Chicago

ENERGY IS NEVER ENOUGH Nothing is sadder than a forced farce. Or phonier than chases without consequences. Famed for his frenetic  The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity  (a comedy about wrestling that reduced sophisticated audiences to howling W.W.F. partisans), Kristoffer Diaz has penned a much lamer world premiere for Goodman Theatre than his sensational triumph at Victory…

TRIFONOV, BYCHKOV & RACHMANINOV All it took was one performance from 23-year-old Daniil Trifonov (dan-EEL TREE-fon-ov) to resoundingly validate for me why he is the current Big Thing of the piano world. The Liszt-like master’s rendition of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at the Hollywood Bowl (followed by a jaw-dropping encore of Stravinsky’s Firebird for…

ON THE HORNS OF HISTORY Imagine history as a roller coaster–more specifically, Oscar Wide’s masterpiece  The Importance of Being Earnest  transmogrified into cerebral vaudeville. Erupting for nearly three hours of whimsical exuberance, Tom Stoppard’s 1974  Travesties  (here enhanced with later rewrites) is a deliberately dazzling, ostentatiously intellectual tour de talk. Its entire comic apparatus is built on one curious…

GOOD BOOKS? The world premiere production of a new play about the Bible by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, The Good Book is impressive, complex, informative, and entertaining, perhaps even provocative and challenging to some viewers. Unfortunately, there seems to be simply too much going on, story-wise and production-wise, to make for a wholly satisfactory…

IN DEED HE DOESN’T Will Eno’s 2012 solo script, now in a Midwest premiere, represents quite a departure (almost a repudiation) of Lookingglass Theatre Company’s vintage style. Here be no flying trapezes, dangling performers, sudden trap doors, harnesses and stilts, rabbits pulled out of a hole. Lasting a bit over an hour,  Title and Deed  (a, well,…

MALE DISBONDING Friendship tests us in ways we never signed up for: Plays about it task us by making us measure what  we  would do when the characters’ choices come too close for comfort. Reviving its 2008 production of  Our Bad Magnet,  Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co. has retained the original actors and, I assume, recreated the confederate mystery of Douglas…

UNLEASHING THE BEAST River North Dance Chicago (RNDC) is blasting into The Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University as part of the “Made in Chicago” Series on Saturday, March 28, 2015 at 7:30. This amazing program includes two world premiere pieces in a single evening: “Beast,” the choreographic debut of RNDC company member Hanna Brictson, and…

“FEELIN’ GOOD SWEET,” INDEED! Giordano Dance Chicago (GDC), America’s original jazz dance company, returns to the Harris Theater for Music and Dance for its spring engagement, March 27-29, 2015. The inexhaustible hot-footed hoofers of GDC offer an exhilarating program that includes the world premiere of “the only way around is through,” an inspiring nine member…

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…