MUST SEE

Without a doubt, Lifeline Theatre’s recent stage adaptation of French novelist Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers contains all the adrenaline-pumping athleticism and quick-turning escapades one may dutifully expect from this timeless adventure story.

For Rick Stone evinces so strong a personality that he’d no doubt overwhelm whatever narrative mold you’d try to squeeze him in, and Taylor’s script at least is broad enough in its outline to give Stone the necessary wiggle room (or rather, crawling room) to do what he does best. Equipped with seemingly limitless energies and an unparalleled ability to seduce us into an easy familiarity, Stone moves breathlessly between musical numbers sung with husky bravado and a narrative affability so cool he might as well be telling jokes in your living room.

It’s thus with considerable relief to report that Theo Ubique’s newest revue featuring the work of America’s most urbane songwriter is, at the very least, never boring. Under the auspicious vision of director Fred Anzevino, A Cole Porter Songbook is the tenth of Ubique’s unique cabaret-style productions featuring the blockbuster songwriting talents of Broadway.

Steppenwolf’s third annual Next Up, featuring the work of Chicago’s up-and-coming generation of theater artists, continues with a mounting of playwright Neil LaBute’s 2005 black comedy Fat Pig. And under the direction of David Prete, this subtle ‘comedy of manners,’ currently playing at the Steppenwolf Garage, successfully showcases LaBute’s characteristic ambiguities in charting the moral lapses of the prototypical American male.

Without a doubt, the Writers’ Theatre’s production of David Ives’s ‘translaptation’ The Liar—freely adapted from the 1643 French comedy Le Menteur by Pierre Corneille—is the funniest ticket in town. And those eager to kick off their summer right could do significantly worse than with this dazzling fireworks display of language, ingenuity and comedic bravado. William Brown (who directed last season’s A Little Night Music at Writers’) directs an exceptionally adept young cast as they bring the linguistic intricacies of Ives’s verse comedy to life, tickling the ear even as they titillate the mind.

But Fleischmann’s Tom is a far cry from the cocky, burgeoning writer Williams himself would become. Rather, he’s homeless and living in a gritty back alley meticulously covered in glass bottles and knickknacks, harkening back to sister Laura’s own collection of glass animal figurines. And it’s amongst the dilapidated ruins of Tom’s life and sanity that the memories of his family come back to haunt him, always withholding the necessary act of forgiveness for his having abandoned them.

As stuffed full of well-measured comedic performances and lush production values as you are likely to see anytime soon, Newell’s Misanthrope feels as hedonistically indulgent as any French courtier. Like an opulent Parisian banquet (or a drag ball in Harlem), it’s strengths are in its cultivation of the surface’s glittering allure. And in never deigning to take itself as seriously as Alceste takes himself, this production still manages to probe deeper than any hair-brained philosophy.