Latest from Chicago Critic

The Overwhelming

This is a marvelous piece of dramatic theatre! Rogers is a talented writer who both develops rich characters and plausible situations placing each in a nuanced complexly gray-shaded world on Rwanda in the 1994.

Treasure Island: A Musical Adventure

Their Treasure Island is a major triumph with a grand future offering sophisticated tale ripe with pirates, excitement, buried treasure, ships and distant shores peopled with richly developed characters originally created by Robert Louis Stevenson.

La Clemenza Di Tito

Mozart’s last opera from 1791, La Cemenza Di Tito, is a high drama of great immediacy featuring the soaring Mozart score under the deft direction of Jane Glover. This story is set in ancient Rome (79 A.D.) where Vitella (Amanda Majeski) wants Emperor Tito assassinated because he doesn’t lover her as he has chosen Berenice. She wants Sesto (played by a female Renata Pokupic) to kill Tito but asks him to delay the murder because Sesto is told by his friend Annio (also played by a female Paula Murrihy) that Berenice will not be the emperor’s consort after all. The two men renew their friendship as the populace hails Tito as a near god.

The Rocks

Mark Young is one of a handful of playwrights who captures the imprecise, highly contextualized language of younger Americans. His ear for cadence, inflection and oblique comment is pitch-perfect and his knack for getting the language on paper gives his contemporary young characters an authenticity that allows the audience to feel that they are eavesdropping on private conversations

Bad Guys In Suits

This is a little more than 60 zany minutes with non-stop action and some very clever writing. The story is about mobsters during the Depression era circa 1930’s having a “bad day at the office”.

The Bird Sanctuary

Lynne McMahon’s The Bird Sanctuary is a one-act drama about group of late middle-aged friends – two married couples – and their unspoken disappointments with their lives. It plays with another one-act, Mark A. Young’s The Rocks, which deals with a similar topic from a 20-something point of view.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

By Jay Presson Allen Adapted from the Novel by Muriel Spark Directed by Ronan Marra Produced by Signal Ensemble Theatre At Chopin Theatre Patricia Austin is fabulous as Jean Brodie “I was quite strongly influenced by a teacher. . .a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime”— Sister Helena, in response to a question about some … Read more

A Chorus Line

A Chorus Line is Michael Bennett’s ode to all those unsung heroes of the musical stage—the chorus ensemble dancers. They are the ‘gypsies’ who thanklessly give depth to musicals with their singing and dancing