Author Archives: Jennifer Vanasco

In this one-woman show, writer-performer Kara Buller creates a handful of eccentric characters who reveal their true selves inadvertently. A desperate 1950s housewife uses chirpy party tips to cloak her viciousness, a mullet-wearing lesbian camouflages her rage with a stand-up routine, and a seemingly gentle New Ager can’t let any of her grievances go. Though […]

Home, the 1980 play, was nominated for a Tony. Home the Musical makes it difficult to understand why. Adapted by the original writer, Samm-Art Williams, and composer Grenoldo Frazier, the musical has little character development or complexity. And it’s difficult to follow the 13-year odyssey of Cephus Miles (Lawrence R. Thompson in a one-note performance) […]

Rebecca Gilman’s 1999 play focuses on an issue–it attacks hidden white liberal racism. But it’s worn well, in part because it’s thoughtful and doesn’t resort to cliche, in part because of its snappy, often funny, dialogue. There is a bit of preaching in the second act, and sometimes the characters are flat–it’s hard not to […]

Of the estimated 15,000 homeless young people in Chicago, roughly 6,000 are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, often kicked out by their families. This riveting theatrical documentary, created by About Face Theatre artistic associate Megan Carney and the About Face youth ensemble, delivers stories collected from these GLBT young people over a period of 18 […]

Director David Mink sets this solid Oak Park Festival Theatre staging of Shakespeare’s play in the 1960s: Caesar is a charismatic, Kennedy-style leader complete with a Jackie-esque wife, and the citizens are hippies, soldiers, or suits. Mink doesn’t go far with this interpretation–after the setup, this is simply a production in modern dress. But it’s […]

Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, about the yearnings of a family in a small Russian town, is a resilient play, able to withstand all the gimmicks and hysterical acting of this multimedia Big Picture Group production. Director Roger Bechtel clearly has a vision of what he wants the play to look like–the coldly contemporary black, white, […]

Ace director Beau O’Reilly keeps the first act of Scott T. Barsotti’s pretentious new drama from sinking under its own weight. But not even he (or Gil Rocha’s cool drawings on a black wall) can save the second act. The play begins as a seemingly existential dialogue between a fed-up husband and his recluse wife […]

GayCo Productions’ latest revue opens with a brilliant, devastatingly funny political sketch about the literal marriage of church and state and closes with a poignant, amusing bit about women who discover they’re lesbians late in life. But in between there’s only an uneven mix of sluggish moments, banal gags, and sketches that are OK but […]

David Mamet’s realistic, swiftly paced, syncopated dialogue is one of the pure pleasures of his work. And that’s just where Steven M. Roseman’s staging of this Hollywood satire for Theater O Th Absurd goes wrong. Instead of jumping on each other’s sentences, Django as a Hollywood production head and Adam Glen as the yes-man who […]

The nuns do Vegas in writer-director Dan Goggin’s lackluster sixth take on the Nunsense franchise. Though this is a remount of an entertaining production at Drury Lane Water Tower Place last January, there’s a new cast, and the performers have less chemistry and a more sluggish sense of timing than the previous group. And Drury […]

Emily Schwartz’s new black comedy, produced by Scott Dray Productions and the Strange Tree Group, is set in early-20th-century America. A rambling novel of a play, it features garrulous, often charming characters, Dickensian plot twists, caustic comments on modern life, two ghosts, and a macabre story touching on pedophilia, incest, suicide, and murder. The most […]

Corn Productions is at its best with parodies. And sure enough the highlight of Jenni and Nick Caruso’s new musical, about the reuniting of a 1986 Catholic high school choir, is its recapitulation of Jesus’ life using jazz hands and 80s music revamped with funny, surprisingly reverential lyrics. There are hints of greatness here, especially […]

This multimedia work by CAMP (Creative Arts Melting Pot) is often visually beautiful but intellectually confusing, combining dance, monologues, short scenes, video, and music to tell a story that doesn’t hold together. Alice (played simultaneously at different ages by Colleen Murray, Heather Kroski, and Laura Chiaramonte) is a naive, lonely 30-year-old, long ago abandoned by […]