HIPSTER HUMOR ON A ROLL The title  of Second City e.t.c.’s 39th revue, Soul Brother, Where Art Thou?,  is more wordplay than revelation. They know very well where to find their very specific “soul brothers.” Their generational sketch humor (targeted mainly to folks under 40) wants to invalidate 2015’s absurdities and expose our place in the idiocy…

SHTICK ON A SHIP R.M.S. Titanic was not unsinkable but the S.S. American really is. It’s been sailing strong since 1934 as Cole Porter’s biggest hit before  Kiss Me Kate. It may have jettisoned its original ballast-heavy book by P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, and taken on an equally cornball script by Timothy Crouse and John…

MAKING HEAVY OF LIFE “Can you see magic?” That’s both process and purpose in Jordan Harrison’s deliberately dazzling 75-minute bravura piece  The Grown-Up, now strutting its precious stuff in a Chicago premiere by Shattered Globe Theatre. The troupe’s last offering,  The Rose Tattoo, was Tennessee Williams’ painstaking and heartbreaking travelogue through broken hearts in the deep South….

YOU’LL FIND BLISS IN KISSIN If you haven’t heard, Evgeny Kissin is positively the best pianist alive. In the sense of the grand pianistic tradition that some say died with likes of Arrau, Cliburn, and Rubinstein, Kissin is a living legend who, basically since infancy, has been caretaker to the “Golden Age” of the piano….

CONDITIONAL LOVE AND EARLY DEATH The perils of parenting are center stage in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s truth-teller. British  playwright Rory Kinnear’s strangely named  The Herd  (a title that could indict the characters or the audience) exposes a curse as searing as any the House of Atreus endured. It measures a suburban London family beyond all clichés about what…

CAROUSEL COMES TO LYRIC OPERA Lyric Opera of Chicago’s stunning new production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel opens tonight and runs through May 3, 2015 at the Civic Opera House in Chicago. The production is directed and choreographed by Tony, Emmy, and Olivier Award winner Rob Ashford. It stars Steven Pasquale (The Bridges of Madison…

BEFORE IT WAS TOO LATE Six symbolic lives get ruthlessly entangled in this blast from the past. The world is pre-independent Virginia circa 1676 and the outcome is today in Marcus Gardley’s  An Issue of Blood: An Historical Parable. Of course the real issue isn’t blood as much as race in this passionate Victory Gardens premiere….

A GOOD  BÊTE Even though it’s written in mostly rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter, David Hirson’s 1991 play, La Bête, is by far the least avant-garde presentation at Trap Door I have seen. That means those who have been reticent to sample the East European alternate theater company can rest assured this is a most accessible…

ENERGY IS NEVER ENOUGH Nothing is sadder than a forced farce. Or phonier than chases without consequences. Famed for his frenetic  The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity  (a comedy about wrestling that reduced sophisticated audiences to howling W.W.F. partisans), Kristoffer Diaz has penned a much lamer world premiere for Goodman Theatre than his sensational triumph at Victory…

TRIFONOV, BYCHKOV & RACHMANINOV All it took was one performance from 23-year-old Daniil Trifonov (dan-EEL TREE-fon-ov) to resoundingly validate for me why he is the current Big Thing of the piano world. The Liszt-like master’s rendition of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at the Hollywood Bowl (followed by a jaw-dropping encore of Stravinsky’s Firebird for…

ON THE HORNS OF HISTORY Imagine history as a roller coaster–more specifically, Oscar Wide’s masterpiece  The Importance of Being Earnest  transmogrified into cerebral vaudeville. Erupting for nearly three hours of whimsical exuberance, Tom Stoppard’s 1974  Travesties  (here enhanced with later rewrites) is a deliberately dazzling, ostentatiously intellectual tour de talk. Its entire comic apparatus is built on one curious…

GOOD BOOKS? The world premiere production of a new play about the Bible by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, The Good Book is impressive, complex, informative, and entertaining, perhaps even provocative and challenging to some viewers. Unfortunately, there seems to be simply too much going on, story-wise and production-wise, to make for a wholly satisfactory…

IN DEED HE DOESN’T Will Eno’s 2012 solo script, now in a Midwest premiere, represents quite a departure (almost a repudiation) of Lookingglass Theatre Company’s vintage style. Here be no flying trapezes, dangling performers, sudden trap doors, harnesses and stilts, rabbits pulled out of a hole. Lasting a bit over an hour,  Title and Deed  (a, well,…