Theater Review Archives - Page 5 of 106

Pierre Jean Gonzalez as Alexander Hamilton stands center stage. Around him is a circle of dancers, leaning in with their legs stretched behind them and arms to their sides.

The room where it happens, again

by Kerry Reid September 21, 2023September 20, 2023

At this point, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is beyond critic-proof. (Once you’ve had an entire episode of Drunk History dedicated to your recap of the events in your musical, what else is there to achieve?) But for the fanatics and newbies alike, I’m happy to report that the current Broadway in Chicago touring production of the […]

A middle-aged woman sits left at a kitchen table, across from a middle-aged man on the right. She is wearing a full apron. He has his hands on either side of what appears to be an unwrapped birthday present of a fishbowl.

Theater Review

Lighting up the years

by Kelly Kleiman September 21, 2023September 20, 2023

Noah Haidle’s play got absolutely savaged in New York, with the critics’ main objection being that the story of a family over time had already been told in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and The Long Christmas Dinner. Apparently they’d never heard that there are only seven plots in the world. In any case, I could […]

A Black woman in a red striped suit is jumping up off the floor at left. A Black man in suspenders and trousers sits at a sewing machine right, pointing a finger in her direction.

Theater Review

Harlem stories

by Kerry Reid September 21, 2023September 20, 2023

I don’t know who came up with the idea of a Pearl Cleage festival for Chicago theater, but based on Mikael Burke’s gorgeous production of the Atlanta poet laureate’s 1995 drama, Blues for an Alabama Sky, I’m glad they did. (Goodman Theatre’s staging of Cleage’s comedy The Nacirema Society is in previews now.) Blues for […]

Five women stand in a circle holding telephone receivers to their ears.

Theater Review

Collective power

by Katie Powers September 21, 2023September 28, 2023

From 1969 to 1973, a Chicago-based organization known by the code name “Jane” brought safe and accessible abortions to more than 10,000 women. Paula Kamen’s Jane: Abortion and the Underground gives voice to the women who ran the resistance collective, risking their freedom to champion the right to choose. Director Morgan Manasa and Idle Muse’s […]

An older white woman clutching a beer bottle stands left in the foreground. Behind her are two younger women, also holding beer bottles. The set looks like a service alley behind a mall.

Theater Review

Revolution offers small revelations

by Kerry Reid September 21, 2023October 10, 2023

Chicago playwright Brett Neveu is so good at writing about the darker side of life (as in his 2002 play Eric LaRue, now a film directed by Michael Shannon, his fellow ensemble member at A Red Orchid Theatre) that it’s hard to remember how flat-out hilarious he can be. If you need proof, look no […]

A Black man and woman stand left in front of a sofa, looking across the living room at another Black man and woman.

Theater Review

You won’t be my neighbor

by Kerry Reid September 21, 2023September 28, 2023

“Well, look who’s come to dinner!” bellows Gerald (Ronald L. Conner) to the neighbors he and wife Patricia (Sydney Charles) have invited to their home in Inda Craig-Galván’s WELCOME TO MATTESON! But the neighbors here aren’t white or interracial, and nobody’s trying to marry anyone else’s daughter. That aside, the parallels to Guess Who’s Coming […]

A middle-aged woman in dark clothing stands left, looking at an older woman in a white cardigan sitting in a chair.

Theater Review

Petty lives of desperation

by Kerry Reid September 14, 2023September 14, 2023

When The Beauty Queen of Leenane first premiered with Galway’s Druid Theatre in 1996, it marked its author, Martin McDonagh (then just shy of age 26) as an exhilarating new voice in Celtic drama. The story of lonely 40-year-old spinster Maureen Folan and her hypochondriacal and controlling mother, Mag, cut like a chainsaw through any […]

A bald middle-aged man kneels on the left, holding the hand of a young woman who is crouching on the right.

Theater Review

A superb View

by Kelly Kleiman September 14, 2023September 14, 2023

When it’s directed wrong, Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge comes off as a dated melodrama about the unthinkability of incest. Fortunately, director Louis Contey at Shattered Globe understands it’s actually a piece about self-deception leading to self-destruction and thus is as much of a punch in the gut as it was when it […]

An older man in black clothing holding a guitar stands center. There are four other musicians in the shadows behind him.

Theater Review

Ring of Fire lacks dramatic heat

by Jack Helbig September 14, 2023September 14, 2023

Let’s begin with what this 2006 jukebox musical is not. It is not a rich, textured, nuanced, moving, memorable musical biography of Johnny Cash. It does not attempt to do onstage what the rousing, Academy Award-winning 2005 movie, I Walk the Line, did on the silver screen: bring us Cash in his power and glory […]

A man in a dark shirt and mustache stands left. Just in front of him is a woman with long dark hair in a black dress.

Theater Review

A tale of two poets

by Kerry Reid September 14, 2023September 15, 2023

Water People Theater’s last full-length production was The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon, presented in September 2019 as part of the Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, written by and starring artistic director Rebeca Alemán under the direction of Iraida Tapias. Alemán’s story of a Venezuelan human rights reporter struggling to regain her memory […]

Audrey II, a giant puppet version of a Venus flytrap, is on the left. Audrey, a woman in a black dress, is on the right, talking on the phone.

Theater Review

Camp carnage

by Kerry Reid September 14, 2023October 2, 2023

Several years before they struck Disney gold with Beauty and the Beast, the musical team of composer Alan Menken and book writer and lyricist Howard Ashman stuck their toes into campy cult waters with 1982’s Little Shop of Horrors, adapted from Roger Corman’s 1960 film The Little Shop of Horrors. The film is famous, among […]

Nine performers of various races and genders stand in a line. They are wearing rehearsal clothing.

Theater Review

The love language of dance

by Kelly Kleiman September 14, 2023September 14, 2023

It’s incredibly ambitious for a Chicago company to choose A Chorus Line, because although the city has a strong dance community, it’s not one with a tradition of crossing over into theatrical dance. So director Wayne Mell and choreographer Susan Pritzker have done a creditable job in staging a show that’s all about theatrical dancing. […]

A man with white hair and glasses stands front left. He wears a gray lab jacket and his arms are stretched out in front of him in an agitated way. Behind him on the right are two other men, one also wearing a lab jacket.

Theater Review

Dark comedy goes nuclear in Cat’s Cradle

by Dmitry Samarov September 14, 2023September 14, 2023

Heather Currie directs John Hildreth’s laugh-a-minute adaptation Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut’s satire about the U.S. nuclear program and all-around ignorant hubris. The story is told in flashback by a writer, possibly named Jonah, or maybe John (Tony Bozzuto), trying to write a book about the end of the world while perhaps living through said event. […]

Thee Ricky Harris stands left with arms upraised, wearing a white cooks apron. An ensemble of five performers in black clothing and aprons stands on the right behind Harris.

Theater Review

Cooking With Soul

by Matt Simonette September 6, 2023October 5, 2023

Near the end of Black Ensemble Theater’s (BET) superb new revue A Taste of Soul, co-emcee Qiana McNary mentions that the show’s creators hope to leave the audience both “full and hungry at the same time.” The show’s central framing device—a television cooking program veering into musical numbers, concurrently leading the audience through the history […]

Lucia Spina as Mama Rose stands alone wearing a green velvet cloak. She is facing to the left with her hands outstretched in front of her.

Theater Review

Rose’s show

by Catey Sullivan September 6, 2023September 6, 2023

The titular showgirl in Gypsy isn’t necessarily Gypsy Rose Lee, the reluctant vaudeville child star who—per the “musical fable” from Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Jule Styne (score) and Arthur Laurents (book)—blossoms into an internationally renowned burlesque artist. In the Marriott Theatre’s sturdy production, the stage belongs to Mama Rose (Lucia Spina), the so-called stage mother raised […]