Chicago

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…

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…