After director Michael Weber narrated the history of Chess The Musical, I realized that this production was special: it was the first London rendition to grace an American stage. This 2 hour, 45 minute production is a mixture of modern operatic motifs with classic pop/rock music and rock-sung recitative.
Read More
Shepsu Aakhu’s new play Feral is set in Chicago this upcoming summer. Given the events it depicts—the shooting of a young black man by the police for a minor crime and the subsequent unrest—hopefully it is not prescient, but it’s impossible to watch without an overwhelming sense of dread. Feral is the conclusion of the Ma’at Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theatre’s Black Lives Matter season, which puts theatre artists’ frequent claim to be directly engaged with the community’s issues to the test. The resulting story of a tragic young idealist, his enraged peers, grieving, guilt-ridden family, and baffled mainstream media may not surprise anybody willing to see a show bearing the Black Lives Matter moniker, but under Carla Stillwell’s direction, it elicits strong emotions, without allowing them to dissipate into catharsis.
Read More
Safe to say, the scope of topics played upon is wide enough that if you live in America and have Internet or cable, you’ll be heartily entertained.
This was only my second foray into Chicago’s sketch-comedy scene, but it’s not hard to see why The Second City is so highly regarded: the energy never lagged, the jokes always landed for someone (particularly the guy across the aisle from me), and the agit-prop nimbly toed the line between discomfort and comedy. I can’t imagine sketch comedy gets any better than this.
Read More
In an attempt to restore the emotional power of the 1900 play Three Sisters, three adapters, Earl H.E. Hill, Dan Christmann, and Andrej Visky have rewritten it for Theatre Y with just the title characters. For the first half of the play, director Visky employs a wide array of non-naturalistic staging choices to bring out the emotional core of each character, as they navigate the place where experience becomes memory, which becomes pining for Moscow. It contains all the unexpected, original, and striking visuals audiences appreciate in Eastern European-influenced companies. Then, halfway through, the staging stops, and the sisters just monologue to the audience until the lights go down.
Read More
This spectacular, colorful, exquisitely sung production is a treat. You’d be hard pressed to see a finer production of this beloved classic. The casting was fine but I could see an older and more charismatic King yet Montalban sure had his moments. I was most impressed with production. You’ll be entertained and you’ll live humming the fabulous R & H tunes. “Shall We Dance” is still stuck in my head – it makes me want to polka!
Read More
In 1971, John Guare’s dark farce The House of Blue Leaves launched his career by establishing him as a writer who defies genres and has a wicked sense of humor. Now, in 2016, when the farce has receded from its once-prominent position in the theatrical landscape, Guare’s story of a husband undergoing a mid-life crises while in thrall to his mentally ill wife and a group of invasive nuns awaiting the arrival of the pope looks even stranger. But in Raven’s production, under the direction of co-artistic director JoAnn Montemurro, every cackle rings true, and the horror exposed at the heart of the genre is all the more disturbing for being buried under such a goofy exterior.
Read More
Brian Parry is fantastic (as usual) as the aging king awhile Elaine Carlson equals Parry’s verbal assaults. I could watch and listen to these two debate as they anchor a fine cast in one of the finest productions of The Lion in Winter seen on a Chicago stage in years! This is a wonderful written script expertly performed by a superb cast.
Read More
I think this play is for women, mothers and teen girls. They will relate and maybe understand the talk more than I did. The speech patterns of the girls – their tendency to talk fast and run their words together with the contemporary pop culture references made it difficult for me (a senior male) to understand. The younger folks, especially the women, laughed at the comments while I was clueless.
Read More
Murder mysteries were one of the most popular genres of theatre once, but rarely were they as political and action-packed as Matt Pelfrey’s 2010 adaptation of In the Heat of the Night. The novel by John Ball is today best known for being the source material of the film, directed by Norman Jewison and staring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, which won the Academy Award for best picture in 1967. But Pelfrey’s script and Louis Contey’s production with Shattered Globe are exciting, disturbing, and possess a stylistic flare perfect for the stage.
Read More
Nominees Announced For the 43rd Annual Non-Equity Jeff Awards (2016)
Read More