Chicago

SECOND CITY GROWS UP Second City is expanding its cabaret empire in a new Chicago venue currently housing five shows. The operation carries the umbrella title of the UP Comedy Club, located on the third floor of Piper’s Alley near the Second City Mainstage and e.t.c. performance spaces. One of three Second City cabaret spaces,…

THE ACTING FILLS YOU UP BUT THE ADAPTATION LEAVES YOU HUNGRY FOR LESS Elise Blackwell’s slender 2003 novel Hunger tells the harrowing story of a group of Russian scientists trying to survive the siege of Leningrad during World War II. Blackwell’s novel has been adapted into a drama receiving its world premiere at the Lifeline…

A DRESS THAT’S ALREADY OUT OF STYLE The two-character romantic play typically follows a set pattern. A man and a woman have just met. They are very different in lifestyles and initially they don’t hit it off. But gradually they connect, and by the end of the story they are either in a happy-ever-after clinch…

A CRIMINAL SCRIPT OF AN EVIL STORY Lucy Prebble’s play Enron tries to dramatize the Enron financial scandal, one which serves as a poster child for everything greedy and immoral and corrupt in the American financial system. The play was a big hit in London, but the Broadway outing died after a few performances. Interestingly,…

A TEPID DISCOURSE ON SEX AND RELIGION IN THE HEARTLAND Hesperia is the name of a small Midwestern town, home to a number of devout Christians. Young Claudia fled here from Los Angeles in spiritual turmoil, seeking peace and consolation from life in the pornographic film industry. She finds succor in Hesperia’s sympathetic Christian fundamentalist…

FIRST FOLIO MOVES THEIR BLOOMIN’ FARCE INTO HIGH GEAR Unnecessary Farce is that rarest of theatrical birds: a farce that is actually funny. Sure, it’s silly to the max, but it makes the audience laugh, the primary responsibility of a farce (and a goal rarely achieved). Paul Slade Smith, a popular Chicagoland actor a couple…

IS THERE A RECONCILIATION IN SIGHT? Every dedicated theatergoer should attend both Race at the Goodman Theatre, and Disgraced – which just opened at the American Theater Company, even though both shows will evoke a pretty bleak vision of culture wars in the United States. Both dramas see the gulf as virtually irreconcilable, largely through…

WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY Attend the Profiles Theatre production of Leslye Headland’s Bachelorette and meet Gena, Katie, and Regan – three foul-mouthed, pot smoking, cocaine sniffing, pill popping young ladies that the audience can accept as funny, pathetic, repulsive, or tragic. The maidens spend about 70 minutes of stage time doing their drugs, stabbing every back…

PHOTO REALISM Time Stands Still has only four characters and a single set, but it covers an immense amount of dramatic ground, exploring personal matters of love and commitment while addressing larger public issues connected to our attitudes toward war and violence. The play can be seen in an impeccably acted and directed production at…

THE SILLY BLONDE MUSICAL THAT ACTUALLY WORKS Local musical productions will have problems hiring skilled and energetic young performers for the next couple of months. The Chicagoland talent pool of youthful men and women is being monopolized by the presentation of a deliciously silly musical comedy at the Marriott Theatre. Legally Blonde originated as a…

WHOSE ETHNIC HERITAGE IS IT, ANYWAY? Black Pearl Sings! is a two-hander that explores the odd couple relationship between a black woman in prison for murder and a white female academic in Texas during the depths of the Great Depression. The play touches on lots of chewy issues, like racism, sexism, and, most provocatively, what…

MAMET CONFRONTS RACISM David Mamet’s Race looks at the racial situation in this country and sees an unbridgeable chasm between blacks and whites in our society. It’s a bleak vision, fortunately delivered with scintillating dramatic tension and some very funny dialogue.   Indeed, audiences will spend much of the evening laughing at what’s happening onstage at…

KLEA BLACKHURST IS QUEEN OF THIS GYPSY Gypsy is a musical theater biography of striptease performer Gypsy Rose Lee; but it’s really about Gypsy’s mother, Mama Rose, immortalized by Ethel Merman in the original 1959 production. Merman’s performance set the bar for all future performers brave enough to take on the role. Every revival of…

SUITORS SUIT ILL-FITTING SUITS Enda Walsh, scribe of The Walworth Farce and The New Electric Ballroom, is one of the great polarizing writers in modern theater:   his admirers love the English dramatist’s quirky theatrical imagination and his command of language, while his detractors complain that his stories are improbable, if not incomprehensible, and that his…

IT’S A WONDERFUL PRODUCTION A stage adaptation of the movie classic It’s a Wonderful Life premiered in Connecticut in 1997 and, before long, the adaptation became a staple of the regional theater circuit during the Christmas season.   The show now challenges A Christmas Carol as the preeminent live theater attraction of the holidays.   There is…