Chicago

WHEN YOU WISH UPON A THEME PARK You just know that the title The Happiest Place on Earth is ironic–or, like Ringling Brothers’ “greatest show on earth,” bombastic. How could it not be, given the subject? Over the last 66 years, Disneyland, Walt’s first conceptual amusement park, has become a byword for bourgeois escapism from…

GOODMAN GIVES GOTHAM GLORY Wonderful indeed. Wonderful Town, Leonard Bernstein’s 1952 tribute to the ever juicy Big Apple, has been wrongly overshadowed by the other N.Y.C. musicals he wrote before and after’”On The Town and West Side Story. It more than holds its own. With captivating lyrics by the wizard team of Betty Comden and…

LIGHTS OFF BUT LIVING LARGE In The Heights, a two-time Tony-winning 2008 musical, celebrates a place that doesn’t quite reward the torrid devotion of its likable characters. They both delight in and want to depart from Washington Heights in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a close-knit neighborhood populated by Hispanics from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the…

DEATH BY COMMENTARY Glib, pat, and smug, Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird disrupted and deconstructed Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. Audiences loved it for its bratty, “in-your-face” 21st century bravado. Now a Midwest premiere by Lookingglasss Theatre Company, Posner’s latest updating (downdating is a better term), Life Sucks is not to be confused with Mel Brooks’…

MAKE ROME GREAT AGAIN Julius Caesar:  It’s a strong choice for an election year, a timely reminder of why we prefer peaceful changes of power to assassinations and their inevitable knee-jerk revenge. It’s unsurprising that Shakespeare’s most political play centers on a political murder, the ultimate act of censorship, whether done in togas or, as in…

AN EXPERIENCE NOT TO BE MISSED On a website which attempts to list every Anton Bruckner orchestral recording offered to the public, the discography collector and annotator John F. Berky states that the Austrian composer “expanded the concept of the symphonic form in ways that have never been witnessed before or since. When  listening to a…

HELL IS THIS MUSICAL An achingly forgettable world premiere, Helldrivers of Daytona is a nasty piece of art. Flagrantly referencing those dreadful Elvis movie musicals (thus lowering the bar from the start), this tale of hotrod racers in 1965 perpetrates bikini-beach-musical clichés and an I.Q.-shrinking pandering to teenage trivia and spring-break fantasies. But, unlike intelligent…

WHITE TRASH DIRTY LAUNDRY Scarcity is a fine title for a play that lacks a lot. Ugly is as ugly does: Lucy Thurber’s bottom-feeding modern melodrama, a Redtwist Theatre Chicago premiere, works overtime to dumb down characters who, to start with, were ingrown, missing-link, birdbrained stereotypes. Like the Showtime series Shameless, the movie Deliverance, or…

SELF-RACIAL PROFILING FOR FUN AND PROFIT Reviewing stand-up comedy, as opposed to dramatic monologues or one-man shows, is not my forte. But occasionally a mind-opener like Ultra American: A Patriot Act, an 80-minute world premiere hosted by Silk Road Rising at the Chicago Temple, deserves to be dealt with as drama. In this not at…

A PLACE CALLED CARIBOU COFFEE INHABITED BY  A HUMAN HERD In Mat Smart’s decisively named Naperville the setting is the story. We’re eavesdroppers, listening in Joe Schermoly’s awesomely accurate Caribou Coffee outlet in “downtown” Naperville, a burg that’s the seat for DuPage County, just west of Chicago. A 100-minute, 2014 one-act by a former resident, Naperville…

THE FIRST’”AND BEST’”NOí‹L A bravely Noël Coward musical retrospective set in an intimate Art Deco cabaret’”what could be more intrinsically suave and sophisticated, equally knowing and feeling? A first musical comedy revue from Dead Writers Theatre Collective and the second installment in their “Mad About the Boy” season, Oh, Coward!  (originally  devised by Roderick Cook in 1972)…

THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING AND THE VALUE OF NOTHING Given the amount of sheer transience in 2016, authenticity (as in a lack of fakery) has never seemed more needed–or endangered. Ever seeking to “keep it real,” our quest for bedrock values, genuine feeling and awesome actuality seems a natural reaction to (or, more accurately, against)…

ROSE KENNEDY: A PROFILE IN MOTHER COURAGE A catholic confession (in the larger sense), Laurence Leamer’s Rose portrays the matriarch of America’s most political dynasty’”a family as cursed as Aeschylus’ House of Atreus’”as a tough-loving protector. Over 90 minutes we meet a resilient and formidable lady, enduring but regretting the sacrifices she made for three  dead…

TAME MAME STILL GETS ACCLAIM Few nicknames carry the impact of “Mame,” the free-spirited super-aunt. Appearing first in gay author Patrick Dennis’s best-selling 1954 novel, she’s become synonymous with bourgeois-baiting artistic license par excellence. What endears this ex-flapper as much as her vicarious outspokenness (“Life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are…

DANCERS DO GOOD BY MAKING ART For a quarter century’”since 1991’”one summer night of nights in Chicago has raised funds to fight HIV, assist the AIDS Foundation of Chicago and 30 other service organizations, as well as provide for the health emergencies of countless dancers. True to its mission, on Saturday night  Dance For Life raised…

THEATER NOIR EXPOSES A COLLABORATIVE CRIME WAVE Making its U.S. debut at the Greenhouse Theater Center, the solo saga Bloodshot, by Chicago native Douglas Post, feels as world weary and viscerally violent as its supple title. A superb vehicle for British dynamo Simon Slater that’s been touring the UK and Europe since 2011, the taut…

BRECHT FORCES YIN ONTO YANG A strong, often infuriating, truth about the protest plays of Bertolt Brecht is how much the socialist playwright pushes the plot beyond the ending: He ends up accusing the audience of failing to finish the tale. It’s not really over, he cajoles or threatens, until we furnish the future. How…

HIS HEART IS CRYING, CRYING The latest rouser in Black Ensemble Theater’s 40th anniversary celebration/season, The Jackie Wilson Story, a retrospective on an R&B Legend, showcases terrific talent. It also revives a 2000 hit that went on to a 2002 national tour, culminating in a record run at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. The blast from the…