MUST SEE

Rob Fention depicts Kevin’s the somewhat adventurousness of youth; John Hoogenakker presents the self-doubting man who hides in booze while Joe felts regret that he never went for the woman he lusted for. Each of these men tells us of their ordinariness as manifested in their admitting to being “one’s who go with the flow” rather than being “one’s who fight.”

In the year of one playwright, this year Sir Alan Ayckbourn, Eclipse Theatre presents a fine, scary, well staged version of Ayckbourn’s 1994 mystery, Haunting Julia. This three person mystery is surprising even as it appears to be predictable but since Ayckbourn is a master at audience manipulation, it unfolds with razor-sharp timing to jolt us.

The haunting sounds from Bill Meyers’ cello underscores this beautifully heartfelt story of a family’s perpetual torment from the Holocaust.. Elegy emerges as a fitting elegy for the dead as a means of letting go by the most effected person in the family – Helmut (the empathetic David Wohl).
Set in the 1970’s and earlier, 1938 during the Kristallnacht pogrom in Berlin to Auschwitz in 1942, we meet Hilde (Iris Lieberman) as she discovers her 20 something son Jerry (Justin Leider) in their home’s attic. Jerry finds a poem written in German with the same handwriting as his fathers.

TimeLine Theatre presents Larry Kramer’s 1985 drama, The Normal Heart, that was both a call to action and a vivid personalized look at the devastating effects of an unknown plague surfaced mostly in the gay community in the 1980’s. We meet gay men dying quickly from a plague that seems to be only affecting them. A dedicated and outspoken doctor, Dr. Emma Brookner (Mary Beth Fisher in a riveting performance) pleads with influential gay men to get the word out to abstain from having sex until scientists find the cause of the plague that causes the immune system in an infected body to shut down. Ned Weeks (David Cromer), playwright Larry Kramer’s alter ego) is the abrasive, confrontational, combative writer turned activist who leads the fight to awaken the world to the crisis. He battles an deferential local and federal government as well as a gay community who isn’t about to change their sexual habits.

Miss Saigon is a romantic musical—a pop opera really—set in 1975 in Saigon just as the Viet Nam war closes. An American marine, Chris (power voiced Brandon Moorhead) falls in love with young native orphan—Kim (the lovable Shawna Haeji Shin) that is reminiscent of Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly. This tragic tale of love and war contains much recycled Boublil & Schonberg music that sound amazingly like Les Miserable especially with the many anthems.

What makes Mary Poppins work so well at Marriott Theatre is the superb staging and casting by Gary Griffin. With the zesty choreography by Alex Sanchez, this heartfelt production wins us from the start.

Directed by Marie Cisco produced by MPAACT At the Greenhouse Theatre, Chicago Hauntingly beautiful saga of letting go of life

Hello Dolly! contains a funny, romantic and innocent book by Michael Stewart adapted from Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker. Director Rachel Rockwell plays it for all the laughs contained. David Lively deftly plays Horace as as the grouchy store keeper with his spot-on comic timing and grim malice. We see Horace as a cranky, unloved miser and ½ millionaire who runs a feed store in Yonkers, New York. Dolly Levi is determined to marry Horace but she must help some loved starved folks while she eliminated her competition for Horace’s hand. The result is a bewitchingly cute tuneful romantic musical comedy.

Jones uses the technique of having Grimm speak as the chimpanzee that only us audience members can understand-and- Trevor, the chimpanzee can’t understand the humans, But, of course, we can understand both. This ingredient garners much humor as we hear Trevor verbalize his thoughts, dreams and desires. We also see his loving mother figure, Sandra (Mierka Girten) as she struggles to maintain Trevor as her housemate rather than a caged animal.