Chicago

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,…

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…