Chicago

CANNED SPAM-ILTON For little more than an hour, Spamilton, an attention-deficit musical travesty, never lets up until we’re let out. Exploding with relentless volleys of unfriendly fire, it bombards us with “in” jokes and manufactured outrage over New York City’s less than Great White Way. With the crowd packed to bursting in the studio in…

KWIECIEŠƒ’S ONEGIN IS EUGENE THERAPY Having brought seven new productions to Chicago this year, perhaps it was inevitable that Lyric Opera would bring an old one out of the woodwork. But what an excellent one to choose. Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin was last heard nearly ten years ago, so this would seem not a season too…

COPELAND’S MOREL LACKS INVENTION Four years ago, Long Beach Opera (Artistic and General Director Andreas Mitisek’s other company) staged Stewart Copeland’s The Tell-Tale Heart, giving the one-act opera it’s U.S. debut. Based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, it was an undeniably madcap production with little to recommend itself beyond sheer novelty. As…

THE SOUR SMELL OF SUCCESS Never confuse fear with respect. During the Cold War, when the Russians were less deniably our enemies, op-ed tyro Joe Alsop rivaled gossip czar Walter Winchell in gaining the ears of politicians’”and, sometimes, as with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, other parts as well. For better and for worse, Alsop is the…

SINKING INTO THE STEPPES Running invisible endurance feats, the characters of Anton Chekhov expose what Henry David Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.” When the good doctor’s creations, compassionately but uncompromisingly presented, break loose from boredom and emotional paralysis, it’s only to crash into unrequited love. Like T.S. Eliot’s forlorn J. Alfred Prufrock, they measure…

THIS BROTHERS  IS A KEEPER This winner really is a blast from the past. Celebrating America’s most explosive and enthralling tap-dancing team, My Brother’s Keeper’”The Story of the Nicholas Brothers is Black Ensemble Theater’s latest reclamation jamboree, a loving tribute to two brothers who made it big and kept it fun. It’s also a tour de…

A SOUTH SIDE WEAVE The setting is a beloved beauty parlor on Chicago’s South Side. It’s seen better times and may soon see none. Hanging over the storefront is a gallery of famous female African-American singers and pioneers from Rosa Parks to Beyoncé. Instantly we’re more at home than at shop. Playwright Marcus Gardley (The…

NO ADO ABOUT LITTLE Never has a lesser comedy enjoyed a lovelier setting: Embraced by a Rococo balustrade, staircase, and pastoral backdrop worthy of Watteau or Boucher, Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Courtyard Stage is dwarfed by a huge oak tree in autumnal glory, discretely dropping selected leaves. It’s an apt backdrop for a Mozart opera; indeed…

MORE BULL THAN BEAR, BUT NOT MUCH Because Bizet’s Carmen is so well-known, from the exuberance and buoyancy of the overture to the singalong Toreador Song, it’s hard to put together a production that is going to please everyone. One way to make things more interesting for the audience is to switch out some of…

URINE FOR A GOOD TIME I fondly recall the infectiously brilliant Cardiff Giant shows that Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann perpetrated in the 80s and 90s. After so much success in Chicago, it’s doubly disconcerting that their Big Break came from a show the Windy City never saw, a smash “underground” hit that, in its…

THE URGE TO BE USEFUL Steppenwolf Theatre is great at stirring things up’”on stage and in the minds of its crowds. Nobody does it so well. Exhibit A is their latest offering: There’s good cause for the subversive disruption of Straight White Men. Employing a very generic title to set things apart, hot new playwright…

THE SONGS AND THE FURY Sardonic, ironic, cheeky, subversive’”hip epithets can’t convey the excruciating call-and-response fusion of humor and horror, laughter and tears, that you feel seeing The Scottsboro Boys. It was nervy enough in 2010 for Broadway legends John Kander and Fred Ebb and bookwriter Fred Thompson to create a musical about a travesty…

TAKING OUT THE (WHITE) TRASH Ever since 1981, small-town souls, Dixie doodles and atavistic Red State rednecks have fueled the fun in the Tuna trilogy. It’s a hilarious perpetration by adapter Ed Howard and original author-performers Joe Sears and Jaston Williams: Greater Tuna, A Tuna Christmas, and Red, White, and Tuna delivered laundry-line cross-dressing and…

ANATEVKA COMES HOME In this world premiere of a newly commissioned and instantly topical new work, Chicago Shakespeare Theater makes it clear: Karen Hartman’s The Book of Joseph is not just another play about the Holocaust (not that that’s a bad thing). Yes, that once and future horror re-erupts, with painful “new” details confirming a…

HE FOUND HIS HEART IN SAN FRANCISCO  (AND MORE) I Left My Heart: A Salute to the Music of Tony Bennett totally earns its title. Created in 2005 by David Grapes and Todd Olson, this warmly wrought and richly arranged tribute to a terrific troubadour chronicles a career that, at 90, is far from over. (Bennett…

THE DEAD WEIGHT OF RANDOM TALK Richard Greenberg’s better works’”Take Me Out, Three Days of Rain, The Violet Hour’”stand out by putting enough in play to make us care. Raven Theatre’s distressingly languorous Midwest premiere, Greenberg’s 2013 The Assembled Parties (the title a social and legal pun) spreads, circuitously and discursively, across two decades. Its…

FINDING NETHER-LAND Cryptic and fascinating, Jennifer Haley’s 85-minute one-act The Nether takes its name, if not its inspiration, from an allusion to the afterlife. But, persuasively presented by director Karen Kessler, “The Nether” is in the here and now. It more than rivals reality. A Red Orchid Theatre’s techno-parable reveals the malleability of identity when…