John Fenner Mays and Kristen Magee/Photo: John W. Sisson, Jr.

Dog & Pony’s “Dead Letter Office” is a slow burn. Christian has been the sole staff member of the Department of Lost Letters in a Twin Cities post office, with the daily interruption of cloying coworker Agatha the only break from his well-worn monotony. Until, that is, young Je T’aime walks in, carrying a serious amount of baggage for all her twenty-two years. Stuck between the boss she’s sleeping with for her job and Christian, her supervisor, who used to be a boxer like her dad, Je T’aime has one killer secret.

With the exception of Agatha, a loony Midwestern stereotype, the play’s character development is sumptuous and heartbreaking. Especially moving is Joshua Volkers’ Rolo, who gives more complexity than you’d expect to a character with that name. And yet the ambitions toward a seeming indictment of traditional communication systems, supernatural figurations and Shepardian psychology leave you more than a little nonplussed. Things go more than a bit haywire in the final moments, creating an incomprehensible knot from disparate threads. If the ingenious production design is any indication, however, the beauty of the show’s ambitious juggling act isn’t in the ta-da moment, but in the inevitable tumbling down. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Dog & Pony Theatre Company at the Chicago DCA Storefront Theater, 66 E. Randolph, (312)742-8497, through July 18.

Dennis Kelly and Susan Veronika Adler/Photo: Rich Foreman

RECOMMENDED

There is perhaps no work in the entire Gilbert & Sullivan catalog quite as peculiar as “The Yeomen of the Guard.” The duo’s only attempt at “serious” operetta, “Yeomen” lacks most of the Victorian barbs associated with G&S and instead attempts to give us a tale of unrequited love set against the England of Henry VIII. The problem, of course, is that G&S knew very little about that time and historical dramaturgy was hardly their strength.

Ironically, despite the work’s supposed seriousness, it happens to have the odd distinction of being the only G&S work with a happy ending, though you would never know that in the Rudy Hogenmiller-directed production of the piece for Light Opera Works, given the way that nomadic jester Jack Point (George Andrew Wolff) is allowed to carry on when he gets the news in the finale that his hoped-for mate is leaving him for her husband. He had his chance to marry her (“I’m a fool,” he states earlier on, “but there is a limit to my folly”), but allowed her to marry a condemned yeoman (Colm Fitzmaurice) for his inheritance, but the yeoman, of course, escapes, with the help of an admirer of his who seduces the jailor. Read the rest of this entry »

Gregory Porter and Mississippi Charles Bevel/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

“Low Down Dirty Blues” is the new songbook-style musical revue from Northlight Theatre and it offers everything you’ve come to expect from musical entertainments at Northlight:  great songs, fabulous voices and strong production values. That makes the show worth praising. What makes the show worth experiencing, however, is what you don’t expect to get:  a lot of raunchiness and just enough racial bite.

The actors/singers are Sandra Reaves-Phillips and Felicia P. Fields—the women—and Mississippi Charles Bevel and Gregory Porter—the men. They’re backed by a three-piece blues band and the song list consists of nearly two dozen blues standards. Whether putting you through the emotional wringer with the torchy “Good Morning Heartache” or the plaintive “Grapes of Wrath,” or making you blush with the delicious double-entendre of “My Stove’s In Good Condition” and “If I Can’t Sell It, I’ll Keep Sittin’ On It,” the production breathlessly moves from number to number without bothering to stop and articulate some feeble storyline. Instead, the arrangement of the songs—sometimes to maintain a celebratory mood, sometimes to provide humorous ironic counterpoint, other times for reflection and introspection—provides the evening with its strong emotional arc. Read the rest of this entry »

Barbara Landis, Ricardo Herrera

RECOMMENDED

Even if you’ve never heard of Ernesto Lecuona, you doubtless have heard his music. Known as the “Cuban Gershwin,” Lecuona was the original Latin crossover king and a true Renaissance man as a composer, arranger, pianist and band leader who wrote tons of hit songs for movies and stage works that are infectious both for their rhythmic vitality and his golden gift for melody. (His title song for “Always in my Heart” was nominated for an Oscar but lost to Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” and his “Malagueña” is as known as much as a pop song as it is in classical circles for Lecuona’s own virtuoso piano version.)

In addition, Lecuona wrote “serious” music as well, a battery of important piano pieces, concertos, symphonic works and, of course, was a master of zarzuela, or Spanish-language operetta that is light musical theater with plenty of comedy, dancing and singing which still thrives in Spanish-speaking countries.

Here again, if the form itself is unfamiliar, the careers of native Spanish-singing operatic luminaries who developed their vocal prowess performing zarzuelas—including Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, Alfredo Kraus, Victoria de los Angeles, Teresa Berganza, Montserrat Caballé and Pilar Lorengar, among others—probably are not. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A patriarch dies, the family gathers, secrets are divulged, rifts widen. “August: Osage County”? No, the latest  family dysfunction festa from Dana Lynn Formby.

Doug (Derek Garza), a twitchy Vietnam vet, camps out in his family’s squalid mountain cabin. His father’s suicide brings siblings Paul (Christopher Jon Martin) and Jake (Jon Penick) and wives Lisa (Stephanie Stroud) and Kaiann (Sara Tode) to  haggle over property and possession.

Formby’s fragmental poetic narrative can occasionally obscure her setup, but it’s ambitious. The performers bring the prerequisite desperate energy to the sad story: it’s a heartbreaker to watch Martin try to generate interest in his latest get-rich scheme (a little thing called Microsoft), as Stroud cowers in the shadow of his failure. Penick’s emotional disconnect seems even more disturbing than Garza’s PTSD. Tode’s guilt over her handicapped daughter drives her to do things that ultimately rip the family apart. (Lisa Buscani)

Mortar Theatre at The Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 North Southport, (312)806-0541, through June 27.

Aimee Tye, Dmitri Peskov/Photo: Kevin Reed

Dmitri Peskov has the intoxicating demeanor of the man who embraces art in all its manifestations. An active poet with a master’s degree in foreign languages and literature and a background in both drama and martial arts, his conversation is delightfully riddled with unassuming references to Beckett, Kurosawa and Brueghel. “Of Fleeting Things,” the first piece for his newly formed company, takes its name from the rejected title of M. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” and explores, in what might be described as novelistic form, the temporality and beauty of human experience.

“The quest for something more is what makes us human,” Peskov muses via phone. “If we suffer we are alive, but people jump to conclusions about my work. I’ve been called angst-ridden, but I think ‘Of Fleeting Things’ is soothing. Suffering is human, but we do more than suffer.” Read the rest of this entry »

"Aggression Therapy"

For five weeks this June and July, Beau O’Reilly and Curious Theatre Branch will bring back the third incarnation of his short play series, “Three Story Animal,” combining three story-based theatrical adaptations each night running in rotating repertory, three nights each week. Each night, O’Reilly combines one of his own stories with one renowned writer—like Beckett, Hemingway, Donald Barthelme—featuring Theater Oobleck actors and one guest writer/performer:  animator Chris Sullivan, monologist Diana Slickman, poet John Starrs, Curious co-founder Jenny Magnus, and playwright Mark Chrisler.

Why curate such an assorted three-part evening? “It’s a simple answer,” according to O’Reilly. “The first show we did at the twentieth-anniversary of Rhino Fest, calling it ’20 Story Animal.’ I wanted to do a bunch of stories from people who had been in the Rhino and some of my own. When people asked if I would do it again the next year, I thought, what’s the second story animal? It ended up being me and a guest. And in introducing the third element this year, I’ve been playing with short adaptations of pieces by famous authors… the gestures of short-story writing and novel writing applied to theater.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Visual jokes are the smartest aspect of this stylish adaptation of Sartre’s existential classic about three malefactors trapped in a tiny room in hell together for all of eternity—the origin of the famous quote “hell is other people.” In this production, the scariest aspect of hell is its interior designers: the set, an inclined, cramped, shocking pink Schiaparelli-esque nightmare with a giant nude statue and ugly powder-blue furniture (with one comfortable chair the characters fight over) is a perfectly awful place to spend the hereafter. Director Sean Graney handles the story adeptly, and if anything with almost too much vitality; the exquisite claustrophobia that marks the beginning of the production gets dispelled by madcap chaos by the end. As the characters begin to admit why they’re in hell and to work their torture on one another, Graney has them pacing like caged animals, pasting torn-out pages of ”Being and Nothingness” on a wall with toothpaste, switching clothes and seducing one another crassly as they destroy the space around them. The action makes the show imminently watchable but results in a frenetic energy that seems less suited to somber Sartre than to farce. Ultimately, it’s a smart, immensely entertaining but psychologically superficial treatment. “I can’t go on without making people suffer,” one character declares; I wish the Hypocrites would let the audience suffer just a little bit of the torture Sartre’s characters go through. (Monica Westin)

The Hypocrites‘ No Exit” plays at the Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport, (800)982-2787, through July 11.

A young writer can hear the arguments of the couple who lives next door through the cheap drywall. After an especially boisterous fight, he goes next door to comfort the girlfriend, who soon discovers that the writer has been using their fights as fodder for his fiction. From this point on in Abraham Werewolf’s premiere of “Paper Thin Walls,” by company member Jack McDonald, cliché-addled writer (Cardigan, check. Jazz LPs, check. Electric typewriter, check.), deluded muse and jealous boyfriend converge to manipulate each other to further their own selfish ambitions. Unfortunately, this play fails to make the creative process dramatically engaging. The actors do their best with overlong conversations that have no drive and sudden acts of sex and violence that come out of nowhere. John Holt’s set, positioned between a sort of alley seating configuration, would be a revelation if only director Matt Hook’s use of it weren’t so uninspired. Not to be too harsh on such a young company, but their play could have benefited from a few more discerning hours in the typewriter. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Abraham Werewolf at the Viaduct Theatre, 3111 North Western, (773)296-6024, through June 20.

Alexis J. Rogers, Bakesta King and Ericka Ratcliff/Photo: Sonny Latimer

RECOMMENDED

“I’m not what I was ten years ago or ten minutes ago. I’m all of that and then some,” a character proclaims toward the end of “The Colored Museum,” and twenty-four years after its premiere, that thesis holds true. In eleven disparate and seemingly unconnected vignettes, George C. Wolfe’s comedy lampoons various aspects of African-American culture that for better or worse have solidified into positive and negative stereotypes. Congo Square has chosen wisely by appointing Anthony Irons to direct the play, who uses his Second City training to give the play the enegy of a sketch show. Scenes like “The Gospel According to Miss Roj,” about a finger-snapping, alien drag queen, and “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” which satirizes the great black theater works, will make you laugh, cry and laugh again. And yet, given that so much has happened in black culture and in American culture during the last quarter century, it’s hard not to think of “The Colored Museum” as a museum piece itself. At this point, the play could use a few more exhibits, but those still there are worth a visit. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Congo Square Theatre Company at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, 777 North Green, (312)733-6000, through June 27.