Chicago

AN EVICTION NOTICE FOR THE 1% This is Brecht’s real Mother Courage, not “Canteen Anna,” the pointless survivor of the cautionary later play who thrives on war (which, Brecht implies, capitalism does as well). Written in 1930,  The Mother is an unashamed piece of agitprop, a more driven and optimistic successor to The Threepenny Opera of…

PARENTAL RIGHTS, GRANDPARENTAL WRONGS As with her hit debut drama Spinning Into Butter (1999), Rebecca Gilman’s newest agitation Luna Gale, directed by Robert Falls at Goodman Theatre, puts the versatile Mary Beth Fisher in the hot seat. Instead of playing a university dean coming to terms with her own racism, Fisher now depicts another authority…

A PLAY THAT PUTS YOU INTO THE COLD TAKES YOU OUT OF THE COLD When The House Theatre of Chicago decided to bring Rose and the Rime back to the stage this winter, they couldn’t have predicted how perfect their timing would be. Denizens of the Windy City can always use some cheering up during…

AN EXALTATION OF LARK We all know Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, and The Children’s Hour, even the 1977 film Julia, based on her book Pentimento. But The Lark is easily the playwright’s least characteristic work. Perhaps that’s because this history play is a 1955 adaptation of L’Alouette, a 1953…

NO CLOSURE EVER A tangle of shifting sympathies and treacherous turns, Johnna Adams’ spare 75-minute, two-hander one-act teeters on a knife edge during every burning second. Its setting and situation are simple: a previously scheduled parent-teacher conference in a 5th grade classroom in Lake Forest. Yet at heart it’s no such thing. Profiles Theatre’s Midwest…

DONE TO DEATH A ton of fun gets dumped in this calculated musical spinoff from Mel Brooks’ funniest film. As with The Producers, Brooks’ expanded version of Young Frankenstein (with his own songs) was repackaged as a merry musical by director/choreographer Susan Strohman in 2007. No gags got left behind; there are at least ten…

DO TELL MAMA TO COME TO THIS CABARET Just as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show swallows Annie Get Your Gun, the Kit Kat Klub engulfs a backstage story that becomes a show within a show in Cabaret. The conflation of illusion and delusion cleverly mirrors the musical’s anti-heroine: the cocaine-snorting, high-living, lonely hedonist Sally Bowles,…

A BARD OUT OF WATER Here’s what we know for sure is the background for MadKap Production’s Midwest premiere: In 1933 Nobel laureate and, in his own estimation, the greatest writer in the world  George Bernard Shaw and his dutiful wife Charlotte Townsend Shaw  embarked on a self-declared “world tour” that took in Hollywood’”that is, after a…

ANOTHER BRIDGE TOO FAR Solstice offers a disturbing look at a chaotic class-ridden conflict, and British playwright Zinnie Harris delivers some ugly goods: She imagines’”and A Red Orchid Theatre pictures it all potently’”a violent neighborhood poisoned by a contaminated river and hemmed in by a barrier bridge upon which some obscure atrocity has occurred. The…

DISREGARD BEAUREGARD Much in the spirit of Ben Jonson’s salacious  Volpone  and  Giovanni  Boccaccio’s same-titled lascivious tale of irrepressible lust,  Niccolí²  Machiavelli’s  own political bombshell, his  only surviving farce  The Mandrake,  is a devastating diatribe.  Fueled by the same “the end justifies the means” mentality as his more famous  The Prince,  The Mandrake‘s  almost too-easy target is the all-too-human hypocrisies that deny nature  its due (of course, meaning sex). The…

ORACLE’S THE MOTHER GETS A WELL-DESERVED REMOUNT My annual theater sojourn to the Windy City this year was a bit of a let down. Spoiled by previous pilgrimages, in which no less than 50% of the theater I saw astounded me, this trip yielded scant results (excepting a few great musical revivals). The final show…

NOW E.T. REALLY CAN GO HOME A justified hit, bright as any of the lights on Michigan Avenue, Lookingglass Theatre Company’s exhilarating adaptation of Antoine de St-Exupery’s classic and cautionary children’s tale may well run through the winter. Despite its total lack of holly or mistletoe,   David Catlin’s ingenious dramatization of this whimsical philosophic classic…

ONCE AGAIN, ATTENTION MUST BE PAID British playwright Nina Raine’s Tribes, which played Off-Broadway last year and has been produced regionally, depicts an oppressively intellectual British family, rich with colorful eccentricity and denied dysfunction. However, the real context for Steppenwolf Theatre’s bold new winter show’”no holiday play in any way’”is silence, the non-negotiable world that…

WAY BETTER THAN A PARTRIDGE IN A PEAR TREE Redmoon’s seasonal performances are not events or even experiences, but passages to a fleeting world of contemporary fable, complete with masks, music, machines, puppetry, and particularly in this years’ Winter Pageant, dance.   Forty multi-talented performers take the stage to tell a pigeon’s tale: An unpresuming bird…

A WAY TO GOOSE UP YOUR HOLIDAYS There’s not much of a mystery in Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Goose. Michael Menendian and John Weagly’s adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” stays faithful to the source material, an unusually light tale involving the consulting detective….

OLD LECHERS GET NO RESPECT Merrily set at Christmastide at the height of the swing era, Barbara Gaines’ sumptuous Navy Pier staging of Shakespeare’s slightest comedy is hilarious, certainly funnier than it has any right to be. As always with this company, it’s also as gorgeous to behold as to hear. Its nearly three hours…