If you want to see an expert Broadway musical, this production of Chicago sure qualifies. If you’ve never seen Chicago and/or you’ve only seen the film, then do get to the Cadillac Palace to witness the “real” Chicago. There is nothing like a Bob Fosse dance show. Chicago is Fosse’s best. It is thrilling and so polished. Kudos to Broadway In Chicago for bringing back this classic. Hurry, it is only here through Sunday.
Read More
This madcap musical comedy is written and presented in the style of those wacky 20-30’s style light-weight comedies that were an excuse to present dazzling songs. But here, Joe DiPietro has concocted a deliciously wild book filled with hilarious situations. This show is both fun and a terrific dance show to many fine Gershwin numbers. In its Chicagoland premiere, Nice Work If You Can Get It is a surprise hit.
Read More
After opening their new building with a production of Tom Stoppard’s incredibly dense Arcadia, the staff at Writers Theatre thought audiences might be in the mood for something funnier. Do they ever deliver. In a collaboration with Second City, Death of a Streetcar Named Virginia Woolf: A Parody is now the inaugural production of the Gillian, the smaller of the playing spaces in the complex. Riffing on four of the mid-twentieth century dramas which dominate the American stage (the fourth, not included in the title, being Thornton Wilder’s Our Town), Tim Ryder and Tim Sniffen’s script is a rapid-fire homage and parody which imagines a clash of icons in sultry New Orleans.
Read MoreWhile I personally never cared much for Little Shop Of Horrors, I must report that the creatives at American Blues Theatre, under the smart leadership of director Jonathan Berry, have mounted a slick, funny and musically interesting production of the campy classic.
Read More
Strawdog will be moving next season to a new location at 1621 West Howard Street, but for now, it’s the end of an era at their Lakeview home for twenty-six years. They picked a great way to go out, though. Though the names George Kaufman and Moss Hart are today associated most strongly with You Can’t Take it With You, a beloved, but dated and overexposed, comedy, their first collaboration, Once in a Lifetime, has a lot more satirical bite. Written in 1930, the story centers on the movie industry, one of the few financially promising fields at the time (or so many people hoped), and director Damon Kiely has found all sorts of delightful ways of bringing out the script’s humor, while making it compatible with modern tastes. It’s the perfect fusion of old and new for a long-running company undergoing a major transition.
Read More
The story of how a North Carolina Klan leader in the 1970s reluctantly joined forces with a black civil rights activist to improve public schools, wound up befriending her, realized their mutual enemy in an oppressive economic system, and renounced the KKK in favor of a union has obvious appeal for the Christian Left. But what makes it amazing is that it’s true. Mark St. Germain’s 2012 adaptation of the book of the same name by Osha Gray Davidson is a chamber play which pulls no punches in portraying the depraved hatred of white supremacy and the resulting anger among African-Americans who endured the desegregation struggle. But today, when bigotry has once again reverted to its raw form amid economic tensions and strengthened opposition, the production of Best of Enemies at Provision Theater is a welcome bit of reasonable optimism.
Read More
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