Chicago

BIG LAKE BIG CITY BIG TURKEY Chicago to the broken bricks and bone, playwright Keith Huff was at his storytelling best in A Steady Rain, a big hit about a conflicted cop and his crooked crony at Chicago Dramatists (and a lesser one on Broadway). In Huff’’s taut mix of interrogations turned confessionals, two policemen…

THE IMPOSTER HITS HYDE PARK HARD Because religious hypocrisy — specifically “affected zeal and pious knavery” — never goes out of fashion, Tartuffe is forever. Continuing and completing its Moliere Festival (which ends on Bastille Day), Court Theatre’s second offering is the master’s perennially popular “home invasion” comedy. In this domestic dust-up, the title fraud…

A LONG HIKE IN THE THEM THAR HILLS OF SHAKESPEARE Along with its companion piece The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare’s late-blooming “romance” Cymbeline is usually treated as a fairy tale. Rightly so, as it abounds in surprises, reversals and restorations.   Minus any realistic causation and motivation, their pell-mell plots are packed with improbable events — inexplicable…

FLEECING A LEGEND The tickets are free in (re)discover theatre’s generously-meant new work by company member Jessica Shoemaker. Their too-fresh offering is an anachronistic, two-act take on the love story behind the legend of ancient Greek hero Jason and his witch wife Medea. Jason and (Medea) — the strange parentheses hinting at one partner’s curious…

GAY PRIDE AND PREJUDICE The Pride  is an invaluable offering for Pride Month, or any other for that matter. Deeply textured and perfectly enacted, this Olivier Award-winning script by British playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell shifts eras to look at whether sex improves or just persists with time ’” and I don’t mean as we get older….

KISS ME, COLE Just the songs are  blessing and bounty enough in A Cole Porter Songbook, Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre’s all-singing, much-dancing salute to Broadway’s suavest purveyor of perfection. Cleverly compiled in rich arrangements by music director Aaron Benham, hoofed up to period perfection by choreographer David Heimann, and, above all, seamlessly staged with inventive inevitability…

EXQUISITE SHARDS OF GLASS Never has the title of Tennessee Williams’ early masterpiece, The Glass Menagerie, been so thoroughly embraced by the set designer. Grant Sabin takes the name of this 1944 memory play very seriously. Unlike past productions where the late 1930s Saint Louis cramped Wingfield apartment is fully realized, fire escape and all,…

HAND IN HAND TO HELL’S ANGELS Deceit and destruction reign in Wayward Productions’ hell-bent for leather staging of Richard III, which has been reimagined  as biker gang mayhem in a bar named London. This reinterpretation of Shakespeare has extended its run from the Underground Wonder Bar; given the deft direction of Carlo Lorenzo Garcia and committed…

THE  TITLE CHARACTER IS  TOO PURE FOR PEOPLE, BUT THIS PURE PRODUCTION IS FOR EVERYONE Of all Moliere’s comedies, The Misanthrope (1666), now gloriously and faithfully revived at Court Theatre, is the one literary critics and Moliere fans most take to heart. The master’s most personal and most ambiguous work, The Cantankerous Lover (its telling subtitle) delivers…

THE MOTHER OF CHICAGO THEATER Workers and theatergoers of Chicago unite! Oracle Theatre is mounting a rousing defense of Karl Marx and the Bolsheviks, and demands your undivided attention. Though my experience is admittedly limited in the realm of communist propaganda, The Mother is not only the best  agitprop I’ve seen to date, but it packs…

CATCHING WISE TO THE OLD RAZZLE DAZZLE A fascinating phenomenon is occurring in the theater, one which was elucidated by many shows that I saw in Chicago over the past couple of weeks. As the art of playwriting (to wit: storytelling) becomes deconstructed, muddled, and (occasionally) wholly impenetrable, the stagecraft used to tell these tales…

THE PLAY’S NOT REALLY THE THING, THE PRODUCTION IS Further earning a proud name, Chicago Shakespeare Theater has produced Henry VIII for the first time in professional Chicago theater history. The history cycle is finally finished. Fortuitously, all this happens exactly 400 years after it premiered at the Globe Theatre when, alas, an accident with…

SECONDS WHICH SHOULD BE SKIPPED, NOT SPLIT Within the messy, overwritten and frustrating new script, If You Split A Second, is a potentially interesting premise: In an instant of unthinking and reflexive violence a man can obey his demons; yet in doing so, he can destroy not just his future but the welfare of his…