Chicago

WHEN IN ROME, DO AS THE ROMANS DO (NOT THE BRITISH) With Puccini’s Tosca, Lyric Opera has done one update too many this season. Don Giovanni was bumped up 300+ years in time to the 1920s, Capriccio 100+ years also to the 1920s, and Il Trovatore was transposed forward 400+ years to the 19th  century. Only…

THE JUICY APPLES’ SLICE OF LOVE You can’t keep an eloquent family down. TimeLine Theatre Company’s concurrent productions of election-night episodes from Richard Nelson’s Apple Family Plays contrasts That Hopey Changey Thing  (reviewed separately),  set in 2010, with Sorry, which occurs  two years later very early on the day of Obama’s reelection. The locale for both is  the quaint…

ACTION SNAPSHOTS IN AN APPLE HARVEST Commissioned by New York’s Public Theatre, the four-part saga Apple Family Plays by the prolific Richard Nelson is a remarkable effort to preserve the present. Spanning the first four years of this decade, these very topical and time-sensitive one-acts are actual’”rather than virtual’”time capsules, detailing the ups and downs…

RELUCTANT HEROISM IN A CHANGING CAUSE Oracle Theatre, Chicago’s 44-seat public-access venue where tickets are free, just unleashed another populist piledriver. It’s a play with several sources. Adapted by Emma Stanton, Nigel O’Hearn, and Thom Pasculi from a drama assembled by collage-composer Charles Mee, Circle-Machine unavoidably channels Bertolt Brecht’s proletarian parable The Caucasian Chalk Circle….

NO BOYS IN THIS BAND In only 80 minutes, Grant James Barjas’s  Accidentally, Like a Martyr assembles the very actual denizens of an obscure, unnamed gay bar on Manhattan’s East Side’”and makes them matter. This Chicago premiere from A Red Orchid Theatre, pointedly staged by Shade Murray, delivers all the fleeting gay intimacies and enmities of…

ONE HAND, ONE HEART’”ONE HIT! Sadly,  hate conquers all  in  West Side Story,  but the love we see and feel can hold its own. Though over a half-century old, the Bernstein/Laurents/Sondheim/Robbins tour-de-force is, like its Shakespearean source, young as first love. You don’t revive it, you detonate it, as happens repeatedly in Drury Lane’s dynamic production, which thankfully has…

LET THERE BE DARK In endurance sagas such as Lord of the Flies and The Blue Lagoon, stranded youngsters on deserted islands try to reimagine civilization by mimicking adult classics, or else surrender to the anarchy that underlies’”and undermines’”innocence. A similar phenomenon happens in Anne Washburn’s post-apocalyptic fantasy Mr. Burns, a Midwest premiere from Theater…

CAUGHT IN TENNESSEE’S WALTZ An opera disguised as a play, Tennessee Williams’ 1951 labor of longings The Rose Tattoo is the first and last word on heartbreak. The master made a good choice to tell it through vibrant, hot-blooded Sicilian-Americans living on the sultry Gulf Coast between New Orleans and Mobile. These sometimes stereotypical survivors…

SING OUT, ETHEL! What a difference a vowel makes! After his catchy title  The Book of Merman, it seems that Leo Schwartz’ delightful world premiere musicale  practically wrote itself: You just follow the formula, “Fish Out of Water meets Irrepressible Icon.” Mormon missionaries on a two-year stint to convert more Latter Day Saints, young Elders Aaron Shumway…

ONE MIRACLE TOO MANY A very righteous offering from Stage Left Theatre, Penny Penniston’s world premiere Keys of the Kingdom is a well-intentioned attempt to build bridges between ideological opposites: a creative lesbian muralist and the self-appointed men of God who run a repressive evangelical megachurch. The play’s point, it seems, is that our humanity’”as…

HIT AND MISS SEMI-HORROR Calling your 75-minute compilation Scary Stories 2015 puts the premium on terror, a concept or condition that’s hard to compete with real life. In the thoughtfully paradoxical style of the dusky Twilight Zone series, which can offer food for fear as much as thought, these eight sketches’”written, adapted and directed by…

FALSTAFF LITE There’s potent psychology operating inside Shakespeare’s two-part Henry IV,  the twin tales of a false father and a false son. The latter is Prince Hal, the fiery rebel whose Spartan-pure rage against his father, Henry IV, makes daddy  (formerly “Bolingbroke”) wish that the  rebel Henry Percy (“Hotspur”) was his son and not Hal, the current Prince…

IT DOESN’T GET ANY MERRIER THAN THIS This radiant revival is Light Opera Works’ fourth coming of Franz Lehár’s masterpiece from an earlier turn of the century. Rudy Hogenmiller’s sterling staging carries more than enough jubilation to make The Merry Widow a holiday delight. Running through the rest of the Old Year, this three-hour confection,…

YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A CHRISTMAS CIRCUS It’s dazzle central and a welcome return to Chicago by the one-ring, 20-feat Cirque Dreams performers, but only through December 21. Their extravaganza Cirque Dreams Holidaze lives up to all three names with a two-hour spectacular to charm even the most jaded brat or cynical adult. Wonder isn’t…

A POOR MAN’S LANFORD WILSON Only in New Orleans could a dumpy parking lot flanking a decrepit motel on a highway leading only to the airport be transformed into a lagniappe-soaked, Mardi Gras-festive party place. This ugly setting gradually gets festooned with colored lights, bunting, papier-mâché medallions, beer kegs, glitzy garlands, and loud jazz. “Laissez…

THE HOTTEST SHOW IN TOWN One of the best-reviewed and most popular Christmastime shows, The Ruffians’ Burning Bluebeard, returns beginning tonight for three weeks only through Jan. 4, 2015, at Theater Wit. Pam Chermansky joins original cast members Anthony Courser, Molly Plunk, Jay Torrence, Leah Urzendowski Courser, and Ryan Walters to tell this fantastical tale…

CST STAGES A FRESH AND FANTASTICAL PERICLES William Shakespeare is a man of many faces. To most, he is quite simply a master of the English language and one of the greatest playwrights who ever lived. To others, he is a crypto-Catholic who encoded his plays with hidden meanings. To some, he is a gay…

RADVANOVSKY IS REGAL IN ANNA BOLENA With so much filmed and written about the six wives of Henry VIII, the Tudor period is perhaps one of the most familiar eras in English history. Yet Gaetano Donizetti’s Anna Bolena manages to give us a fresh perspective by focusing on the transition between Anne Boleyn and Jane…

SUGAR PLUMS AND COALS’”ALL IN A VERY STUFFED STOCKING Goodman Theatre just got schizoid. On one end of its block-long Dearborn Street lobby is the Albert Theatre, where the sacred cash cow A Christmas Carol continues to attract traditional holiday lovers. But, on the north end, the black-box Owen Theatre is showcasing an unsubtle subversion…