Chicago

SPOILER ALERT: THE PLAYWRIGHT DID IT Here’s the warning issued to the press on Monday night. It’s about critiquing Goodman Theatre’s imported New York staging of Gloria: “In the hopes of maintaining the integrity of the experience of Gloria for our patrons, the playwright [MacArthur “genius” winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins] and the director [Evan Cabnet] respectfully…

ANOTHER BAND OF BROTHERS At a certain “tipping point” in the mid-20th century, passing for straight became one lie too many. A generation before the Stonewall riots, a generation after Henry Gerber started the first gay rights organization in roaring ‘20s Chicago, and over two generations after Oscar Wilde paid a terrible price for a…

THE PURITY OF INFINITY Mathematics can be maddening. Unless reflected in music (as in Bach), the “numbers game” feels stuck in a seemingly sterile realm of abstract entities, perfect in their predictability and infinite in range and scope. Math seems inhuman’”if not, as in its wartime applications, anti-human. It takes a rare play, like Proof…

THE HERO JOURNEY OF A  DRAG QUEEN Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is, of course, a much-loved 1994 “staying out” film from seemingly straight Australia. It spins the peripatetic tale of three Sydney drag queens who stuff their sequins and silicone onto the title vehicle (a “wayward bus” worthy of Steinbeck) and cross the Australian Outback….

LEARNING TO BE DEAD Orpheus usually gets top billing in the classical Greek legend. He is of course the master of music who literally goes to Hell to retrieve his beloved Eurydice, abducted by Hades, king of the underworld. In Sarah Ruhl’s deeply personal 90-minute one-act the emphasis is on the kidnap victim, not the…

WHAT OF OUR  SUFFERING IN THE NIGHT? Ambition should be made of smarter stuff. Nearly three hours of unfocused agitation, What of the Night? begs its own incoherent question. It’s not the night that’s at stake in Marí­a Irene Fornés’s four-play epic. It’s the well-being of an audience who, perplexed, provoked but never enlightened, endure a…

CATHARSIS IN A BASEMENT It’s not easy for actors to lose control without losing the role as well. A master of concentrated dread and systematic despair, Kate Buddeke haunts this solo show. She completely controls it too. Her America, a drama by Chicago writer Brett Neveu that’s part of Greenhouse Theater Center’s “Solo Celebration,” is…

A VERY DISPENSABLE DOOM Famed for her sardonic 1948 short story “The Lottery” and the scary novels We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson was a Gothic gadfly in the Eisenhower Era, full of apocalyptic post-war angst and Cold War panic-peddling. She industriously penned fright-freighted tales of…

FIXING FICTION It’s not your usual detective story: A quaint couple works to restore a villain suddenly lost from countless fairy tales. Mr. and Mrs. Pennyworth depicts a very proper Edwardian couple, a tinkerer and a part-time anthropologist (Samuel Taylor and Lindsey Noel Whiting) who bonded after meeting in the park every Saturday to share…

TCHAIKOVSKY MEETS THE WORLD’S FAIR: A PERFECT NUTCRACKER RECIPE It was a marvel of the ages and the crowning achievement of the 19th century (except maybe the Eiffel Tower). Now, happily, the World’s Fair of 1893 has returned to Chicago. And, since it’s via Joffrey Ballet’s new site-specific Nutcracker (replacing Robert Joffrey’s equally American version),…

THIS FLUTE IS MAGICAL Few operas are more delightful than Mozart’s Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte), which fuses fantasy and adventure with high ideals and memorable melodies. Lyric has aptly billed it as family-friendly fare (child tickets are available), playing up the opera’s whimsical elements at the expense of its moral philosophy and social criticism. The…

NASHVILLE NIGHTINGALES If winter needs warming, Honky Tonk Angels should heat up happy crowds at the No Exit Café in Chicago’s Rogers Park. The bubbly good time delivers a mix of downhome directness and rural sass. Created by Ted Swindley, who gave Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre its 2014 hit Always:Patsy Cline, this roadhouse romp prefers…

HEAVEN MEANS HELL In King Charles III, now playing Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Mike Bartlett imagines what would happen if a king dares to act like one’”and opposes a Parliamentary proposal to fetter freedom of the press. (Hint: It doesn’t end well.) A similar speculation tears through Lucas (Isaac’s Eye, Death Tax, Hillary and Clinton) Hnath’s…

PICKING UP OUR PIECES The neatly punning title of The Second City’s 105th Mainstage Revue, The Winner:of Our Discontent, implies an anti-Trump evening. But, unlike SNL, there’s little rage and more resignation against the possible dying of democracy. Though raucous even by Second City norms and curiously free of running jokes (or many sight gags)…

A SWEET AND SOUR “TWIST” In the month of December, Goodman Theatre simply goes schizoid. On one end of its block-long Dearborn Street lobby is the Albert Theatre, where the sacred cash cow A Christmas Carol continues to attract traditional holiday lovers. (A smugly complacent look at a non-threatening Ebenezer, by now it’s more a…

CRUMPET COMES CLEAN For 8  boffo holiday seasons at Theater Wit, Mitchell Fain has been better known’”and locally famous’”as Crumpet, the irascible, impish and subversive Macy’s elf in David Sedaris’s hilarious monologue The Santaland Diaries (based loosely on Gogol’s equally manic Diary of a Madman). A trouper in tights, Mitchell Fain only missed 2  of 252 performances…