Chicago

A RECIPE FOR BETTER  THEATER It’s no accident that this bold play, the latest offering from Northwestern University professor Rebecca Gilman, happens in Wisconsin circa 1976. The story of a corporate takeover of a small-town cheese company, Gilman’s civic-minded drama doesn’t play out in the present. But the 40-year-old anger and displacement it depicts is thrust…

INTERROGATING AN AUDIENCE It’s the afterschool special from hell: The North Pool is that rare you-can-hear-a-pin-drop play. In a mere 80 minutes, playwright Rajiv Joseph shrewdly and sharply changes the terms and tones in a purportedly ordinary conference between a vice principal and a graduating senior. James Yost’s engrossing, entangling staging, a Midwest premiere from…

BINGEWATCHING THE BARD “Tug of war”–a child’s game  that mutates into an adult’s nightmare; it’s an apt title for Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s marathon of Bard history plays.  Tug of War: Foreign Fire revisits the lowlights from the Hundred Years War between England and France. We see’”and feel–strife from both sides and at all levels, a harrowing chronicle…

AN UNCRITICAL MATING COMEDY Familiar gay fare, The Boys Upstairs, a 2009 rouser by Jason Mitchell, revels in industrial-strength crowd-pleasing. Pride Films and Plays’ two-hour funfest is crammed with catty-more-than-witty banter, salacious-to-graphic sexual situations, bitchy byplay, lifestyle branding, eroticized objectification, italicized zingers, shameless doubles entendres, and a feel-good happy ending. Not that these are bad…

A DOCUMENTARY DRAMA DELIVERS Chicago is currently witnessing two productions about photojournalists haunted by their work. TimeLine Theatre’s Chimerica offers a flawed but fascinating 180-minute look at a fateful historical “shot”: the “tank man” from Beijing’s 1989 demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. Delivering a more potent work in much less time, Stage Left Theatre’s 95-minute The…

GIRL-POWER PRINCESSES TAKE ON TROPES, BUT THIS REVUE COULD USE MORE WIT AND MAGIC If you were a mean girl, you might call Disenchanted! a feel-good pity party. More compassionate souls will see this 95-minute 2011 musical, created by former history teacher Dennis T. Giacino, as a pushback protest. In any case it definitely counts…

A SEARCH FOR DOUBT BOTH TANTALIZES AND ENERVATES Speculation is just as tricky on the stage as on the stock market. Winner of the 2014 Laurence Olivier Award, Chimerica (its title suggesting a distinction without a difference between America and China) is British playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s wildly imaginative depiction of one reporter’s search for a…

A FAIRY TALE LEAPS INTO LOVE Rossini, Walt Disney, Rodgers and Hammerstein’”they all wanted a piece of Perrault’s fairy tale. Cinderella has become Cendrillon, Cenerentola, and, by Jerry Lewis’ sex change, Cinderfella. In any incarnation the 17th-century source is an irresistible feel-good parable of purity that prospers. It remains the ultimate rags-to-riches story, patient virtue…

LORRAINE HANSBERRY’S OTHER PLAY Written five years after Raisin in the Sun and just before her early death at 34, Lorraine Hansberry’s last work is a challenging’”as in problematic’”play. The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (deservedly or not, forever in the shadow of its predecessor) is a 1964 depiction of bohemian Gothamites caught in the…

THE GODS MUST BE ARE CRAZY! It’s not often that one gets to see the same opera twice, especially when the opera in question is a delightful rarity like Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto, which debuted in 1651 and remained unperformed for more than three centuries. Fortunately, La Calisto’s popularity is growing; and after seeing Haymarket…

KILLER CHLOROPHYLL HATCHES A HIT American Blues Theatre seldom does musicals (the last was the wonderful Hank Williams: Lost Highway). Happily, their current triumphLittle Shop of Horrors literally roots their mission’”blue-collar sagas that question and redefine the American dream’”in a perfect choice, an incisive, hilarious rock sermon on the perils of selling out. Its source,…

A CRASH COUSE IN ‘LA LA LAND’ LUNACY Once in a Lifetime, the first triumph of George S Kaufman and Moss Hart (You Can’t Take It With You, The Man Who Came to Dinner, The Royal Family), is a mostly hilarious 1930 “coming of age” comedy. It centers on three Hollywood hopefuls who slam against…

A ROYAL PRODUCTION The King and I is a rather curious bundle of contradictions and opposites. First, it’s based on a true story, but plays out more like a fairy tale. In fact, it doesn’t seem all that strange that a king with dozens of submissive wives should fall in love with yet another woman,…

SCATTERSHOT SPOOFERY THROWS A LARGE NET  OVER A LITTLE SATIRE Alluding to the elevated Chicago subway that courses through the North Side, A Red Line Runs Through It proves a theme as much as wordplay in this 40th revue from The Second City e.t.c. Our evening of comedy sketches begins and ends with passengers in a…

IN THE HEAT OF THE STORY “They call me Mister Tibbs.” That’s the signature catchphrase from the celebrated 1967 film starring Sidney Poitier (the first  African-American male Oscar winner) and rough-riding Rod Steiger, like George C. Scott, as visceral an actor as the screen could contain. Ebony and ivory, against their natures, these seeming stereotypes work…

NEVER SAY “NEVER AGAIN” Survivor guilt is supposedly small-scale suffering, compared to the agonies of those who never get the luxury of remorse. It’s a tricky feat to accommodate near evil. Now in a searing Midwest premiere by ARLA Productions at Chicago’s Stage 773, Alan Lester Brooks’s post-war drama A Splintered Soul examines an open-ended…

A DOO-WOP DREAM He’s going strong for a guy who died 400 years ago today. This, of course, is easily William Shakespeare’s most popular comedy, if only because it delivers some magical goods: There’s an epiphany near the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when the mixed-up quartet of wayward lovers who’ve been confoundedly mashed…

PRODUCES  MORE LAUGHS PER MINUTE THAN ANY OTHER MUSICAL It’s always springtime for Mel Brooks, who really does write musicals the way they used to. Even before Young Frankenstein, his 2001 triumph The Producers (based on the sidesplitting 1968 film with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) reverts to the anything-for-a-laugh, neo-vaudevillian, politically incorrect musicals of its…