Michael Dalberg Archives - Chicago Reader

A woman in black-and-orange checked pants, black shirt, and tan vest, wearing wolf ears and sunglasses, stands center stage singing into a botle. She is surrounded in the tavern setting by four other characters in various costumes sitting along the wall.

Survivor stories

by Kerry Reid October 13, 2022October 13, 2022

Theatre Above the Law returns to the fairy tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, as adapted again by Michael Dalberg. (Dalberg’s adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is also currently onstage with Idle Muse through October 23.) I saw last year’s outing, and this time the connective tissue in […]

A white man in a dark suit, holding a test tube, stands left. On the right is a Black woman in a plum-colored Victorian skirt suit, looking toward him. A table with a glass tumbler is in front of them.

Theater Review

Split personality with a twist

by Albert Williams September 28, 2022September 29, 2022

Idle Muse Theatre Company’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is good, dark Halloween-season entertainment, especially if you’re a fan of the Hammer/Amicus/American International Pictures-style of lurid rethinkings of Victorian horror classics. Adapted by Michael Dalberg and directed by Morgan Manasa, this production ups the sex-and-violence aspects of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 […]

Three people in white lab coats stand in a dark gray room.

Theater Review

Fallout boys

by Max Maller February 9, 2022February 9, 2022

Looking through the window of the control room at the stars, Leonid (CJ Lange-Embree) muses on how much he always wanted to be an astronaut. It’s too late for that. He’s been sipping vodka at the switches all night, the reactor is melting down, and there’s nothing he, his diligent counterpart Akimov (RJ Cecott), or […]

Young woman seated on bed in background, while another young woman stands with hands clutched in front of her face in attitude of excitement. Young man in black coat stands with his back to camera in front of the standing young woman.

Theater Review

Eb & Belle riffs on A Christmas Carol

by Max Maller November 24, 2021November 24, 2021

When the Ghost of Christmas Past visits decrepit miser Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, one painful memory the ghost has him swoop back over concerns a delightful young girl named Belle, who Scrooge was supposed to marry until greed eclipsed tenderness in his heart and she broke off the engagement. Adjusting the […]

Man in green with cocktail strainers over his eyes on left, woman with cat ears on right

Theater Review

Grimm examines fairy tales with a twist

by Kerry Reid October 14, 2021October 14, 2021

If Cheers and Into the Woods got together for an unprotected hookup, the end result might be a bit like Michael Dalberg’s Grimm, now in a world premiere with Theatre Above the Law under Josephine Czarnecki’s direction. The conceit is that the characters from the Brothers Grimm fairy tales (Little Red, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, […]