Chicago

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…

IT’S ALL GREEK TO MEE Charles Mee’s plays are audacious, imaginative, weird, sometimes funny, and more often than not, powerful and thought provoking; they are not for all tastes, but audiences willing to sign on for one of Mee’s dramatic flights of fancy are guaranteed a wild ride that likely will make the viewer laugh,…

UNRESOLVED USE OF STORY James Still’s 80-minute play, Illegal Use of Hands, set in an old rural-American home, opens in the middle of a late-October night; an old man is reading in an armchair while rock music blares away, when suddenly there is a banging on the front door and two young men barge in….

ONE NERDY, COMPULSIVE, AND SINGULAR SENSATION The Porchlight Theatre opens its 18th season at cozy Theatre Wit with a musical about musicals: the uncanny A Class Act, which pays tribute to Edward Kleban, known primarily as the lyricist for A Chorus Line. As it turns out, Kleban, despite his roaring success with the 1977 Tony-winner,…

MORE THAN JUST VARIATIONS ON A THEME 33 Variations starts out with a character asking the question, “Why did the great German composer Ludwig van Beethoven write 33 variations on a trivial little waltz by a mediocre amateur composer?” On the surface, the question itself may seem trivial, but playwright Moises Kaufman expands the mystery…

THE CAST IS GREAT. THE BOOK AND THE STAGING? NOT SO DREAMY Dreamgirls is based on the rise of the Supremes, America’s premiere girl singing group of the 1960’s. The musical opened on Broadway in 1981, won six Tony awards, and ran for nearly four years. Since then, the Michael Bennett musical has only two…

IF THERE’S NO WATER, WHY IS THIS SCRIPT DROWNING IN PRETENTION? A group of bad artists resent their (dare I say) “frenemy” because she is a more successful artist than they are, and because she is “distant.” The group takes pleasure when she has a near death accident, and find a darker side of art…

A DINNER IN REAL TIME Richard Nelson’s Sweet and Sad at the Profiles Main Stage has six characters gather around a dining table for 95 minutes of uninterrupted talk on a Sunday afternoon dinner at the Apple home in upstate New York on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 disaster. The action is presented in…

A HEARTBREAKING, FUNNY, AND COMPASSIONATE TALE FROM A PLAYWRIGHT WHO IS SORELY MISSED The audience never sees Marvin, the title character in Marvin’s Room. He’s an old man ravaged by cancer and senility, living in a dark room in his Florida home. His caregiver is his daughter Bessie, a 40-year old unmarried woman dying of…