Mierka Girten and Susan Monts-Bologna/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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Does sex change a relationship? With not one but two movies out this year suggesting that friends can have their cake (friendship) and eat it too (uncomplicated sex), society doesn’t seem to believe it. Yet the characters in Gina Gionfriddo’s play can’t seem to have their way.

Mierka Girten plays the titular role as an office temp who comes into the lives of Max (Lance Baker), a money manager with an incisive wit and “class issues,” his adoptive sister Suzanna (Jennifer Engstrom) and her husband Andrew (Dan Granata). What begins as an honest blind date between Max and Becky, set up by Suzanna and Andrew, only serves to expose complex past relationships and threaten new ones. Read the rest of this entry »

"Continuous Replay"/Photo: Paul B. Goode

Just scanning the proper nouns of Bill T. Jones’ resume gives a glimpse into his influence in the dance world over the last thirty-five years: MacArthur ‘Genius,’ Kennedy Center, Jacob’s Pillow, Tony, Obie and Bessie, The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, Wexner Prize… distinctions pepper his professional history from start to present day. His work spans genres and disciplines, from avant-garde movement experiments to Broadway musicals (most recently, a musical on the life of Fela Kuti written, directed and choreographed by Jones).

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Monica Cervantes/Photo: Cheryl Mann

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By ladies, about ladies, the newest program from Luna Negra features work by Latina (and one Latino) choreographers inspired by famous women through history. Artistic Director Gustavo Ramirez Sansano, now entering his junior year with the company, has introduced Chicago audiences to fantastic work by before-unseen-in-the-U.S. choreographers hailing from his native Spain. This show is no exception; Asun Noales, director of Otra Danza sets a new piece on Luna Negra inspired by the image of Juana la Loca, first queen of Spain, pregnant and following the casket of her young husband, the key to his coffin around her neck. Other pieces on the program include a full company work by Sansano and the revival of Michelle Manzanales’ piece inspired by four self-portraits of Frida Kahlo. (Sharon Hoyer)

At the Harris Theater, 205 East Randolph, (312)334-7777. October 1, 6:30pm. $25-$65.

Edward Gero/Photo: Liz Lauren

John Logan’s play is intentionally tricky: it both valorizes and occasionally gently undermines our hyperbolic image of the artist as a visionary, rebel, philosopher and spiritual guide all in one. For no period in recent art history has this stereotype been more reified than in abstract-expressionism, where the personalities of artists like Pollock, de Kooning and Rothko were fetishized through creation myths fueled by their hyper-subjective creative work. And Logan plays right into the urge to personify the emotional intensity of the ab-ex canvas by presenting us with a larger-than-life Mark Rothko, nee Marcus Rothkowitz, who faces in the play the difficult decision of whether to sell out—literally—a set of exquisite color-field paintings commissioned by a fancy restaurant. Read the rest of this entry »

Annabel Armour and Scott Stangland/Photo: Johnny Knight

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It’s telling that this 210-minute Gordon Edelstein adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra” (itself an update of a Greek myth) is marketed as “shortened” on Remy Bumppo’s website—a three-and-a-half-hour show can scare audiences off (at least it’s not five-and-a-half!). But split into three acts (each around an hour long) this gutsy debut by incoming artistic director Timothy Douglas is fast-paced and compelling throughout.

There’s not much by way of a set—a few chairs, some columns and a giant portrait—but this somewhat-blank slate serves as an ideal setting for the thick emotional backdrop the powerhouse cast manages to construct with the potent dialogue. Read the rest of this entry »

Laura Savage and Creg Sclavi

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It is hard to believe that it has been nearly a decade since “Urinetown the Musical” first appeared: it was not only one of the first new shows to reestablish the Great White Way after 9/11 had brought the city’s entertainment infrastructure to a virtual halt, but it was also one of the first of what was to become a subgenre of Broadway shows, the satire musical, or musicals for people who don’t like musicals. What is fascinating about Circle Theatre’s production directed by artistic director Kevin Bellie is that it is done here as if it were a real musical, a daring and delightful idea.

Both the New York and Chicago productions were played so tongue-in-cheek that the actors’ tongues seemed as if they were swollen by the end of the first scene. The irony, of course, is that when you put this show in the hands of someone like Bellie who knows and loves musicals, the satire is actually more biting by the elements being so true to the form. Instead of a blackbox production, there are real sets here and the characters are costumed almost as if we have stumbled upon “Pirates of Penzance” roaming around Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” singing and dancing their naively wisecracking hearts out as they go. Read the rest of this entry »

Carrie Coon and Sean Fortunato/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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Leave it to Tom Stoppard to make me rethink my position on plays about the scandals and travails of affluent white people and their lovers. But then few writers are as intellectually challenging, insightful or careful with their words  as he. (As Stoppard’s fictional counterpart Henry says in the play, “If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”)

So even if to a degree the play is fueled by the question of did she or didn’t she “get off” with someone else behind his back, it’s the layers upon layers of reality, fiction and illusion, building as the play goes on, that make it turn in a meaningful way. Read the rest of this entry »

In a nod to the technological gimmickry of Hollywood’s B-rated past, at one point in “Scott Janus” a crew member walks before the audience holding a stick with pine-scent air fresheners and spritzing them with water to enhance the smell. The idea was to give the coming scene the sense of a wooded area, but the trick, a live theater version of Smell-o-Vision, didn’t work. However, that was likely the point.

Comic book-loving Eddie Edderson suspects that his neighbor, Mr. Nosferatsenberger, might be a vampire who has occasioned a series of cryptic deaths. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Polkow

For a guy who has been working as a high-profile Broadway composer and lyricist for “over forty years now—oh my God, can you believe it?” Stephen Schwartz is remarkably youthful both in appearance and attitude.

Sitting in the basement of Northlight Theatre in Skokie on an early Saturday morning clutching green tea prior to the final day of rehearsals before the first preview of his new work “Snapshots,” Schwartz exudes an enthusiasm and energy that is refreshing and contagious.

“It’s a new work, certainly, in that we keep tinkering and changing things,” he says, “but this isn’t the first version of the show that has been presented. We haven’t had an official ‘world premiere’ yet because I always feel that is the finished work at that point. ‘World premiere’ is a concept that is more important to theaters and venues than to writers.”  Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Sarah Ruhl’s take on an 1880s costume drama both is and is not a historical exploration of electric vibrators as cure-alls for women’s hysteria during the dawning of the modern age. It’s also a meditation on the elusive nature of love and desire, and seemingly a call to eros writ large. But it’s also a staggeringly well-made play, with some of the most intensive dramatic irony I’ve seen in recent memory. Read the rest of this entry »