Chicago

STAGNANT STAGING AND CRAZY COSTUMES, BUT THE  CAST AND CHORUS CAPTIVATE There’s a good reason why Verdi’s operas are typically described as “grand opera.” They’re big and bold, requiring massive orchestras and choruses. Soloists need strong voices with ample range and power. If this makes them somewhat formidable to produce, then Nabucco has a reputation for…

THE DESCENT OF MAN AS DRAMA Another incendiary offering from Oracle Productions, Monty Cole’s bold take on Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape is pugilistic and powerful. In his athletic tour-de-force, a vibrant sextet stomp, leap, clamber, dangle, and swing like the title from stage-wide scaffolding. For all its force and fury, this latest Ape never…

COMMITMENT CRISES FUEL A CRACKLING COMEDY Many, many gay plays since Stonewall have pitted fidelity against promiscuity, love against sex, and, nowadays, marriage against friendship. Same-sex weddings have clearly intensified the painful choice between “sexual outlaw” and legal spouse. If children aren’t reason enough to keep folks together after sex wears thin, is sheer devotion?…

EVERYTHING’S FINE IN ‘59 It’s as welcome as flowers that bloom in the spring: A cascading, minute-by-minute hit,  Bye Bye Birdie  is a showcase for happiness even as it merrily mocks the pseudo-innocent “togetherness” of the Eisenhower Era and the scary advent of rock ‘n’ roll. For coy or legal reasons, Elvis Presley never gets mentioned in…

LEARNING TO BE LOVED The past clashes with the future in Dominique Morisseau’s  Sunset Baby, a drama more of reckoning than reconciliation. Despite her rage at the father she thinks deserted both her and her late mother in the name of impossible idealism, a daughter is forced to face a legacy of radical activism. Inevitably, a…

ANOTHER WALTZ WITH TENNESSEE Tom “Tennessee” Williams never buried his treasures. The ultimate, unashamed “bleeding heart,” this passionate playwright put his soul and guts into every show he ever wrote–actually into every character, with contagious compassion and dependable shocks of recognition. Sometimes, his works even capture his state of soul while writing them. Few do…

TOO TRUE TO BE NEW Subtitled “A Tale of Today,” Mark Twain’s early novel  The Gilded Age  was written in (and from) 1873, a dozen years before Huckleberry Finn rafted down the Mississippi. A conventional potboiler, its chapters were presumably grabbed from headlines detailing the scandalous Grant administration. Mr. Clemens’ 630-page epic, which anticipates Gore Vidal’s insider…

A SERIOUSLY STUPID SCREAMFEST Premiering in politically correct San Francisco in 2014, Christopher Chen’s cartoon drama purports to address multi-culturalism in politics. This two-act trifle focuses specifically–and improbably’”on two Asian-American presidential candidates from both parties. (I guess Latino or African-American “mixed race” prospects weren’t available.) A blatant and simplistic satire of race-baiting and identity politics,…

BAGGAGE HANDLING Unprocessed pain can supply grist enough for a playwright’s mill. But an unprocessed play is a lot less. Alas, there’s little design for loving in William Donnelly’s  No Wake, its plot almost an exact replica of Noël  Coward’s famous 1933 comedy. Deficient at supplying the psychological context for its emotional payoff, this 80-minute one-act, richly…

A SOUL STORM SUNG TO THE SKIES A tribute to women of soul,  Dynamite Divas, despite the title, is not about terrorists with tonsils. A remake and update of a 2001 hit at the Black Ensemble Theater, it’s a very generous showcase for a ton of talent. There’s everything to enjoy in producer/playwright Jackie Taylor’s earnest…

A VOICE GETS ITS OWN SHOW Despite the name,  Baritones UnBound  is no comedy about musical kinkiness. A kind of theatrical rebuttal to  The Three Tenors  (and its many spinoffs), it offers equal time and retributive justice to the middle voice in the repertory of male vocalists. The baritone register, occupying a strategic place between the heroic and heavenly…

A POUND OF LOVE EXPLODES INTO A TON OF HATE Short of screaming “Fire!” in the theatrical darkness, you can’t imagine a more polemical provocation than  Domesticated. As with  Grand Concourse  and  Good People, Steppenwolf Theatre Company delivers another gadfly masterpiece with this Chicago premiere. There’s toxic irony in the title of  Domesticated, a demure euphemism for some less pleasant…

LEAPING TO THE SOLSTICE Between now and Sunday, four innovative female choreographers offer an evening of motion quests. The Harris Theatre is the backdrop for themes of not-so-close encounters contrasted with sometimes cloying connections. It makes sense: What can show the mutability of desire better than dance, where what might have been and what must…

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…