Must See

Chronicling Charles Darwin’s discoveries was nicely and effectively presented due to Gmitter’s fluid writing upon Collette Pollard’s suggestive set. Director Jessica Thebus’ staging underscores the ambitious storytelling effectively. The combination of telling Charles’ amazing rise to fame as the most controversial writer of the 19th Century and his lifelong romance made for an engaging play.

Lay Me Down Softly is essentially a memory play centered around the patchwork family of Roadshow. The action and metaphors are sports references and the on-going boxing matches. We see how hope and dreams were stiffed as this group laments through melancholy their lost dreams. Each character depends on the Roadshow family for sustenance, companionship, and recognition.

In their year of one playwright – 2014 – Lynn Nottage, Eclipse Theatre Company, under the creative direction of Aaron Todd Douglas, have mounted a powerful and wonderfully performed version of Ruined, the finest play by the talented Lynn Nottage.

She dramatizing the atrocities committed against women in the long civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nottage puts her immense research and writing skills to work to create situations and characters aptly depicting the conflicts in East Africa from a women’s perspective.

Their latest work is a madcap screwball comedy by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar who wrote Liliom that was adapted into Carousel the musical. The President (1930) finds the hands-on control freak President Norrison, played with manic aplomb by John Arthur Lewis (doing the finest work of his career here). Norrison is getting ready for a holiday when his ward, Lydia (Michelle M. Oliver) announces that she is pregnant and married to a poor Communist taxi driver named Tony Foot (Travis Delgado)

Set in the teacher’s lounge, the four teachers deal with a broken copier, a bureaucracy with minimal assets for the teachers and a survival, often cynical, morale of the veteran teachers. This dark comedy focusing on the adjustment of a new teacher conflicted by her determination to helping her students learn with the conflicting system and the advise from her fellow teachers.

Edgar and Alice have played their love/hate game for their entire almost 25 year marriage. We never really understand if they truly love on another to if all the animosity between them comes from hate or simply a sophisticated game to keep life interesting for both of these bored folks? As the games escalate, Edgar passes out several time as he apparently is having strokes or is he? Edgar is sickly and dying, or is he? Alice schemes to destroy and/or leave Edgar since she has been suffering his nastiness for too long, or is she?

Mud Blue Sky has the elements of a wonderful show: honest acting; spot-on comic dialogue and loads of heart and compassion. And, of course, more laughs than any other show now playing in Chicago. This show is easily one of the best shows of 2014 – it’s therapy for a cold rainy spring with all those laughs

Our Class is told as a memory play by ten classmates, half Catholic and half Jewish. We see them from childhood in school through the devastation through the rest of their lives. Told in a 2 hour, 45 minute drama. Our Class emerges as a “must see” theatrical event that will shake you to your bones. It is a story that begs to be told and the artists at Remy Bumppo, under the creatively bravo leadership from Nick Sandys, invest all their energy into a heartfelt depiction of the various personalities that made the dynamics of mass killing possible. Our Class shows how ordinary common folks can so easily move into the darkness of evil when their society is shaken by military occupation that allows escapist blame to be played out through antisemitism.

Les Miserables is an epic story of oppression that finds one good man, one zealot and a group of idealistic students each trying to make a difference in a harsh and cruel world. We see how eventually, goodness and humanity contained in resilient folks wins for a bright future. This is a richly emotional show filled with big anthems, rousing marches and tender love songs and sad laments that will leave you in tears. The power of the live stage and haunting music rings so true. See Les Miserables once again and rekindle your spirits.