They couldn’t be more different in tone and setting, but Tyrone Phillips’s current gorgeous staging of Twelfth Night at Chicago Shakespeare and Robert Falls’s brilliant 2013 reimagining of Measure for Measure at the Goodman have one thing in common: bold directorial choices at the end that resolve nagging questions I’ve always had about how Shakespeare […]
Category: Theater Review
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Chaos in the co-op
A stellar cast more than makes up for some of the inherent unevenness in Charles Busch’s The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, produced at Skokie Theatre as part of MadKap Productions’s 2023-24 season. Julie Stevens is terrific as Marjorie Taub, an Upper West Side housewife recovering from a nervous breakdown—triggered after the death of her […]
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Neighborly nightmares
If you look at French-Canadian playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin’s Right Now with an eye toward finding narrative antecedents, you won’t be disappointed. There’s the young couple living across the hall from an older couple who seem a little too interested in them (shades of Rosemary’s Baby). There are boozy parties (and a possibly imaginary child) straight […]
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All about their mother
The four sisters in Teatro Vista’s ¡Bernarda! often complain about the heat, but the stifling Spanish summer is no match for the passions roiling under their mother’s roof. This stylish, sexy new adaption of Federico García Lorca’s 1936 play, The House of Bernarda Alba, is written by Emilio Williams, directed by Teatro Vista producing artistic […]
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City Lit’s The Night of the Hunter is a satisfying dark yarn
City Lit Theater’s stage adaptation of Davis Grubb’s 1953 novel has a dark, homespun, campfire-tale feel that suits the folksy tone of its suspenseful Southern Gothic narrative. The Night of the Hunter recounts the ordeal of two runaway children—ten-year-old John Harper and his five-year-old sister, Pearl—being pursued by a vicious killer in rural 1930s West […]
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All the single ladies
Doing a gender reversal for Company, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1970 ironic comedy of marriage vs. singledom, is such a great idea it’s surprising that nobody thought to do it before Marianne Elliott’s 2021 revival. In Elliott’s production, bachelor Bobby is now Bobbie, a woman turning 35 and wondering just why everyone (meaning, her […]
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This Bitter Earth dives into the roots of political and personal commitment
At one point in Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre’s excellent production of Harrison David Rivers’s This Bitter Earth, the central character, Jesse (Matthew Lolar-Johnson), says to his activist boyfriend, Neil (Tiemen Godwaldt), that “all lives matter.” Neil, surprised and disgusted, replies, “Saying all lives matter is like running through an anti-cancer rally and saying, ‘You know, there are […]
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La Jom Atenda shows the complexities of caregiving
Plays about the relationships between caregivers and their clients aren’t new. The late Chicago playwright, actor, and disability rights activist Susan Nussbaumʼs well-received No One as Nasty, about a disabled woman and her caregiver, was produced by Victory Gardens back in 2000. Martyna Majok’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize–winning Cost of Living also examined two pairs of […]
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A monster of a good time
Grab your lab coat and walk this way to Mercury Theater Chicago for Young Frankenstein, the hilarious 2007 musical with music and lyrics by the legendary Mel Brooks, based on his beloved 1974 film of the same name. With a book written by Brooks and Thomas Meehan, it delivers on many of the same laughs […]
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Highlands hijinks
On a clear day in Brigadoon, you can see Oklahoma. Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner’s 1947 Scottish romantic fantasia is set in a far more mystical and picturesque realm than the Oklahoma territory of 1906, yet there are undeniable points of narrative similarity. But the dramatic stakes in Lerner and Loewe’s musical (which was […]
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Blackademics offers a course in code-switching
Set in an uber-modern high-end restaurant, the three-person play Blackademics, written by Idris Goodwin, sets up a gilded cage match of the wits for two Black frenemies in academia. Newly tenured professor Ann (Jessica F. Morrison) overcompensates through authentic African garb for what she feels she lacks in “authentic” Blackness due to her upper-class background. […]
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Born under punches
If boxing is a metaphor for life, as many scribes, boxing fans, and websites proclaim (just type “boxing as a metaphor for life” and you’ll find over 1.5 million results alone), then for the four boxers at the heart of Franky D. Gonzalez’s play That Must Be the Entrance to Heaven, life has delivered some […]
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Apocalyptic vaudeville
There’s a long tradition of Black American playwrights and filmmakers subverting the tropes of vaudeville and other popular entertainments to critique white supremacy and its violent power structures—power structures that of course also include American theater and filmmaking. Douglas Turner Ward’s 1965 satire Day of Absence (which led to the creation of the Negro Ensemble […]
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Rocking With Chekhov
There is something about Anton Chekhov’s first successful full-length play, The Seagull, that attracts playwrights to try their hand at creating their own adaptations—faithful or otherwise. Maybe it’s the fact that the characters at the center of this nearly 130-year-old play—the narcissistic mother, her emotionally damaged son, his talented but blindly ambitious girlfriend—feel so contemporary […]
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Satchmo at the Cadillac Palace
Now in a short run with Broadway in Chicago before a hoped-for New York production, A Wonderful World still has a ways to go before it feels like a fully realized portrait of Louis Armstrong. Then again, there were so many facets to the musician that it’s hard to imagine anyone could do full justice […]