Chicago

A MASON/DIXON CATHARSIS REPRISES ITS SUCCESS Can white trash/peckerwood/country cracker/Dixie doodles rise above their rotten roots? Byhalia, Mississippi is not just a place or a title but a condition’”a backwater hamlet with none of the sophistication, joie de vivre or cosmopolitan culture of Jackson, the nearby dumbass state capital. A 2015 Jefferson Award-winning world premiere…

AN EX-SLAVE BREAKS NEW CHAINS Eager to be relevant but not quite succeeding, Thomas Klingenstein’s Douglass, a world premiere by the american vicarious at Theater Wit, is nonetheless a valuable historical allegory. An exercise in irony as much as reclamation, it depicts the struggle of a 19th-century American emancipator, not just to find freedom from…

A FAR FROM COSMETIC MUSICAL MAKEOVER In the late James Kirkwood’s Legends!,  two feuding divas–played on a 1986 national tour by theatrical goddesses Carol Channing and Mary Martin–reach a reconciliation before death divides them forever. In War Paint, a vehicular musical trying out at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, the rags-to-riches rivals are historical personages: Helena Rubinstein and…

HYPOCRISY BEGINS AT HOME In theater revenge is best served quickly. That’s a virtue in David Alex’s 80-minute family drama, now detonating four times a week at Chicago’s Redtwist Theatre. A world premiere from Asuza Productions, Maggie Speer’s intense (as in loud) staging drives home the rifts and grudges that ravaged loved ones during the…

COLORFUL CHARACTERS AIN’T ENOUGH Between Riverside and Crazy is a 2015 slice of strife from Stephen Adley Guirgis (perpetrator of The Motherf**ker with the Hat and Jesus Hopped The ‘A’ Train). It’s a very N.Y.C. story of unprocessed rage and self-sustaining disappointment. Character-driven by hard luck Big Apple survivors ever on the edge (of breakdowns,…

A JEW  WALKS INTO A COMMUNIST MEETING… Sometimes whistle-blowing can echo from the past. It’s never too late for a timely reminder that ignorance is no excuse. A 95-minute solo show by Phil Johnson and Marni Freedman, A Jewish Joke, now in a Midwest premiere by ShPIeL-Performing Identity, tellingly depicts a Jewish comedy writer on the…

THE LIES THAT PASS FOR LOVE Many years ago, a half hour into the Body Politic Theatre’s revival of The Importance of Being Earnest a woman behind me very softly threw up. It was done so efficiently, even decorously, that it barely disturbed the patrons near her, let alone the performance. In a strange way…

FREEDOM BEHIND BARS: THE UNREACHABLE STAR JUST GOT REACHED A skeptic might argue that Man of La Mancha succeeds because it lifts the guilt of anyone who never read Don Quixote. (Two hours in a theater presumably beat two weeks in a study.) Forget the cynicism. The 1965 musical by Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion…

KEEPING COMPANY— SONDHEIM’S BITTERSWEET BEST It’s the first musical in Writers Theatre’s sumptuous new $30 million-dollar home in Glencoe, a light-loving complex with a more spacious lobby than the somewhat cramped seating of its three-quarter mainstage. The Broadway consecration of this North Shore venue is, appropriately, a 1970 show about friends and strangers in desperate…

THE CANDY COUPLE “The world belongs to the fools who dare to dream”: Reprising the crowd pleasure of music-hall euphoria and pantomime cut-ups with a charming quintet of Cockney buskers, An Anthony Newley – Leslie Bricusse Songbook is an endearing 80-minute confection from Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre. It turns No Exit Café, a music mecca…

OUT OF CONTEXT BUT EASY TO ADMIRE William Finn, a gay songwriter with wit and warmth (and second only to Sondheim), writes story ballads and situational numbers that teach as much as touch. Like two of their titles, they’re all about “Change” and “Heart and Music.” In his Tony-winning Falsettos  (a merging of his March of…

CORKING UP OR SELLING OUT? Living up to its title billing, Lookingglass Theatre Company’s world premiere Thaddeus and Slocum: A Vaudeville Adventure is a rampage down Memory Lane. Their 135-minute blast from the past evokes the glory days of broad burlesque and novelty acts, as well as literally darker doings. A guilty pleasure and an…

SO BEYOND BAD THAT YOU’LL BE TAPPED OUT Half-baked, heavy-handed, overlong, poorly plotted, wretchedly sung, scenically sterile, contrived and clichéd, witless and mindless, and minus any production value(s), Tapped: A Treasonous Musical Comedy is not a good night at the theater. I’d say it should not be reviewed’”but that might mean it could be seen–by…

THE LONE EAGLE VERSUS THE LONE WOLF 81 years ago, everything conspired to make the “trial of the century” engrossing entertainment. (Actually, it was the second trial of the century–after the Leopold and Loeb murder tribunal–but who’s counting?) There was the horror of the kidnapping and killing of the 20-month-old baby of American idols Charles…

LOVERLY The most insidiously satirical moment in Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore comes when a lowly sailor and his captain must instantly switch places when we learn that the latter was born nobly and not nastily. (Nautical expertise be damned; birth will out!) Thanks to George Bernard Shaw’s brilliant book, the same subversion occurs throughout…

SUBVERSION, DISRUPTION’”AND PRETENSION Caught is just what Gertrude Stein said of Oakland: “When you get there, there’s no there there.” A series of metaphysical jokes played on the audience, this self-indulgent tripe purports and provokes where other shows present and persuade. It delivers layer upon layer of theatrical deception till it becomes The Play That…

CAPTIVATING VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF LOVE What a feat happens seven times a week in Steppenwolf’s upstairs theater! Usually critics tell you to take their words for what they saw–but this show must be seen to be believed. In only 75 minutes British playwright Nick Payne’s Constellations explores a myriad of possibilities between two…