Chicago

SHRINK, ENLARGE THYSELF! Christopher Hampton’s dramas are marvels of complicated construction, starting in the past and finding us fast. A retelling of the “creation myth” of psychoanalysis, this variegated 2002 offering is compelling in its Chicago premiere by Idle Muse Theatre Company. The Talking Cure contrasts Sigmund Freud (Vincent Mahler) and Carl Jung (Patrick Doolin)….

DARK DOINGS IN POSTWAR PARIS Now in an appropriately driven local premiere by Chicago Opera Theater, Tobias Picker’s two-and-a-half hour opera from 2001 delivers a bleak harvest of shame. The illicit lovers in Emile Zola’s scandalous 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin, based on a true tale of working-class lovers in Paris who murder the woman’s husband…

A VICTORIAN TALE FOR TODAY Jackie Robinson was not, it seems, the first black baseball player in the major leagues. Long before 1946, Moses Fleetwood Walker was a catcher for the Toledo Blue Stockings and later for the Syracuse Stars. He was an invaluable athlete circa 1884, so much so that local racists became fans…

DOOMSDAY THERAPY The peculiar premise behind Matt Lyle’s lifestyle comedy, now running in a moderately intriguing Midwest premiere by The Ruckus, is that for some folks the end of the world will be a character-building, equalizing opportunity–a second chance for losers who didn’t earn a first one. If it doesn’t kill them, adversity brings friends…

ALL KINDS OF ADMISSIONS A peculiarly persuasive puzzle play, Daniel Pearle’s resonant A Kid Like Jake strategically omits the title character from the cast of characters. That’s very right: This four-year-old is a work in progress who alters as we hear his parents’ very different reactions to a boy who may well want to become…

A REALLY REALLY TIMELY PLAY 29-year old playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo’s Really Really premiered at Virginia’s Signature Theatre in 2012 before heading to Off-Broadway, where it was helmed by Chicago’s own David Cromer. Colaizzo’s first play generated controversy and buzz; now it’s getting a Midwest debut during Interrobang Theatre Project’s fifth season. Centering on a…

VOGUEING IT AT VERSAILLES The putative appeal of David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette is that everyone likes to watch a train wreck. Now exfoliating in Steppenwolf’s upper stage in a dispensable Chicago premiere, this 2012 sendup of celebrity worship and its fickle reversals is a fitting showcase in costly Steppenwolf style. A splendid mirror runway reflects…

EVERYTHING A FIRST DATE SHOULD BE First Date, an enjoyable new musical comedy that opened on Broadway in 2013, should really be called Blind Date. Its two principal protagonists, awkward Aaron (Charlie Lubeck) and artsy Casey (Dana Parker), have never met before. They’ve been set up on a dinner date by friends. Aaron’s still trying…

BEING ALIVE’”AND SONDHEIM Way overdue and instantly invaluable, Porchlight Music Theatre’s Sondheim on Sondheim delivers the inside look on Broadway’s brightest. Rich with new arrangements for old favorites and the stories behind the songs, this multi-layered revue, a Chicago premiere, employs video, projections and a flawless eight-member ensemble to present lyricist/composer Stephen Sondheim from the…

GAGA FOR GANESHA Now in residence at Victory Gardens Theater, the newly minted Rasaka Theatre Company is in hot pursuit of more diversity on Chicago stages. Their mission: to share the tales of South Asian-Americans, adding helpful variations on the music of humanity. Anna C. Bahow’s earnest Midwest premiere of Madhuri Shekar’s romantic drama dabbles…

VERY FINE FRENZIES Winter can be wonderful in Chicago’”well, if you’re safe inside the Auditorium Theatre for the ten performances of Unique Voices. The Joffrey Ballet’s three-work showcase of dynamically contrasted works by three inimitable choreographers is more than just a feat for feet. So outwardly diverse yet internally consistent are these very individual works,…

IT’S ALL FOR THE WORST…IN A GOOD WAY With his typical topsy-turvy perversity, Charles Francis Addams might have  been happy had the 2009  musical inspired by his sardonic New Yorker cartoons  ended up as a “work in regress.” But happily for us, the opposite has occurred to  this show about  a ghoulish misfit clan haunting a Queen Anne brownstone in…

ELEVATING THE SUBWAY There’s a very specific springboard for Redlined: A Chicago Lyric, 75 minutes of slam protest poetry: It’s the elevated transit line that runs through the Windy City’s North and South Sides. The latest evocation from Chicago Slam Works (“igniting poetry through performance”) is J.W. Basilo’s taut staging of a free-form literary collage…

TITS AND ASSHOLES Gay activists who deride this delight forget just how radical the musical was in 1983 (the original film even more so in 1973). A third of a century later, it’s still a merry, gender-bending masquerade, a bourgeois equivalent of Kiss of the Spider Woman. For all its sex-smashing glitz and farcical laughs,…

WILL OF FOOLS You can’t take it with you’”but that doesn’t mean you go gently into that good night. Dividing the Estate, Raven Theatre’s latest offering, is the late Horton (The Trip to Bountiful) Foote’s last new play on Broadway. A valedictory swan song, this 2008 potboiler sums up the Texas dramatist’s grasp (as in…

ROUGH STEPS FOR A TEAM OF TEN It was worth the wait. It’s been way overdue for Giordano Dance Chicago to finally play the Auditorium Theatre, part of the treasure house’s ongoing 125th  anniversary season. Yesterday that one-night stand finally happened’”and the aggressive 90 minutes of forensic dancework is well worth a report of record. Very…

BECKETT’S RIDDLE CONTINUES TO CONFOUND Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is not an easy play to write about, let alone produce, act, or even watch. It’s challenging, opaque, and ambiguous. On the surface, it’s about nothing at all. Deep down, however, it’s about everything. It carries a multiplicity of meanings that accumulate like the rings…

PASSIONLESS PRONOUNCEMENTS Freud’s enduring question persists: “What do women want?” Gina Gionfriddo’s aggressively hip drama, now in an equally frenetic staging by Kimberly Senior, offers a Cosmo-cute depiction of the perils and promises of feminism. It focuses like a lame laser on the (supposedly) only choices facing its female characters’”college and a career or love,…