Chicago

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…

I REMEMBER THE AMUSEMENT PARK BUT FORGOT WHAT THE RIDE WAS ABOUT The more I think about the Hypocrites’ latest theater spectacle, Ivywild, the more entranced I feel about the imaginative proceedings – the way in which the story was told – and the less I care about the story itself.   In an impressionistic, non-concrete…

CORNOGRAPHY It’s been 70 years since Rodgers and Hammerstein ushered in the “golden era” of Broadway musicals with Oklahoma!  but  given the right production, the innovative musical can still soar. Old-fashioned staging, however, can  thicken  the  aging brown dust on the bright green corn;  that’s when  the innovative musical can show its age. Well, an Oklahoma!  twister blew through Lyric Opera last night,…

PLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MOOR Alas, this is mainly a review of record: This is the final weekend to savor the triumphant revival of the Joffrey Ballet’s Othello. Originally given its world premiere by the American Ballet Theatre in 1997, this “dance in three acts” is fueled by a suitably ferocious score by still-young…

PERFECTED STORIES Ever since Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories premiered at South Coast Rep in 1996, and especially after it hit the Broadway boards starring Linda Lavin in 2010, the one-set, two-character play — being inexpensive to produce — is   seemingly occurring at any given time somewhere in the U.S.A. There is some predictability in the  plot,…

LEAVE IT TO  CHILDREN’S THEATER TO MAKE THE BIGGEST STATEMENT OF ALL The biggest opening in Chicago last week was the behemoth pre-Broadway spectacle Big Fish,  but right across town at Lifeline Theatre is another musical with more heart, a more resonant message, better songs, funnier dialogue, and performers who are infinitely more watchable than their non-distinctive…

SQUALL IN THE FAMILY In meteorology, the phenomena known as Lake Effect occurs when a cold system glides over the warmer water of a large lake and dumps huge amounts of precipitation, usually snow, in the surrounding area. This weather pattern can occur anywhere, but it is especially hard-hitting in the areas around the Great…

PLOUGHED UNDER BY  GOOD INTENTIONS AND BAD  SONGWRITING What a great idea: Create modern folk songs to represent Americans whose voices have been given short shrift (or ploughed under) by history. There are boundless unsung heroes who can attain mythical stature through inspirational ditties. Given the little we know factually about the subjects, there is room for…

FAUST IN SPACE Just because I recommend Trap Door’s latest production doesn’t mean that I understand it. Core of the PUDEL (pronounced “poodle”) is an Avant Garde/Experimental/Movement Theater production conceived and directed by Thom Pasculli, who draws from Goethe’s Faust to present a one-hour rendering that is practically impossible to follow for those unfamiliar with…

ALMOST A FULL MOON The theater has been sorely affected by electronic communication. Since the advent of the internet, at least, the cumbersome amount of news bits and twittering has infected storytelling like a cancer. Modern playwrights must be so caught up in instant missives and self-promotion on Facebook (or some such nonsense) that even…

WHEN UNIONS RULED THE EARTH Outrageously overdue for revival (the last one was at Marriott Theatre in 2004), this irresistible 1954 Broadway classic harks back to a time when producers could actually pin a plot on a threatened strike by union workers in the Sleep Tite Pajama Factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (Solidarity, alas, isn’t…

CHICAGO CAD MAKES BAD LOOK GOOD Sassy and brassy Pal Joey is  a wondrous rouser that spins the tale of a roué gone rotten in Depression-era Chicago. Porchlight Music Theatre gained the exclusive rights to Rodgers and Hart’s original 1940 version of their masterwork, and is staging a  glorious revival at Stage 773 (they’ve even restored “I’m…