Chicago

THE ICEMAN  HATH ARRIVED Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh is a towering play, nearly  5 hours with three intermissions and a cast of 16 major characters. Yet its theme can be summarized in five words’”We need illusions to survive. The Goodman Theatre is reviving a basically uncut Iceman (one character has been dropped) in what certainly is…

TIMON ON OUR HANDS OK, raise your hand if you have read Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. No? Do you even know how to say Timon? It is pronounced TIME-uhn. Have you seen a production? Probably not, as it is rarely produced. Well, guess what? It most likely wasn’t even produced in Shakespeare’s time. The scholarly…

TOO MANY THEATER INGREDIENTS SPOIL THE BROTH If there were a Joseph Jefferson Award simply for risk-taking in the theatre, Brandon Bruce would most assuredly win for his direction of John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi. Mr. Bruce has assembled a savvy design team and has employed numerous theatrical styles to tell the…

A PRODUCTION TO TAKE PRIDE IN All of Jane Austen’s novels are built on the same premise. A woman meets and marries an eligible man after a series of usually comic difficulties. But Austen extracts a remarkable amount of drama, comedy, and human interest from her domestic tales through her witty, ironic prose and her…

THE ACTING IS DARK AND DEEP BUT THE SCRIPT GETS LOST IN THE FOREST In a Forest, Dark and Deep may not be top drawer Neil LaBute, but it does provide a showcase for two of the area’s best performers to rant and rave at each other with considerable gusto for 90 uninterrupted minutes. The…

THE LONG MARCH E. L. Doctorow’s The March was a fine Civil War novel and likely would make an excellent motion picture, but as a play it has problems. The ambitious adaptation at the Steppenwolf Theatre certainly gives the book a brave try, but at 2 hours and 50 minutes the production turns out to…

A PRODUCTION THAT IS THE VERY MODEL The comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan can be an acquired taste for modern audiences. The plots are inane and the satire, so cutting in Victorian days, means little to today’s spectators. Still, the music is superb and the lyrics delicious, though it takes a sharp ear to…

SIXTY MILES TO NOWHERE The setting for Dan LeFranc’s Sixty Miles to Silver Lake is the front seat of a car. Ky (Sean Bolger) has picked up his son Denny (Ethan Dubin) from a soccer game, as he does every weekend, to drive sixty miles on the Golden State Freeway to Silver Lake, near downtown…

A PERFECTLY COIFFED HAIRSPRAY A successful revival of Hairspray demands pinpoint casting in two roles: Tracy Turnblad, the show’s central character, must be short, exceedingly stocky, look like a high school girl, and have a performing motor that doesn’t stop for more than two hours, and  Tracy’s mother Edna must be credibly played by a man….

A REFRESHING RAIN When reviving an oft-produced play like N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker, the hope is that the director will somehow put a new spin on the production so that the piece doesn’t come off as dusty as the drought-ridden plains in which it takes place. Bohemian Theatre Ensemble’s production at Theater Wit has…

FEELING A LITTLE BLUE In 1992, a friend insisted that we see Blue Man Group: Tubes at the tiny, cramped Astor Place Theatre in New York City. At the time, people were calling it a new generation of performance art, largely because it lacked the self-serving air of attention-seeking SoHo artists. To us, it was…

THERE’S MUCH TO DESIRE One of the most truly inspiring films of the last year was Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance; while it was clearly a love letter to Joffrey’s legacy, the documentary made evident that the current company, under the artistic direction of Ashley C. Wheater, continues to be a  forward-looking institution while honoring what…

SECOND CITY KNOWS EXACTLY WHO THEY ARE Second City calls its 100th mainstage revue Who Do We Think We Are? The question is rhetorical. For more than half a century, Second City has been the citadel of improvisational theater in the United States, with an astonishing alumni list that runs from John Belushi and Alan…

A LITTLE OUTDATED, ANGELS IS STILL MANNA FROM HEAVEN In 1994, Tony Kushner’s two-part Angels in America plays – Millennium Approaches and Perestroika – opened locally at the Royal George Theatre where they provided a stunning viewing experience. In two sprawling works Kushner brought alive the American national scene of the 1980’s and early 1990’s,…

I SAY YOU WANT THIS REVOLUTION After the Revolution is a chewy new play about family dynamics and the difficulty of making moral judgments, especially after the fact. For audiences thirsting for a literate, intelligent, stimulating, and accessible new play, it will fill the bill nicely. The Amy Herzog 2010 drama premiered Off Broadway to…

THE IDEA WORKS BETTER THAN THE ACTUAL PRESENTATION Jackie Sibblies Drury’s new play could have the longest title in the history of the theater: We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915. It came out of the Victory…

MUSICAL STRIKES AN UMBILICAL CHORD Motherhood the Musical doesn’t break any new ground in taking on the joys and tribulations of motherhood, nor does the 100-minute revue deliver any surprises, but that doesn’t lessen its entertainment value. This is one clever and witty show. Granted, the maternity material is aimed at the ladies, but menfolk…