Here’s the TL;DR version of what to expect from Ain’t Too Proud, the new jukebox musical about soul/blues/disco/rock hitmakers The Temptations, whose catalog of songs spans the 1960s and the height of the Motown era through the disco beats of the 1970s and beyond. The music—featuring more than 30 tunes from the Motown catalog—is irresistible […]
Author Archives: Catey Sullivan
Brothers on the run
In Exal Iraheta’s Last Hermanos, a pair of Latinx half-brothers find themselves at a crucible somewhere in the hot, hostile wilderness of a Texas state park. The “pick-up” that was to ferry them to the next spot on their journey doesn’t show. Julio (Roberto Jay) and Miguel (Esteban Andres Cruz) are rapidly running out of […]
He’s just not that into you
Its title and structure clearly classify William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well as a comedy. By definition, tragedies end in death, comedies with weddings. Nobody dies during All’s Well, but the climactic wedding in the final act hardly ends with the happy couple basking in the rosy romantic glow of a strongly implied happily […]
At the Siskel Center, Rogers Park is Tuesday’s star
Like the rest of us in 2020, film director Michael Glover Smith found his carefully laid plans laid to waste by a microscopic agent of chaos and destruction.
The Automat
In Lisa Hurwitz’s charming, informative film, the era of the Automat gleams anew, as everyone from Colin Powell to Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Brooks recall their appeal.
Sweat, tears, and blood
Lynn Nottage’s gripping drama Sweat launches a new direction for Aurora’s Paramount Theater, a 1,000-plus seat, 87-year-old Versailles-on-acid space known for award-winning musicals. Directed by Andrea J. Dymond, Sweat is the first production in the new Copley Theatre, a minimalist steel-and-glass black box across the street from the larger venue. Dymond’s airtight ensemble makes the […]
Laced has echoes of Stonewall and Pulse
Sam Mueller’s Laced lives in the shadow of the Pulse nightclub mass shooting, but it is rooted in a club that preceded Pulse by several generations: Stonewall. Through Mueller’s monologue-dependent script, About Face Theatre creates a contemporary story that also gives voice to the history that helped forge it. In director Lexi Saunders’s raw, emotive […]
Ginger Minj is who she is
For six years, Ginger Minj has been turning down offers to star in La Cage aux Folles. “Ever since the Trailblazer Awards I’ve been getting inquiries,” the three-time Drag Race contestant says of the 2016 event where she brought La Cage book writer Harvey Fierstein to tears and the house to its feet with her galvanic […]
Killer queen
For lo these past 20 years, Hell in a Handbag has been camping it up under the indefatigable leadership of founding artistic director David Cerda, whose encyclopedic knowledge of drag, pop culture, and their endless intersections serves him well in his latest parodic endeavor, The Drag Seed (first produced by Hell in a Handbag in […]
Soul sisters
If you’re looking for respite from the slush-bound, gawdawful doldrums of February (and who isn’t?), Mercury Theater Chicago offers a scorching-good respite in Women of Soul. Rebooting the show they debuted in 2018 at Black Ensemble Theater, writer/director Daryl D. Brooks and musical director Robert Reddrick don’t shy away from taking on the tunes that […]
The movement at home
Donja R. Love’s Fireflies (the second in his trilogy, The Love* Plays, each focusing on a different era of Black American history) is at once brutal and hopeful, the hate and violence-soaked former threatening throughout to extinguish the hard-won gleam of the latter but never quite succeeding. It’s 1963 when we meet Olivia (Chanell Bell) […]
Run away from Flee the Light
Exorcisms, demons, girls wildly dancing in their nighties under a full moon, zombification, reincarnation, witches, ghosts, and possession all come into play as the plot lurches along.