Chicago

NOISE IS OFF It is 1944 in a field near a watering hole in Kent, England. A strapping, fine-looking, and masculine young man purveys the view and strips off his shirt. Another young man enters with his bike; he is a rail-thin, bespectacled, academic-looking peer who is also handsome, but more like Harry Potter than…

A TRIUMPHANT MASTERPIECE Rare is the theatrical experience that is so haunting and so achingly beautiful that your soul actually feels caressed and nurtured. The transcendent production at hand is Chicago Shakespeare’s revival of Sondheim and Lapine’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Sunday in the Park with George. The musical fable is based on the short…

MEMORIES MAY BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH Freshly Fallen Snow, by Chicago Dramatists’ resident playwright M. E. H. Lewis, builds its plot upon a recent scientific advancement:   the possibility of mitigating the effects of traumatic memories by physically removing them, potentially erasing long-term memory as well. This intriguing prospect is examined through an alternately stylized…

PASSION IN A POOL It took Ovidius Naso, a 1st century Roman poet, to do full justice to Greek myths. Metamorphoses assembled a panoply of gods, heroes and mortals into 15 books of Latin hexameter; the legends cover everything from the creation of the world out of chaos to the deification of Caesar and reign…

A PUB CRAWL FROM FOLKLORE INTO FANTASY The black-box stage on the sixth floor of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Navy Pier complex is now a Scottish pub. In these still-dark confines beneath the café lights, a sweet but scary story gets recounted among the tavern tables, on top of chairs, and’”representing hell’”all over Oriental carpets at…

“SINCERE EFFORT” BY A NOSE IN THE FIFTH Sam Shepard’s Geography of a Horse Dreamer offers the lyric combination of the rough and ridiculous we expect of Shepard, with eponymous touches of surrealism. The first moments show a man trapped in a bed while projected hooves gallop on the wall behind him, sepia snippets of…

NOTHING EQUIVOCAL ABOUT IT In Bill Cain’s entertaining, stimulating Equivocation, William Shakespeare (spelled Shagspeare in the play) doesn’t radiate awe-inspiring genius. Instead, he’s a regular guy with a considerable talent for writing commercial plays for his acting company, but he faces a problem that may endanger his career, if not his life. Cain’s play deals…

NEITHER WILLIAMS OR THE GOODMAN AT THEIR BEST Sweet Bird of Youth is not top drawer Tennessee Williams. The play has some of Williams’ lyricism and humor, and at least one sharply etched character, but its Southern Gothic excesses are a self-parody of the playwright’s Never-Never Land Deep South. The much anticipated Goodman revival’”largely based…

INTO THE  WOODY American folksinger/composer/political activist Woody Guthrie lived during the Great Depression of the 1930’s and the turbulent wartime and postwar years of the 1940’s. In his music Guthrie became the voice of the common man and woman and child in America, especially the oppressed, the exploited, and the dispossessed. Woody Sez celebrates the man,…

GOOD PEOPLE; GREAT PLAY; AMAZING PRODUCTION David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People is a wonderful play receiving a terrific production at the Steppenwolf Theatre and headed by a magnificent performance from Mariann Mayberry. Those are the facts. The rest is commentary. Good People is set in Boston, especially working class south Boston, where the playwright grew up….

A BIG KNIFE THAT ISN’T VERY SHARP Clifford Odets is justly famed for his agit-prop Depression-era New York-based protest plays (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Golden Boy), but The Big Knife, written a decade later, is more personal than polemical. If only to suit the California context of this 150-minute, rarely produced play, Odets…

THIS ISN’T GREAT THEATER, BUT IT’S TERRIFIC NOSTALGIA The American novelist Peter De Vries once wrote that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Maybe he would have modified his observation after seeing I Love Lucy, Live on Stage at the Broadway Playhouse. The I Love Lucy TV sitcom of the 1950’s clearly held affectionate…

THE DANE’S THE THING The oft-produced Hamlet demands countless choices by a director and Michael Halberstam has met all the challenges; instead of overloading the evening with grandiose directorial concepts, he resolves the script’s knotty problems with intelligent interpretation and theatrical savvy. Like nearly all revivals of Hamlet, the director takes some liberties with the…

SEE SCAPE A wonderfully questioning work from 1975, Edward Albee’s whimsical, Pulitzer-winning domestic drama literally reflects our world as seen by diametrical couples. Seascape meets landscape on the neutral ground of a coastal beach: The result is an inter-species double date. Albee first presents Nancy and Charlie: A mature terrestrial couple, they’re torn between spending…

A HEALTHY DEBATE George Bernard Shaw observed that, “The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.” By that standard, the playwright Shaw and his friend and rival, journalist G. K. Chesterton, must…

THE PLOT THAT WOULD NOT DIE Doggedly dedicated but exhausting at nearly three hours, Robert Kauzlaric’s adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ mystery thriller The Woman in White is, to quote another Victorian writer, “too much of a muchness.” Sparing neither anticlimactic exposition nor a manic attention to convoluted plotting’”complexities that no audience will want to pursue’”this…

WRONG IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE, OR A TREK THROUGH PEDANTRY Middle-aged misogynist, pedant, and poet Henry Dennett has a chip on his shoulder and a worm in his gut’”literally, a gigantic tapeworm’”but in David Hirson’s astoundingly overwritten play Wrong Mountain, it’s also an overly symbolic worm whose name in Latin means “contempt for one’s…

ENTERTAINING, BUT  WITHOUT THE COMIC  SIZZLE In 2009, Xanadu opened in downtown Chicago that turned out to be one of the delights of the season. It was a silly musical, but hip, satirical, nostalgic, and loaded with energy and visual invention. Fast forward to today and the Drury Lane Theatre’s revival: While there is considerable entertainment value,…

YOU BETTER CATCH THIS BEFORE IT REALLY IS THE LAST SESSION Mike Nussbaum is probably weary of hearing himself called the Grand Old Man of Chicagoland Theater and a local treasure, like Wrigley Field. But consider the record. Nussbaum has provided local audiences with superior performances for nearly 50 years. Those unfortunates who missed him…