THE DANE’S THE THING The oft-produced Hamlet demands countless choices by a director and Michael Halberstam has met all the challenges; instead of overloading the evening with grandiose directorial concepts, he resolves the script’s knotty problems with intelligent interpretation and theatrical savvy. Like nearly all revivals of Hamlet, the director takes some liberties with the…

SEE SCAPE A wonderfully questioning work from 1975, Edward Albee’s whimsical, Pulitzer-winning domestic drama literally reflects our world as seen by diametrical couples. Seascape meets landscape on the neutral ground of a coastal beach: The result is an inter-species double date. Albee first presents Nancy and Charlie: A mature terrestrial couple, they’re torn between spending…

A HEALTHY DEBATE George Bernard Shaw observed that, “The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.” By that standard, the playwright Shaw and his friend and rival, journalist G. K. Chesterton, must…

THE PLOT THAT WOULD NOT DIE Doggedly dedicated but exhausting at nearly three hours, Robert Kauzlaric’s adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ mystery thriller The Woman in White is, to quote another Victorian writer, “too much of a muchness.” Sparing neither anticlimactic exposition nor a manic attention to convoluted plotting’”complexities that no audience will want to pursue’”this…

WRONG IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE, OR A TREK THROUGH PEDANTRY Middle-aged misogynist, pedant, and poet Henry Dennett has a chip on his shoulder and a worm in his gut’”literally, a gigantic tapeworm’”but in David Hirson’s astoundingly overwritten play Wrong Mountain, it’s also an overly symbolic worm whose name in Latin means “contempt for one’s…

ENTERTAINING, BUT  WITHOUT THE COMIC  SIZZLE In 2009, Xanadu opened in downtown Chicago that turned out to be one of the delights of the season. It was a silly musical, but hip, satirical, nostalgic, and loaded with energy and visual invention. Fast forward to today and the Drury Lane Theatre’s revival: While there is considerable entertainment value,…

YOU BETTER CATCH THIS BEFORE IT REALLY IS THE LAST SESSION Mike Nussbaum is probably weary of hearing himself called the Grand Old Man of Chicagoland Theater and a local treasure, like Wrigley Field. But consider the record. Nussbaum has provided local audiences with superior performances for nearly 50 years. Those unfortunates who missed him…

IT’S ALL GREEK TO MEE Charles Mee’s plays are audacious, imaginative, weird, sometimes funny, and more often than not, powerful and thought provoking; they are not for all tastes, but audiences willing to sign on for one of Mee’s dramatic flights of fancy are guaranteed a wild ride that likely will make the viewer laugh,…