderfully hokey as its title. A Chicago premiere, Goodman Theatre’s co-production with South Coast Repertory is Karen Zacarí­as’ affectionate salute to the romance of the telenovela. Her stylized showcase is a giddy treat that quietly carries an…

DRAMATIZING WHAT CANNOT BE KNOWN Aerobic exercises for the cerebral cortex, Tom Stoppard’s daunting dramas (The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Invention of Love) go for the gray matter. In perpetual motion and unstoppable talk, they ponder, posit, propose, rebut and refute. But none so deliberately as his 2015 screed The Hard Problem. Now in an…

IF ONLY SINCERITY MEANT SUCCESS You really want this play to work. It means so well and maybe so much. But it’s hard to find a worthy resolution in a play about repeated, nation-wide violations of human rights. Maybe that’s the point. But it’s no dramatic advantage. The optimistic title of truth and reconciliation, now…

IN SEARCH OF A STORY Loved ones seen in stasis are probably truer to most families. No clans are ever collectively happy or purposeful, only the members and not, of course, all the time. But, however accurate its depiction   of mutual dysfunction, a play about paralyzed characters is not intrinsically dramatic. Take Sycamore. There are…

ABBONDANZA! What a gem of a jewel is this rarely done masterwork! It’s what Candide was to Leonard Bernstein or Porgy and Bess to George Gershwin, a folk opera to rise above mere musicals. As wonderful as Guys and Dolls and How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying remain (enough to put any composer/lyricist/bookwriter…