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 […]
Author Archives: Catey Sullivan
Posted inTheater Review
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) […]
Posted inFilm
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.
Posted inPerforming Arts Feature
Welcome to Venus
Back in December, there was a shining sliver of time when it looked like we—as individuals, as artists, as arts institutions—were forging a clear, or at least clear-ish, path forward. Hundreds of people were back at work on live, in-person shows. A Christmas Carol burned bright at the Goodman. The Snow Queen got a shiny […]
Posted inTheater Review
The Wind Phone blows through family dysfunction
The setup of Madelyn Sergel’s The Wind Phone is tried and true: Trap several people with complex personal history in a room, and let the hidden secrets and long-simmering resentments take it from there. In Sergel’s latest, the trapped are estranged sisters Ellen (Elizabeth Rude) and Jenny (Susie Steinmeyer) and their mother, Patty (Maggie Speer). […]
Posted inFilm
Bigfoot Famous is a hashtagging hero’s journey
The new dark comedy is ridiculously entertaining. It is also inarguably ridiculous.
Posted inTheater Review
My Name Is Inanna examines Iranian history through one woman’s narrative
In the opening moments of Ezzat Goushegir’s My Name is Inanna, a clock marks the passing seconds, each tick as heavy as an anvil striking a penny nail. A woman with bound hands sits listening, clearly anguished and afraid. The woman is Inanna (Maryam Abdi), both the Mesopotamian Queen of Heaven and Goddess and an […]
Posted inTheater Review
Putting the pieces together in First Folio’s The Jigsaw Bride
Playwright Joseph Zettelmaier has a history of taking largely forgotten, sometimes nameless characters and putting them in the dead center of the iconic tales they support. It’s a potentially grim business, digging up backstories (and futures) for (no)bodies the world only knows as incidental to someone else’s story. But anyone passingly familiar with the commercial/critical […]
Posted inTheater Preview
Ghost trusters
It doesn’t matter where you are in Chicago. There are dead people somewhere in the ground below you. The millions of Indigenous peoples that flourished for millennia. The countless millions who trampled in next. And next. And next. All those bodies. All that energy. All those stories. Chicago is literally steeped in them. And in […]
Posted inFilm
Black as Night breathes new life into vampire cinema
The best vampire stories are about far more than vampires. Obviously. From Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel to 1972’s ground-breaking Blacula to 2014’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, pop culture’s best takes on immortals who dine on human blood are laden with feeding frenzies that are both bloody entertaining monster stories and critiques of the […]
Posted inTheater Review
Songs for a New World partners hope and struggle
You can all but feel the exuberance radiating from the music in the first strains of Theo Ubique’s emotionally complicated Songs for a New World, the Jason Robert Brown revue that reopened the Evanston venue Monday night. It begins with Woman 1 (Nora Navarro) belting joy to the stars in the anthemic “The New World,” […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Toxic masculinity: the musical!
Midway through the first act of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, there’s an unforgettable duet between the bonkers, titular villain and Penny, the woman he’s loved ever since spotting her at the laundromat while his socks and such tumbled and spun. As their voices twine together in “My Eyes,” Dr. Horrible sings of a world as […]
Posted inTheater Review
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 retains its power
It’s been 30 years since four LA cops pulled Rodney King from his truck and savagely beat him while he lay prone on the street. It’s been 29 years since riots burned across LA after all four police officers were acquitted on charges related to the beating. And it’s been 27 years since Anna Deveare […]