Chicago

HEALING BY THE NUMBERS It cost over a million dollars to launch the Windy City Playhouse, a beautiful new 149-seat theater on Chicago’s Northwest Side (3014 W. Irving Park Road). Designed by Chicago theater architect John Morris, it opened March 23, the first new Equity house of the century, graced with an art-rich lobby and…

THEATER’S TALKING CURE AT WORK AND PLAY The first theater to perform all ten dramas of the late August Wilson’s 20th  century chronicle, Goodman Theatre just staked a new claim to a lasting legacy. 22  years after its 1993 local premiere,  Two Trains Running  returns, a time capsule that entangles today. As much a warning as a matter of…

HAYMARKET TRIUMPHS WITH TELEMANN RARITY Closing out their fourth season with Georg Philipp Telemann’s Don Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Camacho (Don Quixote at the Wedding of Camacho), Haymarket Opera Company beautifully rescues another early opera from obscurity. The composer’s final operatic composition, written in 1761, Don Quichotte’s single act runs slightly longer than an…

STRIPPING DOWN TO BASICS Charged with unforced sympathy and unpolemical solidarity for plucky underdogs,  The Full Monty, like the Fox movie that inspired this musical make-over, fits the pattern of consolation shows triggered by recent recessions: Heavy on grand gestures that “cock a snoot” at hard times and bad bosses, this sweet-tempered protest play joins other…

HEAVEN, YOU’LL BE IN HEAVEN The public’s fondness for songs has an extensive and nearly unbroken history, and one of the acmes of this history took place in America from the 1910s into the 1950s. During this time, songsmiths created ditties that were so well constructed in melody, so sympathetic and amenable in word construction,…

LITERAL LEVITY On display through this weekend at Millennium Park’s Harris Theater for Music and Dance, the  Spring Series  from Hubbard Street Dance Chicago consists of five offerings that blend the intimate with the frenetic. They’re both supercharged and subtle, sometimes at the same time. Three pieces are repertory favorites by Jiří­ Kylián  and Alejandro Cerrudo, one a…

ANOTHER SCHOOL FOR WIVES It’s a huge reversal. For generations the sole route for a successful show was from Broadway to Hollywood–from musical to movie. For young theatergoers today that must seem a wrong-way turn: The smart transformation is screen to stage, the foregone familiarity of cinema blazing a trail for theater’s intimacy and third…

BETRAYED BY THE KISS OF BROADWAY In the small confines of the No Exit Café in Rogers Park, one might have expected a more intimate, low-key version of Jesus Christ Superstar, especially considering that the production is billed as acoustic and unplugged. While the singers aren’t mic’d, the four-piece rock/funk band is definitely amped and…

CELLO í€ LA FRANÇAISE! For the second of two concert programs featuring the work of French composers, the celebrated Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit joins forces with the world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The highlight of the concert is Édouard Lalo’s Cello Concerto in D-minor. Written in 1876, the piece begins with a dramatic Lento that slowly…

PATHETIC PAYBACK Some plays all but ambush their audience–dramatic Trojan horses that promise laughs and deliver the opposite. Aesthetically treacherous, they lure innocent onlookers into enjoying an unthreatening lifestyle comedy, then turn the tables and unleash some very intended consequences. “Some plays” in this case is the chillingly cynical  Angry Fags, a disturbing modern-day revenge tragedy….

THE OTHER CHICAGO FIRE No question, this 20-year-old tragedy is not as sexy a Chicago calamity as either the historic three-day blaze of 1871 or this year’s centennial of the foundering of the Eastland steamer. A natural event with unnatural results, the heat wave of 1995 is more like the 1979 blizzard that defeated Mayor…

A PORTABLE COMMUNE SELF-DESTRUCTS This weird show is a strange but stirring entry in Steppenwolf’s three-play “Garage Rep” series: Red Tape Theatre’s  The Walk  Across America for Mother Earth  is a very 60s-style, interactive, feel-good “mixed bag,” theatrics on steroids. This groovy “do your own thing” combo of  Hair,  Lord of the Flies, and  Marat/Sade  both mocks and celebrates agit-prop radicalism and…

SMART DRAMA REVEALS POLAR ATTRACTION A world premiere production, Mat Smart’s The Royal Society of Antarctica at The Gift Theatre is easily one of the year’s best new plays. Smart, who worked briefly as a janitor at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, mines that experience in this story of adventurous men and women living and working…

THE SCOTTISH TRAGEDY: NEVER SAY DIE You can’t kill the Scottish tragedy. Written 408 years after  Macbeth,  Dunsinane  is the Shakespeare sequel we never knew we needed. Now on tour at Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Navy Pier, this co-production by the National Theatre of Scotland and Royal Shakespeare Theater brings new wounds to some very different combat. David Greig’s…

OPT OUT OF  A PLOT THAT’S NOT The real “sweeter option” is to miss this altogether. A new work written by company member John Henry Roberts and hyper-directed by Marti Lyons, The Sweeter Option is also Strawdog Theatre Company’s 100th production. Well, purely by default, it provides a good excuse to praise the previous ninety-nine. Alas,…

YANKEE DOODLE DUD Of all the plays inspired by the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Yankee Tavern has got to be one of the worst. Steven Dietz’s play, which takes place in New York City five years after the attacks, thrives on conspiracy theories. While the first half is more or less a rambling…

FAME BY DAY, A CLOSET AT NIGHT This retrospective 2010 drama by British playwright Dylan Costello is so well meant, you want to forgive it for its good intentions. But–well–don’t stop the presses! This tale of closeted homosexuals who defy the studios to pursue their love in 1949 Hollywood  (and end up divided but not conquered),…

DEFINITIVE DATES ON INDEPENDENCE DAY In this 95-minute one-act called Four, half the “dialogue” seems unspoken but not unfelt. The audience is literally just along for the ride. Christopher Shinn (who wrote the troubled Teddy Ferrara, recently performed at Goodman Theatre) depicts two strategic couples–one straight, mixed-race, mixed-age; one gay, mixed-race, mixed-age–in Hartford, Connecticut on…

A PASSION PLAY FROM PLACID Like a baby on a breast, Lifeline Theatre thrives on adaptations of “coming of age” novels. As with  many memory-rich predecessors, Jessica Wright Buha’s clear and present stage version of One Came Home, Amy Timberlake’s “heroine journey” best-seller from 2013, hangs on seminal turning points. Buha efficiently establishes clear relationships among…