Chicago

UNEVEN PRODUCTION COMBINES CARNIVAL AND ROMANCE As part of Chicago’s yearlong celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, Lyric Opera has mounted a production of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. One of the French composer’s finest works, and an excellent example of French opera, it successfully debuted in 1867. Although the plot needs…

THIS LOSS IS OUR GAIN William Inge knew the human heart better than a surgeon. In Bus Stop, Picnic, Come Back, Little Sheba, and Dark at the Top of the Stairs, this closeted author exposes our secret selves: With the emotional acuity of his cohort Tennessee Williams, Inge imagines and invents needy, lonely, and thwarted…

MEETING IN MUSIC In the basement of the Chicago Temple, playwright/actor/musician Ronnie Malley displays his electric affinity for and considerable fluency in a dozen musical tongues. In 75 minutes this Chicago performer takes us back to the ninth century and deep into our own. On Yeaji Kim’s magic-carpet set, strewn with exotic musical instruments and…

PLAY CONTROL A clumsy comedy about our gun-crazed nation, Cocked packs heat but no warmth. Glib, slick and slippery, Sarah Gubbins’ world premiere from Victory Gardens Theater proves there are worse things than ignoring the arming of America. Far more bogus is to trivialize the subject by reducing it to a screaming sitcom. Cocked (its…

LIFE IS TOO SHORT WHEN ART IS THIS LONG A dozen years ago, dying at 50, Roberto Bolano left his unfinished 2666 as his valedictory. It was, quite simply, the swan song of a spellbinding creator of worthy works. As this massive five-part, farewell epic confirmed, the Chilean novelist had a sweeping imagination. His probing…

THE LOSSES THAT GROW Only 75 minutes long, this slice of loss by Lauren Yee–a “rolling world premiere” from the National New Plays Network–charts one mother’s tailspin after the sudden subtraction of her 7-year-old son. Darkly poetic and packed with occasionally irritating word play (a “tree of absence” becomes quite literal), twisted logic, free association…

THE SILVER SCREEN IS NOT A MIRROR At three hours long, The Flick takes its’”and our’”time to not tell a story. Almost all atmosphere (more specifically, totally character), Annie Baker’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner is a rare bird: This play perversely mimics the tedium and routine of work (and, it implies, life) by cloning them…

THE HEART KEEPS ITS REASONS Starring Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid, Todd Haynes’ 2002 film Far From Heaven told a tale timeless as Romeo and Juliet. But its glimpse of hearts out of sync with their time and town was very time-specific. Haynes’s work is the kind of fiction where what might have been is…

PRESIDING OVER HISTORY This is a discovery-rich, impeccably presented journey through our political past: American Blues Theater’s Looking Over the President’s Shoulder takes audiences on an invaluable 80-minute tour of the White House, unlike any we ever could. Smoothly written by A.B.T. artistic affiliate James Still and cogently directed by Timothy Douglas, this one-person one-act…

FRENZY IN FEBRUARY Detonating across the Auditorium Theatre’s vast stage through February 21, Joffrey Ballet’s Bold Moves has more of the latter than the former stuff. But this kinetic winter program–two favorites and a world premiere’”reprises worthy returns as it showcases a troupe at its top.  The overall mood of these pieces is noisy desperation: Couples…

MAJESKI’S MAJESTIC MARSCHALLIN Lyric Opera’s new production of Der Rosenkavalier is beautiful, charming, and magnificent. It delightfully exceeded my expectations and gave me a new appreciation for the operas of Richard Strauss. I’m not quite sure what I expected, but I’ll admit to being apprehensive. Four-hour operas in German are, well, long, especially on a…

TALLY LOW Doggedly determined to fight yesterday’s battles, Nell Benjamin’s chronic farce The Explorers Club manically mocks the heyday of male British explorers. Fuddy-duddy adventure seekers with aboriginal blood on their hands, these intrepid trekkers did a lot more than find the source of the Nile; they blazed a trail for imperialism, colonialism, racism and…

A DAMNED GOOD PAIRING What could be a more appropriate title for an opera than La Voix Humaine? What better source material for an opera than Dante’s Divina Commedia? Chicago Opera Theatre combines the two in the unusual pairing of Poulenc’s operatic monologue and Puccini’s one-act Gianni Schicchi. It is a surprisingly successful and enjoyable…

TO BAKER STREET AND BEYOND! Not to give anything away but the title character in The Man Who Murdered Sherlock Holmes is not Professor Moriarty, “the Napoleon of crime.” In this life-imitates-art parallel to City of Angels and Six Characters in Search of An Author, a character clashes with his creator. So the villain is…

IF BREVITY WAS THE SOUL OF ETHICS: One of the advantages of one-act plays is that if they’re bad, you don’t have to wait long for them to be over. (I can’t ever remember wishing a good play would go on longer.) Fortunately, Neil LaBute’s Vices and Virtues isn’t at all bad. Some of the…

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…