Chicago

AULIS WELL AT THE COURT THEATRE With its new production of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, Court Theatre embarks upon an ambitious three-year venture: to present a trilogy of Greek tragedies chronicling the House of Atreus. Guided by the scholarship of translator Nicholas Rudall (founding artistic director of Court Theatre from 1971 to 1994), director Charles…

A NOT QUITE FRACTURED FAIRY TALE A late bloomer, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale belies its adage that “A sad tale’s best for winter.” This tragi-comedy has a spring to it as well, contrasting the first act’s stern Sicilian-set tale of one ruler’s instant jealousy (which kills his wife and child) with, 16 years later, a…

GETTING THERE IS HALF THE FUN One of Chicago’s longest running, righteously rooted hits, Hellcab follows a strong and simple formula: Depict the encounters a Chicago cab driver experiences on a very cinematic Christmas Eve. We watch this tried and true cabbie in an actual yellow car (with the top cut away for an unobstructed…

THE SLEUTH, THE DIVA, AND THE NAPOLEON OF CRIME Over many seasons P.G. Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle have been very good to City Lit, rightly since the theater fully returns the compliment. Reviving a past pleasure, director Terry McCabe’s sprightly adaptation of Holmes and Watson puts the cocaine-snorting, deduction-delivering master detective and his brusque…

GETTING ROOTS WRONG The Dark Continent just got a bit less light. Concluding their all-Lynn Nottage season (which featured Ruined and Intimate Apparel), Eclipse Theatre Company offers the sardonic parable Mud, River, Stone, a culture-clashing drama. Nottage stalwartly addresses the challenges faced by African-Americans who want to be both, specifically two upscale New York tourists…

WE SHALL DANCE! It’s no puzzlement why this sumptuous reclamation of Broadway greatness, Marriott Theatre’s The King and I, is such a grand night for singing, an enchanted evening, and, like its song, “Something Wonderful.” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s semi-historical domestic drama’”the unlikely alliance between a Siamese monarch in the 1860s and a British governess/tutor’”shows how…

A TREASURE TROVATORE There’s nothing subtle about Verdi’s ambitiously conceived Il Trovatore (The Troubadour). Grandly realized and magnificently staged by Lyric Opera, it is one of the three triumphs of Verdi’s “middle period.” Preceded by Rigoletto, the composer followed it with La Traviata, with which it shares more than just a similar-sounding title. Both are…

PRIDE COMETH BEFORE AN ICEBERG Griffin Theatre Company’s total triumph is a strange success. It’s odd that a more intimate version of a musical called Titanic can so succeed. The cast is reduced from 45 to 20, and Jonathan Tunick’s original orchestrations, updated by Ian Weinberger, are closer to the actual ship’s itinerant band. Not…

EXCELLENT BY ALL APPEARANCES It is rare enough to find early operas staged in the U.S., so to find a whole company devoted to their performance is truly extraordinary. Haymarket Opera Company performs them authentically, too, using baroque instruments and staging techniques current at the time of composition. Haymarket opens their short 2014-2015 season with…

FACELESS FOLLOWERS OF TWITTER AND MAO There’s a fascinating paradigm shift in the middle of The Hundred Flowers Project, Christopher Chen’s cautionary stage and video thriller. Whether you can believe it or not, the first-act rehearsal of a play about Mao Tse Tung’s propagandistic   “Hundred Flowers Project,” “Great Leap Forward,” and Cultural Revolution becomes, in…

LEAPING BIPEDS! There’s one more chance’”tonight’”to see five intriguing dances on display at the Harris Theater, exciting work from the reliable 52-year-old Giordano Dance Chicago troupe. Kinetic and percussive both in sound and steps, these are go-for-broke showcases of stamina as much as grace under literal pressure. The stand-out, as much for style as notability,…

WHERE BLACK BOX EQUALS COFFIN Just in time for Halloween, The Chicago Mammals are performing their All Girl Edgar Allan Poe. Apart from the original source material, most everything about this show is the work of women, from the adapting and directing, to the performing, staging and costuming. While the all-girl aspect showcases the variety…

GRACE TO THE FINISH John Newton (1725-1807) was many things: a slave trader, a sailor and a clergyman. Yet today he is chiefly remembered as the author of “Amazing Grace,” perhaps the most well-known and beloved of English hymns. In the  new musical Amazing Grace, Christopher Smith (book, music, and lyrics) and co-librettist Arthur Giron tell…

IN SOME WAYS, THIS PARADE PASSED ITSELF  BY First performed in Chicago by Bailiwick Repertory, now dutifully revived by BoHo Theatre, the potentially pile-driving Parade by bookwriter Alfred Uhry and composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown reprises an ugly and evergreen tragedy. Their driven musical chronicles the reflexive racism that, a century ago, doomed a suspect stranger. Here…

THE FARM-TO-FABLE REVOLUTION IS HERE One of the most extraordinary things about George Orwell’s novels is their prophetic power; they are perhaps even more relevant now than when he wrote them. Thus, it is incredibly timely that Steppenwolf for Young Adults should mount the present production of Animal Farm. Instead of reading it in light…

LEAPS AND LAUGHS: A STRANGE AMALGAM It’s a worthy experiment, even if the eclectic results seem maddeningly inconclusive. For three more performances, two very different Chicago arts troupes share the same Harris Theater stage in a curious merger of movement and comedy. Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and The Second City, bastions of contemporary dance and…

A DREAM WITHIN A DANCE Borrowed from the Pennsylvania Ballet, Joffrey Ballet’s latest offering (running through Oct. 26 at the Auditorium Theatre) is not your usual Swan Lake. Not to be compared with the Trocks’ respectful travesty, the original 1877 production by the Bolshoi, or the psychodrama of the film Black Swan, Christopher Wheeldon’s invigorating…

STEALING CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE The Submission is a devious, double-edged title for Jeff Talbott’s equally transgressive play. It refers both to the cold (as in out-of-nowhere) entry of a script for production consideration in the prestigious Humana Festival, and to the endgame of an ugly quest for dominance between a black actress and a…