Margaret Knapp directs the world premiere of Martha Hansen’s first play (presented by Light and Sound Productions) about five women on an Alaskan cruise—each hoping to sight something other than a bunch of glaciers. Bailey (Hansen) is a chattering busybody looking for a first love late in life, Cora (Judi Schindler) is sliding into dementia […]
Author Archives: Dmitry Samarov
Posted inTheater Review
Tyrant times
Steve Scott directs a storefront production of Shakespeare’s wallow into the nature of unadorned power-lust and demagoguery. With a minimal set—a couple benches, steps with a recess to indicate the space for a throne—and little in the way of choreography or any other theatrical gimmickry, Promethean Theatre Ensemble leaves the Bard’s words to work their […]
Posted inTheater Review
War cries
A wooden rowboat and plastic sheets lining two back walls are the only decorations for Sarah Tolan-Mee’s English-language adaptation of Heiner Müller’s 1982 cry-of-anguish riff on war, betrayal, and the messiness of identity. Using the Greek legends of Medea and Jason as a jumping-off point, this is a raging, poetic rant against tyranny and fate […]
Posted inFilm
The Survivor
While this may not rank with Son of Saul or Raging Bull in the top rung, The Survivor is not a film to take for granted.
Posted inFilm
Navalny feels like a Soviet-era infomercial
I left feeling hollow and angry. Like I’d been manipulated using methods pioneered and perfected under the long-gone Soviet regime of my childhood.
Posted inTheater Review
My old Kentucky home
The Gift Theatre marks its return to live performance after a two-year absence with the Chicago premiere of Naomi Iizuka’s bittersweet ode to memory and place. Directed by Lavina Jadhwhani, it is a series of sometimes wistful, sometimes nostalgic, but always affecting monologues told by a succession of related characters in a Kentucky town, over […]
Posted inArts & Culture
No Robert Mitchum, but stay for the squirrels
Heather McAdams needs no introduction for longtime Reader readers, but I’ll try anyway. McAdams contributed cartoons and illustrations to the Reader for over 20 years, self-published and distributed an annual country music-themed calendar (filled with her original artwork and writing about country and rockabilly musicians) for approximately 30 years, ran the store Record Roundup in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A shooting star of a talent, gone too soon
The 1960 oil painting Garden of Music—the magisterial centerpiece of a knockout survey of the art of Bob Thompson— shows Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and a half dozen other jazz luminaries coexisting in a pastoral landscape. Some figures are silhouettes, while others are rendered with distinct features. How the painter balanced so many disparate elements […]
Posted inTheater Review
Barroom power ballads
Kim Boler directs Mike Beyer and Kirk Pynchon’s Cleveland-set comedy about gentrification, nostalgia, and karaoke; not necessarily in that order. A group of regulars meets up on a frigid winter night for what they think will be just another night of singing their songs at their favorite local hole-in-the-wall. Little do they know that it’s […]
Posted inTheater Review
Carnal knowledge
Mammalian Diving Reflex/Darren O’Donnell present an evening of sex stories from six Chicagoans over 65. Organized as a chronological table read with occasional dance party and audience participation interludes, I don’t think that I could call it a piece of theater, but, from time to time, the veracity of a personal anecdote will certainly stay […]
Posted inFilm
A quarter century of EU films
If a viewer can’t find something to catch their eye in this lineup, they’re not looking very hard.
