A Nativity Story: More Than a Miracle is a Black Ensemble style show that contains enough intense emotions, frantic music and dance including terrific ballet sequences by Kathleen Turner and Anthony Williams making the stage elements interesting. Congo Square Theatre reminds us that African-American concept of The Nativity is unique, emotional, and honestly depicted through gospel music and movement.
Read MoreFranz Lehár’s 1905 masterpiece The Merry Widow epitomized why operettas were the preferred form of dramatic entertainment in early twentieth century Europe. It’s a silly, light-hearted story about love that exists only to provide a context for opera singers to dance, joke, and of course, fill up an auditorium with delightful sound. Now at the Cahn Auditorium, Light Opera Works has provided a twenty-nine piece orchestra, excellent production values, and a new English-language adaptation to complement their talented singers and Lehár’s beloved music
Read MoreCinderella is, by far, the finest National Touring Equity musical to grace a Chicago stage in years! It is a wonderful, beautifully staged and a gorgeously presented musical. It has all the elements of a fabulous family experience: a marvelous, lush score by Richard Rodgers with the smart lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. It has eye-popping sets and costumes (set design by Anna Louizos, costumes by William Ivey Long). It has a new book by Douglas Carter Beane that updates and adds heart to Hammerstein’s fable.
Read MoreHow does theatre tastefully memorialize its losses? That question haunted author Jay Torrence when he was writing Burning Bluebeard, which is about the December 30, 1903 fire at the Iroquois Theatre on Randolph Street in Chicago in which over 600 people died. It’s an amazing story, but The Ruffians and The Neo-Futurists are clown troupes. However, since the fire occurred during a performance of a pantomime, a humorous fairy tale for children, it’s a better fit than it first appears. Burning Bluebeard is now in its third annual run, and it’s a sad, frightening, and yet often delightful piece.
Read MoreUpon entering the theatre, you’ll be amazed by the set designed by Scott Pask, a longtime collaborator of director Joe Mantello. Before you is the façade and parking lot of the Hummingbird, a faded New Orleans hotel. It looks like a nasty place; there’s a rotting Honda and beer bottles strewn around the lot, a gutter pipe is cracked, the vending machine’s lights are out. But on the upper level there is a hanging potted plant, a strand of mini lights, and wind chimes. People actually live here.
Read MoreThe story pits the Newsies against the publishers as the poor versus the rich in a classic struggle for survival. Alan Menken has penned a rousing score befitting the exciting choreography deftly designed by Christopher Gattelli (a Tony Winner for his work here) and superbly danced by the tireless cast of 16 talents who are fine actors and singers to boot!
Read MoreThe Second City’s twist on Dickens has sprinkles of accuracy with a few comic zingers added with appearances by George Bailey, Charlie Brown, and hecklers from the audience to add to the fun. The audience also has their say in several skits as well as pre-show written comments from the audience on the worst thing you ever di
Read MorePericles, Prince of Tyre, is based on a section of the medieval poet John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, which in turn was based on a now lost Greek poem about Apollonius of Tyre. The story is entirely fictional; it has nothing to do with the Athenian statesman Pericles. That’s an important point, because the original was likely created long after ancient democracy gave way to despotism. The tumultuous post-Alexander period, with all its royal incest, assassination plots, and debauched courts would naturally be fascinating to the Jacobeans, whose literature often had similar themes.
Read MoreWhen it was first serialized in La Revue de Paris in 1856, Gustave Flaubert’s scandalous masterpiece was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors. Flaubert was acquitted, but the trial made Madame Bovary a notorious bestseller, now considered a seminal work of realism and one of the most influential novels ever written.
Read MoreHer 2004 play, The Clean House, now produced by Remy Bumppo, is an excellent example of both her thematic interest and her playful, though not uproariously funny, imaginative style. It’s a work that resists logical analysis, instead making rhetorical gestures and sometimes heavy-handed emotional appeals. Audience members should go into it with patience to get the most out of it.
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