Chicago

THE FORCE OF FAMILY Looming over this long multi-generational family epic by Adrianna Sevahn Nicholas is the shadow of genocide’”the 1915 slaughter by Turks of 1.5 million Armenians, a precursor, as the Nazis admitted, to their concept of a “final solution.” It haunts the matriarch of an extended family of Armenian expatriates, even after they’ve…

OPERA WITH A TASTE FOR BLOOD The word “opera” normally elicits memories of sound’”an orchestra roiling, an aria peaking’”but in an effort to innovate the public’s preconceived notions of the art form, Lyric presents both a musically entrancing and visually stunning production of Richard Strauss’s Elektra. Images of blood, destruction — and androgyny — will…

NOT AS BLOODY AS THE TITLE IMPLIES Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is an audacious rock musical tracing the life and times of Andrew Jackson, the 7th president of the United States. The show is receiving its local premiere by the Bailiwick Chicago Theater, and at its best moments the production is a stimulating, challenging, theatrical,…

THE LANDSCAPE OF THE SOUL Those who were lucky enough to witness the Joffrey Ballet’s Spring Desire program this year were treated to what  may well  have been the greatest dance program in years.   The Joffrey has reached a pinnacle of form, beauty, and transplendent theatricality that  other dance companies’”indeed, most theater events’”should strive for. Now, with their…

ONE TIME ONLY FOR ONE NAME ONLY WAS ONE TOO MANY TIMES Yes, America’s got talent. And the performers on stage at Black Ensemble Theater’s beautiful new digs are packed to the gills with charm, powerful voices, and boundless stage presence. But I can’t remember being this shell-shocked and mortified at the stupendous waste of…

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….