…since The Drunken City is a funny yet poignant one act about how we love and what it is to be able to love. Is love an acquired social skill? And can we love someone but not be in love with that person. Last, can we change our mind about getting married despite all social pressure around the ceremony?
Read MoreSteppenwolf’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.
Read MoreWithout 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.
Read MoreNaomi Lizuka’s Aloha, Say The Pretty Girls has a strange experimental structure that includes a series of short vignettes with the sound of howling dogs or weird bird calls during the blackouts. This incoherent show is listed as a comedy yet their was nay a laugh to garnered in the bare bones production
Read MoreDavid Fray
I was highly disappointed that at seemingly the last minute, pianist David Fray chose to substitute for Mozart’s glorious Piano Concerto No. 25 in C the relatively overplayed Concerto No. 20 in D minor. While, like all of Mozart’s late piano concertos, this work is on a very high plane, it arguably lacks some of the scintillating magic of the others; at times it even begins to sound like Mozart is writing in rote-tragic mode. In fairness to Mozart, this evening’s performance did the work few favors. After an expressively wooden orchestral introduction,
Read MoreBut 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.
Read MoreSmudge, is a confounding, disturbing yet somehow intoxicating work that i wanted to hate but somehow I was drawn to the wacky work. To quote the director Allison Sjoemaker: “Smudge isn’t a drama, it’s not a comedy; it’s not realism nor is it fantasy.” I found it a far-fetched drama about what it is to be alive, to be human, and to love another. It sure is one of those head-scratching plays that leaves us troubled, terrified and trembling as we leave the theatre. Yet, it is also a thought provoking piece that get us to challenge our basic beliefs especially on the nature of humanity.
Read MoreChicago Dramatists, the playwrights’ theatre, has a 34 year history of developing and mounting new works. Their latest, Homecoming 1972 by Robert Koon is a nicely acted slice of life of life about the physical and emotional effects of war on a small town average guy. The work is played out in a series of two person scenes. The setting is in a small Minnesota town circa 1972 that finds Frank (Matt Holzfeind) as a physically wounded (bad back) and emotionally scared Vietnam veteran struggling to come to terms with the mundane simple world of rural Minnesota upon his return from the tram of War.
Read MoreZippos Circus is a wonderful, all-family experience, steeped in the traditions of the sawdust ring. Bursting with atmosphere, the 2013 programme, Carnaval, delivers two hours of high energy acts from around the world. Touring, now in East Ham.
Read MoreDelving into her past, Juliet Lawson brings forth from her suitcase, songs and memories, as she says, ‘of angst and passion, with a smattering of self deprecation, humour and other delights’.
In the warm and intimate atmosphere of the Rosemary Branch Theatre, the soulful style and bittersweet wit and rhyme of Miss Lawson, brought sighs of appreciation from her faithful audience, and in numbers like ‘Is It Really You?’, ‘What a Waste Of a Woman’, and ‘At the Sign Of The Fallen Angel’, some truly wonderful songs are on show.
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