Chicago

CHERCHEZ LA CORPSE Sometimes truths get told that only murder can out. The quaint, perhaps anachronistic, setting for David Alex’ problematic two-act drama, just premiered by MadKap Productions, is a book repair shop. (Nowadays it’s hard enough to sell paper literature, let alone fix it.) In this dingy cellar cluttered with vellum covers and scrolled…

WHEN THE BRASS RING IS JUST ANOTHER NOOSE The siren song of the bitch-goddess “success” croons loud and clear in this cautionary, modern melodrama. Golden Boy, Clifford Odets’ 77-year-old potboiler about a guy who decides to use his fingers as a fist rather than to play an instrument, hasn’t lost its knockout impact or visceral…

FRANCE TRIMS ITS 1% WITH THE GUILLOTINE 2014 has been as good to 1859 as it was to the late 18th century. Christopher M. Walsh’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel’”a saga of unexpected heroism during the French Revolution–is Lifeline Theatre latest page-to-stage triumph. Dickens put faces to history, and in 150 minutes Walsh’s new version…

A SEXUAL CAGE FIGHT The punning title’”Cock’”is a heavy clue on what to expect. From the moment you enter, you know you won’t confuse this 80-minute tour de theatre with anything else. Profiles Theatre’s auditorium has been transformed into a cock-fighting amphitheater: Three rows of unpainted wooden bleachers hang above a “cock pit,” one designed…

RACIAL PROFILING AND YOU Smoothly staged by Jessica Thebus for the Goodman Theatre local premiere, the blame game reaches Olympic proportions in Tracey Scott Wilson’s wicked two-act troublemaker, Buzzer. Perilously set in a gentrifying neighborhood in New York City, this slick, almost sit-comic, slice-of-change depicts three old friends in dangerous new circumstances. The character contrast…

WHEN PLAYTIME IS OVER Somewhere between “Once Upon a Time” and “Happily Ever After” there is a very adult world of tests, losses, disappointments, and grief. Despite this, we assert our agency; or as a baker’s wife sings in Into the Woods, “If you know what you want, then you go and you find it,…

NASTY NESTING DOLLS In Steppenwolf’s new show, it’s the specifics that startle. There’s enough grit here to repave Chicago’s countless February potholes. But, despite its well-rooted situations, Russian Transport could be any immigrant family facing hard decisions between Old Country corruption and an unfulfilled American Dream. A Chicago debut, Erika Sheffer’s disturbed and disturbing two-act…

STATE OF THE STEPS Playing (in every sense of the word) through Feb. 23, Joffrey Ballet’s three-part showcase of Contemporary Choreographers delivers some (happily) bloodless cutting-edge miracles of movement. Mostly more impressive to the eyes than comprehensible to the brain, this very mixed rep won’t curl up to you before a warm fire. But our…

IT DOESN’T GET MORE GOLDEN THAN THIS Hot stuff on a cold night! Just released as a companion piece to Black Ensemble Theater’s runaway hit It’s All-Right to Have a Good Time: The Story of Curtis Mayfield, Chicago’s Golden Soul (A 60’s Review) provides a deliriously happy musical context for its sister show. Also produced,…

PLAYING GOD AIN’T FOR AMATEURS Following his return from a decade in exile in Siberia as a dissenter against the Romanov order, Fyodor Dostoevsky intended his second novel, written as much to pay off gambling debts as to share a story, to be called The Drunkards.  It would depict how alcohol destroys a family from the…

THE DUKE WHO WAS A KING A blast from the “big band” past, Queenie Pie is the great late Duke Ellington’s sole–if unfinished’”opera, recently revived in Los Angeles. On February 15, Chicago Opera Theater (COT), in a co-production with Long Beach Opera, takes that reclamation effort to the Harris Theater in Millennium Park, with the…

ENCHANTED FORGIVENESS When the sorcerer Prospero discards his magic staff and abjures his spellbinding ways, it is, of course, Shakespeare’s swan song too. (The play will no longer be the thing.) The Tempest, his final finished work, is a valedictory to the 35 or so splendid stage stories that precede it. If Prospero, perhaps to…

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…