Chicago

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…

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),…