GRACE TO THE FINISH John Newton (1725-1807) was many things: a slave trader, a sailor and a clergyman. Yet today he is chiefly remembered as the author of “Amazing Grace,” perhaps the most well-known and beloved of English hymns. In the  new musical Amazing Grace, Christopher Smith (book, music, and lyrics) and co-librettist Arthur Giron tell…

IN SOME WAYS, THIS PARADE PASSED ITSELF  BY First performed in Chicago by Bailiwick Repertory, now dutifully revived by BoHo Theatre, the potentially pile-driving Parade by bookwriter Alfred Uhry and composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown reprises an ugly and evergreen tragedy. Their driven musical chronicles the reflexive racism that, a century ago, doomed a suspect stranger. Here…

THE FARM-TO-FABLE REVOLUTION IS HERE One of the most extraordinary things about George Orwell’s novels is their prophetic power; they are perhaps even more relevant now than when he wrote them. Thus, it is incredibly timely that Steppenwolf for Young Adults should mount the present production of Animal Farm. Instead of reading it in light…

LEAPS AND LAUGHS: A STRANGE AMALGAM It’s a worthy experiment, even if the eclectic results seem maddeningly inconclusive. For three more performances, two very different Chicago arts troupes share the same Harris Theater stage in a curious merger of movement and comedy. Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and The Second City, bastions of contemporary dance and…

A DREAM WITHIN A DANCE Borrowed from the Pennsylvania Ballet, Joffrey Ballet’s latest offering (running through Oct. 26 at the Auditorium Theatre) is not your usual Swan Lake. Not to be compared with the Trocks’ respectful travesty, the original 1877 production by the Bolshoi, or the psychodrama of the film Black Swan, Christopher Wheeldon’s invigorating…

STEALING CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE The Submission is a devious, double-edged title for Jeff Talbott’s equally transgressive play. It refers both to the cold (as in out-of-nowhere) entry of a script for production consideration in the prestigious Humana Festival, and to the endgame of an ugly quest for dominance between a black actress and a…

MISSING MECHE Although Nobel Prize-winning writer Vargas Llosa is known primarily as a novelist, he has also written nine plays spanning a period of sixty years. La Chunga,written in 1986, is the fourth. Its 1945 setting in the city of Piura, Peru, founded by conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1532, gives the play a somewhat nostalgic…

TWILIGHT IN TIVOLI Following their productions of Brecht’s The Mother and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, venturesome Oracle Theatre brings us another thespian rarity. This fall’s find is Gore Vidal’s adaptation of Romulus by Friedrich Dí¼rrenmatt (The Physicists, The Visit). Cleverly staged by Kasey Foster, this 90-minute curiosity is a playful, anachronistic, and subversive look at…