Chicago

HILARITY HAMMERED HOME, OR AN HEIR TO MISFORTUNE The tone is set from the start:  The Heir Apparent  begins with a chamber pot being emptied from a balcony window. It answers a question not worth posing: Can David (Venus in Fur) Ives stoop to conquer? (A patently rhetorical question for this gentleman’s guide to lust and torpor.)…

DISAPPOINTING DEBUT DELIVERS DAMAGED GOODS Lyric Opera’s world premiere production of Bel Canto fails to live up to its name (translation: beautiful singing). While first-time opera composer Jimmy López expressly does not attempt to write in the bel canto style, neither does he write beautiful vocal lines’”at least not very many, or enough, of them….

LAST CALL FOR BOB’S CLARA After 28 years the Joffrey Ballet is ending Robert Joffrey’s  The Nutcracker. All good things, it seems, must come to an end. Next year Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s beloved ballet will be reinterpreted in a spanking new staging by Tony winner Christopher Wheeldon (who last season reimagined  Swan Lake  as a fantasy within a…

DUMBING DOWN DICKENS It doesn’t matter that  A Christmas Carol  has drifted from Dickens: Goodman Theatre will never slaughter its sacred (cash) cow. For 38 years now, playing three venues and employing 10 directors, 32 Tiny Tims and 8 Ebenezer Scrooges (making 23,000 “Bah humbugs!”), Chicago’s biggest regional theater has doggedly transformed Charles Dickens’ 80-page 1843 parable…

QUIT WHILE YOU’RE BEHIND Some absurdities are just too stupid for satire. Transparently ridiculous, they automatically self-indict, hanging themselves on their own petard. Such is the object of scorn in Michal Aharoni’s world premiere  Angina Pectoris  (a title that sheds little light on its theme). Well-intended but heavy-handed, Aharoni’s political comedy centers on a flagrantly unscientific Israeli…

AN ABORTED AFFAIR The “Maui Pipeline,” it seems, has run out of waves. This “co-world premiere” from Boise Contemporary Theater and Chicago’s Sideshow Theatre Company offers an unedifying look at a Hawaiian romance that was just a trick of the tropical light. Playwright Hansol Jung depicts proto-lovers who find themselves first in dreams. But in…

A MERRY WIDOW MAKES FOR A MERRY AUDIENCE After the unbearable ugliness of Berg’s Wozzeck, Lyric Opera’s beautiful production of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow (Die Lustige Witwe) comes as a breath of fresh air. Originally staged last season at the Metropolitan Opera, this production features a brand new English translation by Jeremy Sams of…

COALS IN EVERYONE’S STOCKINGS Sometimes an entire life can crystallize around a seminal recollection. It can freeze a moment of time into a measure of what did and didn’t come true, what might have been, and what could never be. In Brian Friel’s incandescent  Dancing at Lughnasa  it’s a family gathering that turns out to be their…

HURRAH FOR HAYMARKET’S HANDELIAN HERO Appropriately enough, Haymarket Opera Company (HOC) is kicking off its fifth season with a Handel opera that premiered on London’s Haymarket Street 300 years ago. The fifth of the German composer’s operas written in England, Amadigi di Gaula is a delightfully magical drama set in the exuberant baroque style that…

WHEN LIFE IMITATES OPERA Life imitates opera: Concluding Eclipse Theatre Company’s season-long retrospective of oeuvres by Terrence McNally (Lips Together, Teeth Apart  and  A Perfect Ganesh),  The Lisbon Traviata  is an artfully self-aware domestic tragedy from 1989. It cruelly conflates culture and crime. Indeed McNally’s wicked work plays as if the author made a bet: “I can write a…

WHAT’S UP WITH WOZZECK? Alban Berg’s Wozzeck must have been quite shocking in 1925 at its first public performance in Berlin. Why? Musically, it’s regarded as the first opera in the 20th-century avant-garde style, notable for its atonality and use of sprechgesang (more like spoken song than sung speech). They’re both techniques made famous by…

A ROM-COM TO RELISH AND REGRET Taking a chance at love–that’s the germ and gist of Neil Simon’s mating comedy.  Chapter Two  remains a quasi-autobiographical depiction of the national jester’s rocky courtship with actress Marsha Mason, his second wife. Not the “simple Simon” of his gag-ridden  The Out-of-Towners  or  The Odd Couple, this 1977 concoction takes a hard look at…

FUTURE SHOCK FROM A PAST PRANK In less than 90 minutes this new one-act by Meridith Friedman plays hard: By show’s end we get an absorbing case history in situational ethics. Cautionary scenarios like this usually turn on the audience: What would we do? This is no exception: It’s premise enough for  The Firestorm  (too extreme a…

A VERY SELECTIVE SILENCE “Let hands do what lips do.” Shakespeare never meant the line so literally as it feels in R+J: The Vineyard. Red Theater Chicago delivers a bold resetting, moving the tragedy’s star-crossed lovers from 14th century Verona to Martha’s Vineyard in the 1890s. According to adaptors Janette Bauer and director Aaron Sawyer,…

TEA AND SYMPATHY–AND TRANSGENDERED KIDS It makes an irresistible transformation tale: Teachers shape students, then get golden too as a Midas touch reverses course. We love it in  To Sir With Love, Dangerous Minds, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Fame, Stand By Me, Glee, Teacher’s Pet, Boys’ Town, The Miracle Worker, White Squall, Dead Poets Society–even negative versions…

SAILING OF AGE Prepare to buckle your swashes, shiver your timbers and avoid Davey Jones’ locker. In a co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre Company sets sail on a major maiden voyage–Mary Zimmerman’s world premiere journey to  Treasure Island. Robert Louis Stevenson’s children’s classic remains a rip-snorting epic of tattooed pirates, buried doubloons, delayed revenge,…

A SYMPHONY OF QUIRKS An Evening of Work by William Forsythe  is a dull title for a frenetic program. This is kinetic dance, its percussive paces almost too fast for feeling. Three years in the making, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s action appraisal of Forsythe, a prolific educator, choreographer, former Joffrey Ballet dancer and director of the…

FROM MYTHS TO MOVEMENTS A kind of  Mulan  among major works of 19th-century ballet (it celebrates a young nymph’s coming of age), Leo Delibes’  Sylvia  is not as famous as his simpler, more domestic  Coppelia. But the Palais Garnier’s 1876 retelling of several Greek myths continues to deliver considerable charm. It holds it even in this 1997 reinterpretation for the…

CAPTURES EVERYTHING BUT THE COMEDY Two big ironies attach to the new show at the Broadway Playhouse in Water Tower Place. First, it’s called Unspeakable but it’s not afraid to say anything: Shock value is built into every scene. Second, it couldn’t be less funny, though it depicts Richard Pryor, one of the great clowns…