Chicago

BOYS WILL BE PIGS Stop the presses for a late-breaking alert: Men can be crude, drunk, womanizing wretches. This astonishing revelation fuels the bottom-feeding 75 minutes of Caroline M. McGraw’s utterly unedifying exposé. The Bachelors, a Midwest-premiere black comedy from Cole Theatre at the Greenhouse Theater Center, would only be news on Uranus. Erica Weiss’s…

BEATEN UP FOR COMING OUT Awesomely authentic, Chelsea M. Warren’s setting for after all the terrible things i do isn’t just a character in itself’”it’s a cast. This designer has perfectly constructed the cluttered interior of an independent bookstore in a small Midwestern town. Comfortable chairs are set out for browsing. There’s a green banker’s…

MISS MATCH MISMATCH Though it’s usually the other way around, sometimes musicals actually improve on the sources that inspire them. Arguably, West Side Story is stronger stuff than Romeo and Juliet, She Loves Me a warmer show than Parfumerie, The Boys from Syracuse a fresher take on folly than A Comedy of Errors, and, most…

THE WIZARD OF NOTES For half a century Harold Arlen did to notes what Monet made with colors: He found ways to make them make us very happy, equally sad, and never bored. A warm new offering from City Lit Theater, I’ve Got the World on a String:  Harold Arlen’s Songs of Love and Loss is,…

LORCA’S RUNAWAY BRIDE Elemental, darkly poetic, driven by death, Federico Garcia Lorca’s domestic tragedy Blood Wedding is the 1932 installment of his peasant-primitive “Rural Trilogy.” (The others are Yerma,  about a woman’s desperation to be fecund, and The House of Bernarda Alba,  a claustrophobic saga of sexual repression.) An open homosexual later murdered by Franco’s goons, Lorca…

TAKE-OUT THEATER “This is not how I thought my future would be.” Bittersweet, broken-spirited, resigned to mediocrity, that lament fits all the characters in David Jacobi’s inexplicably named Mai Dang Lao, a world premiere from Sideshow Theatre Company. What Steppenwolf Theatre’s The Flick did for low-wage popcorn sweepers at a cineplex, this much shorter (85…

A TOO-CASUAL CRUELTY Macbeth, Claudius, Goneril, and Iago were monsters–horrible but not actual. Richard III, however, is Shakespeare’s vilest historical villain. In his short, ugly reign the last of the Plantagenets bathed in blood, offing all obstacles to the throne, including his two young cousins slaughtered in the Tower. He died in battle in 1485,…

SHAW FRACTURES A FAMILY In 1896 George Bernard Shaw wrote You Never Can Tell (the title suggests a plot packed with surprise), his answer to the recently successful The Importance of Being Earnest. He’d beat Oscar Wilde at his own playful plotting and acerbic wit. Well, we know how well that went, considering how often…

NEW ON NEW The debut of a quartet of new dance pieces was not without some unanticipated excitement. A patron managed to sneak two non-service dogs into the Museum of Contemporary Art’s theater; one growled his approval–before the work was over. The video promoting the dance pieces accidentally came on five times–but the young dancers…

THE PRICE OF POPULARITY Westerberg High is pretty low. This Reagan-era preparatory school in Sherwood, Ohio is a cesspool of snobbish belittlement. The Buckeye hellhole includes a witches’ trio of mean girls named Heather (Duke, Chandler and McNamara) and Ram and Kurt, disposably dumb jocks swimming at the bottom of the gene pool. Then there…

BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE Grim gray barracks, fortress walls topped with razor wire, smart salutes from sentry towers, cut-away trailers deployed as offices and housing, fluorescent lights draining the colors from mess camps, cold apartment facades–all plunged in a techno-industrial rock mix. That’s the button-down, by-the-numbers, and very militarized backdrop for this authoritarian…

UNEVEN PRODUCTION COMBINES CARNIVAL AND ROMANCE As part of Chicago’s yearlong celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, Lyric Opera has mounted a production of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. One of the French composer’s finest works, and an excellent example of French opera, it successfully debuted in 1867. Although the plot needs…

THIS LOSS IS OUR GAIN William Inge knew the human heart better than a surgeon. In Bus Stop, Picnic, Come Back, Little Sheba, and Dark at the Top of the Stairs, this closeted author exposes our secret selves: With the emotional acuity of his cohort Tennessee Williams, Inge imagines and invents needy, lonely, and thwarted…

MEETING IN MUSIC In the basement of the Chicago Temple, playwright/actor/musician Ronnie Malley displays his electric affinity for and considerable fluency in a dozen musical tongues. In 75 minutes this Chicago performer takes us back to the ninth century and deep into our own. On Yeaji Kim’s magic-carpet set, strewn with exotic musical instruments and…

PLAY CONTROL A clumsy comedy about our gun-crazed nation, Cocked packs heat but no warmth. Glib, slick and slippery, Sarah Gubbins’ world premiere from Victory Gardens Theater proves there are worse things than ignoring the arming of America. Far more bogus is to trivialize the subject by reducing it to a screaming sitcom. Cocked (its…

LIFE IS TOO SHORT WHEN ART IS THIS LONG A dozen years ago, dying at 50, Roberto Bolano left his unfinished 2666 as his valedictory. It was, quite simply, the swan song of a spellbinding creator of worthy works. As this massive five-part, farewell epic confirmed, the Chilean novelist had a sweeping imagination. His probing…

THE LOSSES THAT GROW Only 75 minutes long, this slice of loss by Lauren Yee–a “rolling world premiere” from the National New Plays Network–charts one mother’s tailspin after the sudden subtraction of her 7-year-old son. Darkly poetic and packed with occasionally irritating word play (a “tree of absence” becomes quite literal), twisted logic, free association…

THE SILVER SCREEN IS NOT A MIRROR At three hours long, The Flick takes its’”and our’”time to not tell a story. Almost all atmosphere (more specifically, totally character), Annie Baker’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner is a rare bird: This play perversely mimics the tedium and routine of work (and, it implies, life) by cloning them…

THE HEART KEEPS ITS REASONS Starring Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid, Todd Haynes’ 2002 film Far From Heaven told a tale timeless as Romeo and Juliet. But its glimpse of hearts out of sync with their time and town was very time-specific. Haynes’s work is the kind of fiction where what might have been is…

PRESIDING OVER HISTORY This is a discovery-rich, impeccably presented journey through our political past: American Blues Theater’s Looking Over the President’s Shoulder takes audiences on an invaluable 80-minute tour of the White House, unlike any we ever could. Smoothly written by A.B.T. artistic affiliate James Still and cogently directed by Timothy Douglas, this one-person one-act…