Chicago

AN OAK WHOSE ROOTS WON’T LET GO A flashlight illuminating a face from below: what else could follow that image but a ghost story. And what better time for a ghost story than the month that culminates in Halloween, that night when the boundary between this and the other world is at its thinnest, when…

ON THE THIRD RAIL: STRONG ACTORS KEEP THIS DUTCHMAN FLYING The Trap Door Theatre is a quintessential Chicago storefront theatre — it’s housed in a converted garage, accessed through a narrow walkway, almost invisible from the street — that has built its reputation on offbeat, experimental productions. Their previous production was the divisive Ghost Fetus,…

A KILLER REVIVAL Drury Lane’s Dial M for Murder may be set in 1950s London, but under Adam Immerwahr‘s taut direction, the suspense feels freshly sharpened. Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation keeps the bones of Frederick Knott’s 1952 thriller intact while daringly reimagining one key element: Margot Wendice’s affair is now with another woman. It’s a…

A NEWFOUND(LAND) WAY OF LOOKING AT MUSICAL THEATER It’s always a joy — and a rarity — to see a musical I’ve witnessed before reemerge as something fresher than the first time I saw it. Such is the case with the astounding production of the popular musical Come from Away at Paramount Theatre in Aurora….

SINK YOUR TEETH INTO THIS BLOODY CUT OF MEAT At some time in the future, a band of rebels have staged a successful coup against the United States. The prevailing system of order has been violently overthrown. Cities are razed to the ground, with surviving citizenry housed in camps. Food is scarce. Medicine is scarcer….

CARB-LOADERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! “For the gods know I speak this in hunger for bread…†Alright, so that’s not from Julius Caesar but Coriolanus, that other Shakespeare play about a politician undone by his own ambition and hubris (and that coincidentally also features a character called Brutus), but in this “ad-rap-tation” of the Bard’s…

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. — John Keats Sleep-deprived and fortified with four cups of coffee, I hauled my cranky, cynical self on a Sunday morning to the Chicago Children’s Theatre in the West Loop to watch the opening production of their 20th season: a musical of Leo Lionni’s Frederick, a Caldecott Honor…

TWO CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR An aging, reclusive movie star strikes up a relationship with a struggling writer. It may sound familiar but this isn’t Sunset Boulevard, more’s the pity. The star in question is screen legend Ava Gardner, who, in the late 1980s, contracted British journalist Peter Evans to ghostwrite her autobiography….

THREE WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL In 1978, five women gather in an upper-middle-class home in Karaj, Iran, to primp and prepare themselves; one of them is getting married and being that they are her closest friends, the others are there to make sure she is at her best, both aesthetically and emotionally. It’s a scene…

STUNNING AND UNSETTLING, MR. WOLF IS AT THE DOOR Steppenwolf Theatre’s Chicago premiere of Mr. Wolf is a searing examination of parental sacrifice, loss, and the elusive nature of home. Under K. Todd Freeman’s direction, this production takes what could be an exploitative premise and instead delivers something hopeful and profound. Caroline Neff, Namir Smallwood,…

NOBODY PUTS THIS BABY IN A CORNER A set doesn’t get any sparser than the one for Gangsta Baby, in the sense that there isn’t one. You step in off the street into a basement with two dozen chairs arranged along the walls. In a corner is a small built-in kitchenette, original to the building….

A CLAUSTROPHOBIC MISERY AT CITADEL Citadel Theatre’s production of Misery by William Goldman, based on the novel by Stephen King, is a respectable staging that scratches the itch for a spooky night out this fall, even if it doesn’t fully deliver the chest-tingling suspense of King’s original. As a frequent reader of King’s thrillers, I considers Misery…

TAKE A TRIP DOWN THIS RABBIT HOLE Coping with familial grief has long been fertile ground for theatre, from Rabbit Hole to Hamlet to Antigone, performed almost 2500 years ago at the birth of the art form. The 43rd season opener for Lifeline Theatre, Rabbits in Their Pockets—directed with an eye for character detail and…

A STAR VEHICLE ON THE ROAD TO FRANCIS GUINAN I confess to some amount of trepidation as I settled into my seat at the Goodman Theatre, launching its centennial season with the world premiere of Lee Kirk’s Ashland Avenue, directed by Susan V. Booth. For weeks I’d been inundated with promotional images of television star…

A CLIFFHANGER For the Midwest premiere of TL;DR: Thelma Louise: Dyke Remix, a rock musical by Ellarose Chary (book & lyrics) and Brandon James Gwinn (music and lyrics), the entirety of the Theo Ubique space is transformed by set designer Rose Johnson into the world’s coolest garage; an entirely appropriate location for the world’s coolest punk rock garage band; they don’t have a…

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE… Early in the proceedings of Things with Friends, the new play by Kristoffer Diaz (Hell’s Kitchen, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity) a character dismisses another’s trauma with a snide, “I’m sorry. We all wish we didn’t see things fall”, to which the other responds, “Some of us actually wish that things…