Theater

SOPHISTICATED SWING FROM KING  ELLINGTON Some shows are just pure pleasure, delivering unpretentious delight with no plot to process or points to proclaim. Much like  Ain’t Misbehavin’, an infectious romp that salutes the music and mirth of Fats Waller,  Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies  is a 1981 confection conceived by Donald McKayle that enthralls audiences with two dozen hit numbers…

MANY FORKS IN MANY ROADS “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!” John Greenleaf Whittier’s bittersweet couplet is echoed in If/Then, a 2014 chamber musical. This sprawling, 160-minute speculation of a show wonders whether there are any accidents in life. Is chance just “probabilities playing…

LONELY HUBRIS “I want it all.” “The sky’s [not] the limit.” “You only live once.” “You can’t take it with you.”: We’re fascinated by all the pride that precedes a fall. We can conditionally identify with hyper self-assertion — then strategically withdraw our sympathies when it comes a cropper. That’s what still works, almost 40…

ROCKING THE BOAT When we enter the theater, we see two women in a small fishing boat. It’s surrounded by huge buckets depicting the shallows of an inlet in the Alabama delta. Overhead netting seems to catch the stars. For nearly ninety minutes, this seemingly static situation becomes the engrossing story-setting for  The Gulf, Audrey Cefaly’s…

TOUCHING BUT TRAPPED IN A TIME WARP Stop Kiss was a big 1998 hit at New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater. In 2000 it arrived in Chicago in a tepid local premiere by the Naked Eye Theatre Company. That misfire aside, Diana Son’s 95-minute one-act — a tale of two women who only discover they’re…

A LIGHTHOUSE SPILLS ITS SECRETS Isolation forces intimacy on its inhabitants, if only by its process of elimination. It can also foster secrets: Scattered souls protect their privacy by keeping stuff to themselves. In  The Secret Garden  or  The Turn of the Screw  what’s hidden must out — to respectively good and evil ends. This strategic formula works in  Whisper…

DANCING AROUND ADOLESCENCE It happened with  You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, that peculiar, often cloying, problem of adult actors playing unfledged kids. There’s an unavoidable condescension that’s not lost on grown-ups — even less so with young folks — when performers stoop to be small. But sometimes, as with Clare Barron’s 2017  Dance Nation (a Pulitzer…