Chicago

BEST NOT TO SEE THIS PLAY ON A FIRST DATE The Raven Theatre is celebrating its 30th Anniversary Season with the return of Rebecca Gilman’s Boy Gets Girl, which debuted at the Goodman Theatre in 2000. Much has changed since then in our world: The economy, global revolutions, technological gadgets and the acceptance of gay…

SLOW, SAD AND STRANGE Sooner or later (preferably the former), we expect a play to pay off – to deliver a “gotcha” revelation that makes sudden or accumulated sense out of what seemed to be aimless exposition. A less than engrossing Chicago premiere at A Red Orchid Theatre, Annie Baker’s slow-paced, torpidly talky and seemingly…

AMERICA’S BEST NOTES Beginning its first new season of self-generated musicals, the Mercury Theater has, true to its name, raised the temperature with A Grand Night for Singing, a heartfelt, if sometimes overwrought, salute which happily honors and delightfully reprises the glorious, all-American (in the best sense) Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals and their inexhaustible legacy…

FIXING WHAT WON’T HEAL Jon Robin Baitz’ Broadway drama Other Desert Cities depicts a crisis of apparent betrayal and imminent exposure that besets the Wyeth clan, a wealthy Jewish family sheltered in the oasis of Palm Springs. Viewed one way, Baitz’ Pulitzer Prize finalist is very much a two-act family fight. But, as Arthur Miller…

ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF A PLAY Anarchy is not chaos. The former means “without law,” and the latter means “without form.” This is an important distinction to consider in a play that intends to make an argument for anarchy. After a government scandal, a schizoid anarchist poses as certain government officials to disrupt the government from…

THAT KINKY KINESCOPE It’s a time trip that denies the original intent’”a live taping of a dead T.V. series. The iconic archetype of the boob tube’s “golden age,” I Love Lucy wasn’t just the longest-running T.V. show’”it set the standards and stories for domestic sitcoms until All in the Family changed the rules forever. Depending…

HATS OFF TO STEPPENWOLF If the title wasn’t enough of a clue, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker with the Hat is filled with bad language. But what’s really surprising is how well it uses creative vulgarity to shape a hilarious tale. Jackie (John Ortiz) is a recovering alcoholic on parole who seems to be finally…

YOU ONLY DIE ONCE One of the great pick-up lines that soldiers and sailors on leave during World War II (and probably the Trojan War too) used to seduce a one-night standee was, “Let’s do it – I could be dead in a month.” Chicago playwright Mark Mason’s sardonic Allotment Annie gives this plea a…

HAVEL UNVEILED AT TRAP DOOR While most probably know Václav Havel as the Czech Republic’s first president, he has gained notoriety in the avant garde world for his absurdist plays’”making him the patron saint of edgy liberal arts students everywhere. Just before the holidays,   Trap Door opened up two Havel one-acts: The Unveiling and its…

LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD It’s easy to see what drew Cameron Mackintosh to revive Lionel Bart’s hit musical 18 years ago: Dickens is a lot like Victor Hugo. Like Mackintosh’ smash Les Miserables, the 1960 musical replays an entire novel at warp speed, with fully realized opportunities to depict a swarming cityscape and gloomy Victorian…

A DICKENS OF A PERFORMER It’s been two centuries since Charles Dickens’ birth. Miriam Margolyes, famed for her portrayals in Harry Potter, The Age of Innocence, and William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet offers a well-deserved homage in Dickens’ Women, a one-person tribute directed by Sonia Fraser now playing at Chicago Shakespeare only through Saturday. Dickens’…

A GILBERT AND SULLIVAN FOR 2012 The best show of the year has finally arrived. The Book of Mormon  is a perfectly packaged fusion of the satire we need in a sassy musical comedy  with the entertainment genre that America created and deserves. From the wizards who concocted the all-offending South Park series comes an equally irreverent…

MOLIÈRE FOR DUMMIES Attend David Ives’ The School for Lies’”a manic contemporary travesty’”if you want to fully appreciate Molière’s 1666 masterpiece The Misanthrope, as serious a comedy as the 17th century farceur ever attempted. Brashly brilliant, grotesquely scatological, industriously low-brow, and perversely wrong-headed, this Midwest premiere of The School for Lies at Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s…

A HOLIDAY CHESTNUTCRACKER The Joffrey Ballet is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its holiday production of The Nutcracker, which means audiences have enjoyed an evening of grace, beauty, charm, and magnificent dancing and music for a quarter of a century. The annual holiday event is back at the Auditorium Theatre, billed as “America’s #1 Nutcracker.”…

WHEN THE DECONSTRUCTION OF COMEDY BUILDS LAUGHTER Jeff Garlin, comedian and star performer in HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, appears in his one-man show Closer Than I Appear at the Steppenwolf Theatre Upstairs. Although it is possible to describe the evening through a seemingly free-associative list of objects – a suitcase, plastic jack o’ lantern, orange…

FINDING NEW WAYS TO TURN A BODY The big news from Hubbard Street Dance Chicago as the intrepid troupe launches their four-day “winter series” at the Harris Theatre in Millennium Park? It’s the company premiere of Swedish choreographer Mats Ek’s ambitious 40-minute creation Casi-Casa. Full of glimpses of life caught in its ill-assorted acts, it’s…

CAT CHOKES UP FUR BALLS ONE TOO MANY TIMES You should live so long to meet the Hannukatz, a big 6 foot fur ball of a cat who drops by the Moskowitz family home in Skokie to educate the kids about the true meaning of Hannukah.   If you want to know “How the Jews Began”…