Chicago

BLOOD ON THE NOTES Jazz doesn’t just soothe’”it can bleed. Both acts happen throughout these 150 minutes, never more so than at the end. Paradise Blue brings the lyricism of Tennessee Williams, the glorious gab of August Wilson, and a hard-boiled, “film noir” tough love to an unrelenting tale of music, change, love, and death….

LITTLE SHOP OF HAPPINESS Who can’t love She Loves Me? This utterly unpretentious, easily adored chamber musical delivers the first word in entertainment and the last word in love. Completely captivating, Marriott Theatre’s welcome revival of Harnick and Bock’s 1963 masterpiece’”arguably Broadway’s most intelligent and warm-hearted musical’”gets it right, over and over. Perfectly propelled by…

STILL  THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL This reviewer has a confession to make: I don’t  particularly like musicals. I’ll happily laugh at the jokes and delight in the dancing, but the style of music isn’t my  favorite. That’s why I  prefer opera. But something about My Fair Lady grabbed me  from the get-go: its language. The musical is chock-full of…

PUNCTURING PREVARICATIONS We’ve seen a lot of lying lately’”enough to make Pierre Corneille’s 1644 comedy The Liar cruelly contemporary. An uncharacteristic farce from a famously tragic dramatist, it’s even more zany in David Ives’ “translaptation,” now on exhibit by the Promethean Theatre Ensemble at Chicago’s Athenaeum Theatre. Ives, who has similarly updated (for better or…

THINK GLOBALLY, DANCE LOCALLY Leaps of faith meet jumps for joy. Closing its 2016-2017 season with a bold new offering by Alexander Ekman, Global Visionaries is a salute to the future and the world. Billed as an antidote to today’s pervasive uncertainty, Joffrey Ballet delivers three works’”a 20th-century classic, a returning favorite, and an astonishing…

BEFORE ANY GLASS MENAGERIE, A PRISON SWEATBOX It’s not the “odor of mendacity” that wafts through this Tennessee Williams play’”it’s more like the whiff of tear gas. The “kindness of strangers” that seldom surfaces in A Streetcar Named Desire is totally absent in its cruel cage. Not About Nightingales is just what the title implies:…

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…