Chicago

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A LITTLE OUTDATED, ANGELS IS STILL MANNA FROM HEAVEN In 1994, Tony Kushner’s two-part Angels in America plays – Millennium Approaches and Perestroika – opened locally at the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…

IT’S NOT SAFE TO GO BACK IN THE KITCHEN Along with cutting meat for a living, Valerie, the butcher in Marisa Wegrzyn’s impressive The Butcher of Baraboo, is a middle-aged woman who is the center of an over-the-top dysfunctional family  that takes the audience on a funny, disturbing, sometimes harrowing ride at A Red Orchid Theater….

THE PLAY’S ACTING’S THE THING Plenty of negatives can be directed toward Lee Blessing’s Chesapeake, which suffers from personality disorder: Is it a satire? A comedy? A fantasy? Does it even know, or care? Fortunately, these critical reservations are mostly disarmed by Greg Matthew Anderson’s brilliant performance. This is a good thing because Mr. Anderson…

HAUNTINGLY INTIMATE Ghost stories are difficult to bring off on stage. The physical reality of flesh and blood actors works against the sense of the supernatural and the suspense and horror that give the genre its distinctive flavor. That’s why ghost stories are generally more effective on the printed page or in the movies or…

A FREUDIAN TRIP Freud’s Last Session at the Mercury Theater is a “what if” play. What if the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the English professor and author C. S. Lewis met in Freud’s study in London for a morning of conversation? What if that meeting took place in 1939 on the day World War…

FOR BETTER OR WORSE, IT’S A TELLTALE TITLE Suzan-Lori Parks claimed that her play Fucking A, now playing at the Urban Theater Company, was inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. The Hawthorne work centers on a strong-willed Puritan woman named Hester who is forced to wear a scarlet letter by her community as…

ALL ABOUT ALFRED AND LYNN Ten Chimneys is the name of the estate near Madison, Wisconsin, where the famous American husband-and-wife acting team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne retreated annually to prepare for their season on the American stage. The estate is now a major tourist attraction, a monument to the lives and careers…

WHAT A DIFFERENCE TEN YEARS MAKE The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later tells the story of Matthew Shepard and how it affected those involved a decade after his 1998 murder. As with its point of origin The Laramie Project (also running concurrently as staged readings) disparate denizens of this infamous town in Wyoming have been…