Chicago

SOME THINGS, BUT NOT EVERYTHING, IS ILLUMINATED “With writing, we have second chances,†declares Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything Is Illuminated, his well-received and dauntingly complex first novel from 2002. Taking leaps that have nothing to do with faith, this self-reflexive look at how writing about an event serves many different truths begins with a…

WINTER FLUFF “We’re all in the gutter/But some of us have our ear to the ground.” If you find this limp lyric endlessly repeated in this silly-ass, pun-crazed musical instantly amusing, read no further and see this show. For everyone else, Strawdog Theatre Company’s Midwest premiere of Arthur Riordan’s Irish musical will need to take…

THE HORROR OF SELF-DENIAL FUELS INVENTIVE STAGING Chicago Opera Theater has teamed up with Long Beach Opera in California to produce a delightfully disturbing presentation of Philip Glass’ adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s renowned horror text, The Fall of the House of Usher. While the clichés of such American Gothic might seem to call for…

MUSIC’S MANY BRIDGES It’s a proven power at the Black Ensemble Theater: No disease is so deadly, no crisis so catastrophic that a song can’t cure it within twenty bars. Add 20 more songs that bridge the generation gap, as happens in B.E.T.’s generous new offering, From Doo Wop to Hip Hop, and happiness becomes…

STORIES IN A SPIN CYCLE If ever the cliché “the plot thickens” justifies itself, it’s in this relentlessly inventive 1996 work by Australian playwright Andrew Bovell; anacondas after their bi-annual meal should thicken like this self-generating drama. Bovell’s well-named Speaking in Tongues employs four actors – flawlessly coordinated in Jeffry Stanton’s intricate staging for Interrobang…

25 SAINTS A 75-minute exercise in dead-end disaster tautly directed by Susan E. Bowen, this new work by Pine Box Theater ensemble member Joshua Rollins tightly fits the theater company’s action-oriented theatricality. It also delivers a pitiless look at the “forgotten world of Appalachia,” specifically a misery known as West Virginia. Corruption seems to grow…

THEATER FOR SOCIAL CHANGE With fifty-two murders to date in 2013 as I write this review – over a murder a day – the death toll in Chicago seems as ubiquitous as it is tragic. Collaboraction Theatre Company strives to raise awareness, puncture apathy, and perhaps even instigate change in their new work Crime Scene:…

PARADOXICAL DUALITIES It’s brainy almost beyond endurance and savvy in its approach/avoidance strategies of gaming love. Happily, Itamar Moses’ Completeness at Theater Wit is also engrossingly directed by Jeremy Wechsler as it chronicles a complicated, captivating relationship between two scientific searchers, Elliott and Molly. Easily and perversely, they can reason themselves out of what they…

TWO BATTLES IN ONE WAR As sturdily written and swiftly moving as it was in 1982, Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play remains an enduring testament to the homefront battles that African-American soldiers fought during World War II, within their ranks as well as with white comrades in arms. It’s the kind of upfront, downhome American…

SPRINGING INTO SPRING In Chicago, spring can never come early enough. But, alas, it’s February, so it has to be an indoor sport. Leave it to our homegrown dance company, the Joffrey Ballet,  to gloriously unleash spring fever in the bleak late winter. A quartet of dazzling works by Twyla Tharp, Jerome Robbins and the Joffrey…

YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LEND THIS PRODUCTION YOUR EARS Brutal and relentless, Julius Caesar chronicles a fateful course of envy and revenge defeating idealism and loyalty: Brutus and Cassius, the principal murderers of the titular dictator, are dogged to death by his avengers Marc Antony and Octavius Caesar. But the republic the assassinators…

FEARFUL SYMMETRY In Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, inspired by an actual 2003 event involving occupying soldiers in Iraq, a slain tiger takes center stage and discusses from the perspective of the newly dead that there is a flash of retrospective honesty which instills a global rather than personal viewpoint. The Tiger…

VIRTUAL THEATER Teddy Ferrara, Goodman Theatre’s new commissioned work, is almost three hours long. That excess suggests that nobody had the courage to cut or, not knowing what it was about to start with, couldn’t know where to start or stop. The indulgent length also implies that Teddy Ferrara has a lot of plot to…

AIRPORT FOR BIRDS FAILS TO TAKE OFF In their sketch comedy show Airport for Birds (and Other Great Ideas), Team StarKid seems to have wracked their brains to come up with as many reasons as possible for the performers to scream: There’s a pair of fitness enthusiasts who think that it’s part of doing yoga…

PIôATA FULL OF DARKNESS Don’t be concerned if you don’t receive an invitation to Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party – the Steppenwolf’s revival production is still an event not to be missed. Caretaker Meg Bowles and her deck-chair attendant spouse, Petey (Moira Harris, returning to the Steppenwolf for the first time since 1998, and John…

SOMEWHAT SOUTH OF WHERE IT NEEDS TO BE Chicago Dramatists’ world premiere is a tale of murder, spirituality, and heartbreak: A black man named Stranger, after being accused of the murder of his white employer, Widow Luckey, recalls to the town sheriff the events that led up to his arrest. It’s a compelling, complex story…

READY FOR HER CLOSE-UP, MR. DEMILLE From the start it seemed strange that anyone would make a musical out of a movie that embodies its medium so completely. Yes, the film All About Eve deserved to become the musical Applause; both were obsessed with the theater. But Billy Wilder’s consummately cinematic 1950 masterpiece was a…

SAD TRIUMPH OF HOPE OVER EXPERIENCE It’s like kicking a puppy dog to dislike Charity Hope Valentine. Charity is the cloyingly-named heroine of the 1966 musical by Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields and Neil Simon, a show once made famous by Gwen Verdon’s slinkiness and Bob Fosse’s choreography. Writers’ Theatre approaches this strange amalgam of high…

A CRY TO CARE The 85-minutes of this electrifying protest play begin with a lone microphone suddenly erupting in an ear-splitting feedback. The noise is intolerable, no less than what it ushers in. After this blast from the other side of the world, individual performer/protesters approach that mike, start to speak, back up and unfurl…