Tag: Vol. 32 No. 11

The Heart of Christmas, at the Lakeshore Theater, through January 5. For those who’ve tasted the 27 flavors of Scrooge this holiday season, here’s something different: a musical tale narrated and sung by folk legend Jim Post, aided by his wife, playwright-lyricist Janet Smith Post, and daughter Angel Daniel. The narrative borrows heavily from Mark […]

The Man Stripped Bare by His Boy Curious Theatre Branch at the Lunar Cabaret If form follows function, it makes perfect sense to build a play about fragmentation out of fragments. Could there be a more apt way to communicate isolation than a series of soliloquies in which the people onstage rarely acknowledge one another’s […]

Mr. Punch, or Jack and the Blase Bride, Piccolo Theatre, at McGaw YMCA Child Care Center Auditorium. In his director’s note, Briton Geoffrey Buckley suggests that the allure of pantomime can’t be fully appreciated by an American audience–and it is one of those quintessentially British institutions, like blood sausage, that simply doesn’t translate well this […]

The Vanity Project, Handsome Theatrical Company, at Live Bait Theater. Jay Paul Skelton clearly has a solid bunch of friends; I’d be willing to bet that everyone connected with this evening of eight short Skelton-written pieces is his friend. Who else would agree to participate in a show that advertises its self-indulgence in the very […]

Idle Threats, Hermit Theatre, at the Chicago Cultural Center. You have to like a playwright with the guts to explore the effect critics have on art and artists. In Idle Threats Idris Goodwin gives us a brilliant but spoiled movie critic (played with a beguiling understated irony by off-Loop veteran Beau O’Reilly) who pans a […]