Author Archives: Anthony Adler

RICHARD III Oak Park Festival Theatre I hereby disqualify myself from any future attempts to review Shakespeare plays directed by Terry McCabe. No, really. McCabe’s unquestionably a decent and talented guy. I’ve met him–he’s nice. I’ve seen his work on new scripts, like John Logan’s Hauptmann–it’s good. But his attempts at interpreting the Bard baffle […]

WEST Lookingglass Theatre Company at the Theatre Building There’s a Steven Berkoff parody in the recent Jeff Goldblum movie The Tall Guy: We’re at an audition for a hypothetical Berkoff show called England, My England. Looking like a pair of toughs, two actors stomp onstage to confront a third tough. One of the pair kicks […]

BOOK OF THE NIGHT Goodman Theatre RED TANGO Chicago Actors Ensemble Book of the Night is without doubt one of the best mediocre musicals I’ve ever seen. In fact, its mediocrity is so fully realized here, thanks to Robert Falls, that you’d almost certainly enjoy it. You might even think it was good. That would […]

DEGENERATE ART Cloud 42 at the Theatre Building Comparisons, they say, are odious. I’m sure it would be odious to compare Bush’s America to Hitlerite Germany. And Tom Jacobson never does it–explicitly. Jacobson’s play Degenerate Art remains conscientiously faithful to period as it documents the passion of Emil Nolde–a German expressionist painter who was Aryan […]

ED at Remains Theatre WAITING FOR GODOT at Apple Tree Theatre Nice guy, Ed. Smart as a whip. Funny as hell. Eight heads. Ed puts on improvised shows, late nights at Remains Theatre. Takes a single suggestion from the audience and builds it into an hour and a half’s worth of eccentric characters and odd-to-surreal […]

FUN and NOBODY Next Theatre Company’s Next Lab Anger is an energy–Public Image Ltd. Franz Xaver Kroetz is a West German playwright best known here for his aggressively unpretty “plays of ordinary life,” in which conventional working-class folk get their average teeth kicked in by the everyday horrors of capitalist culture. In one such play–Request […]

THE VISIT Goodman Theatre THE BLACK TULIP Center Theater “I’ll even attack you or eat you whole / Down in the dark my bone mills roll / Porridge for my porridge bowl.” –from “The Minotaur’s Song” by Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band There was an article in Spy magazine some time back in […]

TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS Lifeline Theatre BUNNICULA Lifeline Theatre As flies to wanton boys. . . . –King Lear If you were lucky enough to have seen Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room when it premiered at the Goodman Theatre Studio a little over a year ago, you probably remember what a hapless bunch of losers […]

THE GREAT GATSBY Wisdom Bridge Theatre I’ve got to admit I’ve never read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classic The Great Gatsby. The book got such heavy play in my high school English classes that I avoided it just to see if I could–and it turned out I could, so here I am with a […]

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM Goodman Theatre A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM Children’s Theatre at Second City Picture Michael Maggio’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a miniature golf course. Not just any miniature golf course: a really cool miniature golf course, like the one in the mall on North Clybourn, where each hole’s designed by an artist […]

M. BUTTERFLY at the Chicago Theatre Philip Anglim is best known for his performance as John Merrick, the sweet-souled freak of nature in Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man. The concept in that play was that Merrick would appear onstage without elaborate makeup. There’d be no cosmetic hint of his grotesque deformity. Just the opposite, in […]