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REVIEWSREVIEWS BYTheatre ReviewsTom Williams
Tom Williams

Let Them Eat Chaos

There latest revue, their 101st, Let Them Eat Chaos, follows the classic Second City formula that includes improv, sight gags, physical antics, wordplay, and audience involvement, songs, and vivid video images. This topic is chaos and the six performers do their creative best to give us a funny show for two hours. While Edgar Blackman, Holly Laurant, Tawny Newsome, Katie Rich, Steve Waltien were all terrific comics, I was especially impressed with the talent of Ross Bryan

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Tom Williams

Maria/Stuart

Maria/Stuart’stitle is a pun on the rhetorical tragedy Maria Stuart written in 1800 by Friedrich Schiller (whose bust features conspicuously in Grote’s play). Though beyond perhaps slight similarities to the Strum and Drang school, I’m afraid the reference is lost on me. A more apt precursor here would be the family romances of Sam Shepard, most clearly his Fool for Love. Shepard’s own interests in the incestuous family romance, his uses of magical realism, and the ways in which his plays descend from sadness in a menacing uncertainty foreground much of what Grote seems to be gesturing toward.

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REVIEWSREVIEWS BYTheatre ReviewsTom Williams
Tom Williams

A Permanent Image

In A Permanent Image, now in its Chicago premiere at the Storefront Theater, Carol (Janice O’Neill) has found a strange way to mourn he recently departed husband (Jack McCabe) – shoe painted her entire house, furniture and a all fixtures snow white. When he son Bo (Ed Dzialo) arrives from Is real for his father’s funeral, he quickly concluded that his ‘always-strange’ mother has now gone totally insane

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MUST SEEREVIEWSREVIEWS BYTheatre ReviewsTom Williams
Tom Williams

Barnum

Barnum ran two years on Broadway (1980-82) with music by Cy Coleman (Sweet Charity, City of Angels & Will Rogers Follies) Lyrics by Michael Stewart (Bye, Bye Birdie, Carnival & Hello Dolly!) and book by Mark Bramble (42nd Street). In the Mercury Theater production, director Walter Stearns as assembled a fabulous creative team and a terrific “A” list of Equity actors to make Barnum a true theatrical event. The score is a pastiche of toe-tapping marches, ballads, ragtime and Dixieland tunes with several circus-infused show stopping numbers designed to thrill audiences

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Tom Williams

A Midlife Something

In short, A Midlife Something captures many of the emotional frustrations of living listlessly young and broke in today’s America, even as it suffers from an ill-paced narrative and too narrow a sphere of activity. Cardiff’s story obviously means something very personal to him, and that investment is palpable in A Midlife Something’s big heart. Now if only the story might be as equally big.

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Tom Williams

The Night of the Iguana

Audiences of The Artistic Home’s recent staging of Iguana may keep this in mind, if only because the struggle of its central character, Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, so closely intimates the one Williams himself would be forced to undergo in the years following. Shannon (played here by the incomparable John Mossman), is a man on the edge. He is “cracked up” and “at the end of [his] rope,”

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Tom Williams

Dawn, Quixote

If The Building Stage’s current production of Dawn, Quixote feels undergirded by a pervasive—even wistful—sadness, it’s not hard to understand why. For following the show’s completed run on April 27th, The Building Stage will be shuttering its doors for good. Thankfully founder and artistic director Blake Montgomery’s recent adaptation of Cervantes’s classic is a final act truly worthy of remembrance.

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Tom Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire – The Opera

The libretto doesn’t shy away from the sexual power of the original script as it contains references to Blanche’s gay husband and as it presents the provocative kissing the newspaper collector “on the mouth”scene. This free-flowing three hour plus production has the haunting tone and a fluid use of trumpet and solo clarinet to amplify the atmosphere and psychology of a scene. Previn demonstrates his perception of the cloudy views of reality as seen by Williams’ characters. A Streetcar Named Desire pack a wallop and must take its place as one fine contemporary operas. Renee Fleming makes Blanche her own.

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