Chicago

WHEN LOVE SEEMED ALL A half century can wreak a ton of change, especially when it takes us from 1967’s Summer of Love to 2017’s Winter of Trump. It’s impossible to imagine two more different destinies for the same nation’”antiwar protests mellowed by free love and diverse drugs versus hardline xenophobia, race hate and jingoism…

DRIVEN DANCES FOR JOY AND JUSTICE Their “dance card” is filled to bursting. Departing from Black Ensemble Theater’s usual blast-from-the-past musical reclamations (Nicholas Brothers, Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald),  Last Dancer Standing (More than Hip Hop)  is a character-driven jubilee that makes all the right moves. It faithfully mimics an imaginary “reality-TV” dance competition. With a prize of…

BLUES WITHOUT NOTES It takes a play to raise a village. Here it’s East Harlem, a killing field with 8 homeless shelters, 36 drug and alcohol treatment centers, and 37 mental health treatment facilities underserving a needy neighborhood. Cursed with N.Y.C.’s greatest unemployment, it contains, as the New York Post says, “the most dangerous blocks…

DOMESTIC DISRUPTION From the start, a classic curtained proscenium conceals the utter disorder that detonates on Steppenwolf Theatre’s sprawling mainstage.  Hir, now in a Chicago premiere, is both the title and a gender-neutral pronoun combining “his” and “her” (and pronounced “heer”). Its relentlessly radicalized world is the creation of singer-songwriter/performance artist/playwright Taylor Mac (who prefers to…

BIGOTRY AT THE BURLESQUE Some swan songs will never sound sweet. Take the fade-out of female impersonators in Elizabethan drama. Or the final white thespian to wear blackface. Or’”well, witness the demise of the “nance,” an effeminately nelly, stereotypically gay travesty (often a self-mocker like the African-American entertainers who “corked up” in minstrel shows). Every…

HAPPY DAY’S JOURNEY INTO LOVE It’s a dramatic “one-off”: The same Connecticut domicile supplies the site of two enormously different plays by the same author. If Eugene O’Neill imagined a darker youth than his actual childhood in  Long Day’s Journey into Night  (a tragicomedy the playwright never meant to be seen), he doles out nostalgia for a…

A KURT WEILL COMEBACK Here’s another triumph worth the wait. Recently revived, City Lit’s London Assurance took 120 years to return’”hilariously’”to a Chicago stage. Even more inexplicably absent and a much more recent treasure, Kurt Weill’s 1936 anti-war musical Johnny Johnson has never played the town till now. With libretto and lyrics by Paul Green,…

REST ASSURED: THE LIES LOVE LIVES ON You can’t keep a good comedy down. Wildly popular in its time, Dion Boucicault’s 1841 London Assurance is a mating romp that, inexplicably, has not been performed in Chicago for 120 years. Thanks to City Lit, the city’s amazing patience since 1897 is now richly rewarded. An Irish…

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…