Chicago

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…

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…