Chicago

THE NEW DEAD-END KIDS It’s easy to hate the surly slackers in subUrbia, Eric Bogosian’s slice of strife. In this 1994 play, they infest the parking lot of a 7-Eleven’”now changed to a Quickie Mart’”in the bedroom burg of Burnfield, the “pizza and puke capital of the world.” (I guess the mall is too genteel.)…

STILL BREATHING 15 years ago a new show called First Breath launched the About Face Youth Theatre Ensemble. Appropriately, the current showcase  15 Breaths  is presented by the next generation (more or less) and looks back as much as forward. Interestingly, the concerns these GLBT teens address persist like unanswered questions–the generation gap, gender identity, homophobia, coming…

DIVA TO THE TOWEL SET In this summer fluff title tells all–Bette, Live at the Continental Baths (in Chicago, upstairs at Mary’s Attic). This uncredited concoction by Hell in a Handbag Productions, staged and choreographed by Christopher Pazdernik, recreates the Divine Miss M in her gay salad days at New York’s biggest bathhouse. Here, where…

TIME HEALS ALL PLOTS Shakespeare’s strange romance, which begins with gratuitous jealousy and ends with gratuitous forgiveness, is best treated as a fairy tale for grownups: A virtuous queen is condemned for adultery, her supposed spoiler her husband’s equally honest best friend. It suddenly seems as if we blundered from courtly courtesies into an Othello-like…

BLACKBUSTERS A dozen shows in one and a showcase of solos to beat any band, Black Ensemble Theater’s summer blockbuster Men of Soul pays kickass tribute to the greatest soul singers–black and white–of all time. Sensational singing, coming so close to the original vocalists as to be scary-accurate, is the payoff here for over two…

IS IT REALLY HUMAN TO FORGIVE? Heidi Schreck’s powerfully pleasing play exists for its final moment. So this critique will be strategically selective and shorter than usual. In any case, thanks to Yasen Peyankov’s sweetly sensitive staging (a Chicago premiere by Steppenwolf Theatre Company), Schreck’s five characters count as much as the conclusion. Totally grounded…

TIME TRAVEL AS URBAN RENEWAL [Editor’s note: There are some minor spoilers used in Mr. Bommer’s synopsis.] U.K. playwright Alistair McDowell likes to break the rules to reach a crowd. An intriguing U.S. premiere by Steep Theatre Company, his sardonically titled Brilliant Adventures exposes McDowall’s iconoclastic ways: It’s bracingly matter-of-fact about a weird world of…

A DELIVERANCE IN DACHAU Even in the Holocaust’s democracy of death each victim could only die once. But some seem to have died a bit less than others. Remembering the unnumbered thousands of homosexuals killed by Nazi hate more than the six million Jews slaughtered, Martin Sherman‘s still-stirring 1979 drama sums up many losses in…

UNQUIET DESPERATION IN BUCKS COUNTY He’s no longer an angry young playwright and gay avenger, the bad-boy Jeremiah who unleashed scorched-earth provocations (Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You and Beyond Therapy). The sexagenarian Christopher Durang has momentously mellowed. A take-no-prisoners satirist has softened into a surprisingly kind-hearted and compassionate chronicler of foibles. As…

A LEVIATHAN BEACHES ON MICHIGAN AVENUE Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s whale of a tale (or tale of a whale) from 1851, is as unsinkable as its title cetacean. It’s never been more so than in Lookingglass Theatre Company’s summer sensation staged and adapted by David Catlin. In little less than three hours the enthralling panoply…

THE GIFT OF JOY, FROM LONDON TO CHICAGO It’s been 37 years–two generations!–since the Royal Ballet visited Chicago and the Auditorium Theatre. They couldn’t have come bearing a better gift to prove the fondness of absence: Carlos Acosta’s gorgeous, sumptuous, enthralling 2013 staging of one of ballet’s happiest scores and stories. You simply can’t get…

STAGE NOIR This non-dancing, Tony-winning, cinematic musical by the terrific trio of jazz composer Cy Coleman, bookwriter Larry Gelbart and lyricist David Zippel brilliantly lampoons Hollywood stereotypes and censorship. It’s a complicated amalgam, skewering the hypocrisy but going soft on the sentiment. City of Angels contrasts a young writer’s film-noir screenplay (“the reality of fiction”)…

OUR FEATHERED FIENDS This is not Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, a 1963 horror fest about being pecked to death and delighting in Tippi Hedrin and Suzanne Pleshette’s contagious distress. It’s also not Hell in a Handbag’s recently revived The Birds: For all its ingenious thrills that campy creation was hobbled by a kill-joy Camille Paglia…

HISTORY IN A HOLE The America Play was inspired when author Suzan Lori-Parks observed a professional African-American Lincoln impersonator hard at work pleasing a crowd. This strange early work by the dynamic playwright (of Topdog/Underdog fame) is itself a curiosity. (It even features a cabinet of curiosities packed with detritus from American history.) In Oracle…

CLOSET EMANCIPATOR For what it’s worth, the other “F-word” is now a play’s title, presumably rivaling the “N-word” for shock effect. Well, anything called Abraham Lincoln Was A F*gg*t is not meant to soothe the status quo: The questing character in Bixby Elliot’s provocation, a transgressive Chicago premiere from About Face Theatre, is a 17-year-old…

PRIVATE DANCERS It’s a stunning vote of artistic confidence. The repertory of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s Summer Series, their latest dancefest at the Harris Theatre, consists of three works by Spanish choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo–including his 14th world premiere for the ensemble. The two-hour presentation focuses fiercely on Cerrudo’s tensile strengths–quirky gestures that come from the…

COPE WITH HOPE A tale for all ages, this perennially popular musical by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt (creators of I Do! I Do!) got a major make-over in 1990: The 30th anniversary tour with Robert Goulet featured director Rudy Hogenmiller as The Mute in an enlarged version not seen since ’til now. No more…

SIX SINGULAR SENSATIONS No text or context, no name-dropping or dates delivered, no editorials about the art–the songs just sing for themselves. The revue’s title–A Marvin Hamlisch Songbook–says all and enough. Conceived by director Courtney Crouse and musical arranger Aaron Benham, Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre’s latest treasure triumph at No Exit Café is a beautifully…

WINDOWS ZERO This could have been a conversation. Employing flashy strips of LED lights, twelve video monitors, and digitalized backdrops, Goodman artistic associate Regina Taylor’s stop. reset. asks an interesting if not original question: What have books become? Is the act of reading hand-held, unconnected tomes selfish and anti-social? Does this show of independence cut…

NO FLOWERS IN A TOO-SECRET GARDEN It’s right that Court Theatre completes its 60th season with this redemptive tale–and it comes just as summer finally delivers its much-appreciated promissory note of life renewed. The Secret Garden depicts a seemingly endless winter that engulfs Archibald Craven, a Yorkshire widower who loses his wife and may soon…