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At the opening of this onstage haunted house you’re at a foreign train station late at night, the sound of trains in the distance and buzzing flies nearby. Early on you realize you’re just in the anteroom and will actually have to board the train by walking down a dark, eerie hallway. This is where the true frights kick in, with a well-developed story penned by Jeremy Menekseoglu that mostly unfolds around you but involves you too, offering plenty of uncomfortable chills from a gory plot that leaves you feeling helpless and disturbed. Immersion is key. Read the rest of this entry »

Denis Lambert and John Scherer/Photo: Tanner Photography

When Irving Berlin wrote the song “White Christmas” for his 1942 film “Holiday Inn,” the story goes that he was expecting “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” the Valentine’s Day number, to be the big hit. Bing Crosby never saw the popularity of “White Christmas” coming either—he reportedly laid down the track that remains the best-selling single of all time in eighteen minutes—but it was Crosby’s gently crooning it to a country newly navigating its way through the horrors and sacrifices of World War II that ended up nostalgically reminding everybody of exactly what we were fighting for in the first place.

Ironically, though “Holiday Inn” was made during the war, the film itself exists in a warless vacuum aside from a patriotic montage of troops, weaponry and FDR shown during the Fourth of July sequence. Thus, its lavish, widescreen and Technicolor remake twelve years later made sure to refocus the attention and title on its breakout song, “White Christmas,” and that song’s own nostalgic relation to the war itself now that the country had successfully achieved victory, peace, stability and prosperity with weapons that had included songs to inspire both the front lines and the home front. Read the rest of this entry »

Ricardo Santos/Photo: Herbert Migdoll

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The Tchaikovsky holiday confection is so gooey sweet that many dance cognoscente view it much the way theater aficionados view productions of “A Christmas Carol.” Thankfully, the late Robert Joffrey did not share that view. As a choreographer, Joffrey came to “The Nutcracker” rather late, offering the premiere of his “American” slant on the ballet for what turned out to be the last Christmas of his life, in 1987.

Once the ballet company that bears Joffrey’s name made Chicago its home in 1995, it was inevitable that Joffrey’s particular conception of the work would make its way into the already crowded local “Nutcracker” marketplace. At that point in time, the Ruth Page “Nutcracker” had held sway here since 1965, but ceased in 1997, six years after Page’s death.

In the decade and a half that Joffrey’s “Nutcracker” has been presented in Chicago, however, it has emerged as the definitive version. For most of those years, Joffrey’s partner and company co-founder Gerald Arpino lovingly looked after Joffrey’s vision until his death in 2008, and the details and choreography of both Joffrey and Arpino are carefully preserved in the current production. Read the rest of this entry »

Felicia P. Fields and cast/ Photo: Liz Lauren

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Borrowing the template from “Ragtime” of having well-known historical characters musically interact with fictional characters representative of various classes of American society, “A Civil War Christmas: An American Musical Celebration” attempts to use the holiday season as a nostalgic look back, warts and all, at our conflicted soul-searching as a nation at the climax of its greatest national crisis. The scenario for Paula Vogel’s play—receiving its Chicago premiere from Northlight Theatre—is Washington, D.C. on Christmas Eve, 1864, when General Sherman gave President Lincoln the captured city of Savannah, Georgia as a Christmas present.

The show cleverly uses the African-American experience on both sides of the conflict as a means to look at ourselves in the mirror with the clear adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The scene of an escaped slave and her daughter finally arriving at the bridge across the Potomac only to be turned back by Union soldiers because the city already has enough of “her kind” could come right out of today’s headlines. Read the rest of this entry »

Peggy Roeder, Amy Matheny/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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Small-town life may be small, but it’s rarely simple; that’s what they discover in Budapest (pronounced boo-DA-pest), Illinois as the members of the local women’s club decorate their float for the town holiday parade.

It’s a motley crew. Doodee (Wendy Robie) is the town doer; she’s the first to help, but the first to judge. Char (Rengin Altay) is a divorced real estate agent in need of a change; Arletta (Peggy Roeder) is the small-minded busybody, and Luce (Amy Matheny) and Marty (Adrianne Cury) are two women attempting to take their attraction to the next level.

Patricia Kane’s script has tone changes that strain credibility; Luce is reluctant to embrace a lesbian relationship but becomes Don Juanita by the second act. But Kane’s punchy dialogue and surprising twists keep you entertained and rooting for her characters. Leslie Buxbaum Danzig’s fluid direction keeps the tight ensemble sparking. It’s a fun, far-from-silent night. (Lisa Buscani)

About Face Theatre at Theater Wit, 1229 West Belmont, (773)975-8150. Through December 12.

Carla Kessler/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

The House’s remount of their successful 2007 holiday show is a very loose adaptation of ETA Hoffman’s classic story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King,” and yet its prologue is still almost ironically evocative of the Tchaikovsky ballet. Cheerful dancing around the Christmas tree turns to tragedy, however, when news arrives of the son’s death at war. A year later, no Christmas party almost means no Christmas, until a surprise visit from Uncle Drosselmeyer, with a gift for Clara of a nutcracker that looks like her brother, upsets the somber balance of the household. The adaptation by company members Phillip C. Klapperich and Jake Minton cleverly psychologizes the tale, spinning the magical battle against darkness and Rat Kings as one against childhood grief and family wounds. The brisk, lively staging never lets you linger on such heavy thoughts for too long, but the actors all have great fun with each other, with the script, and with the audience. You’ll believe in magic again. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

The House Theatre of Chicago at the Chopin Theater, 1543 West Division, (773)251-2195. Through December 26.

RECOMMENDED

As the earnest narrator Geest, Brian Pastor proves himself to be an engaging storyteller, injecting a fair amount of humor into his careful recounting of the familiar story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. Director Stephen F. Murray has Pastor make elaborate use of the various props lying around the cluttered basement-like set (designed by Matthew Cummings) throughout what is essentially a one-man show.

But the live original music (composed and performed by Matthew Bivins) and sound effects (Shawn Goudie) create the ambience that makes this show truly noteworthy, with memorable interpretations of passages from Bürger’s “Lenore” and Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” and an especially grim version of the spiritual “Dem Bones”—paced to the sound of banging pots and paired with darkly dramatic lighting (Christine Ferriter). It’s a Halloween show that’s eerie without being frightening though it contains enough spooky moments to give younger kids the chills. (Zach Freeman)

City Lit Theater at Edgewater Presbyterian Church, 1020 West Bryn Mawr, (773)293-3682. Through October 31. $25.

Sean Thomas, Ashlee Edgemon, John Sanders, Michael Aguirre, Jennifer T. Grubb/Photo: D. Rice

RECOMMENDED

World-premiered by First Folio Theatre for Halloween 2006 and reprised a year later, it has been three years since Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Allan Poe have haunted the halls of Mayslake in west suburban Oakbrook Terrace. Dramas about Poe’s personal life and adaptations of his best-known short stories are a virtual cottage industry but kudos to First Folio managing director David Rice for a brilliant cross-fertilization of both types of Poe plays into a single, interactive audience experience that uses the magnificent space of the actual thirty-room Tudor “Peabody’s Tomb” mansion—considered haunted in Chicago folklore for decades—as an opportunity to spend an evening with the Poes and the characters of his best-known works.

Ushered into the cavernous library of the estate, Poe in the persona of actor John Sanders—making his debut in the role since Larry Neumann Jr., who created the role, is busy over at Steppenwolf as the chilling villain of “To Kill a Mockingbird”—welcomes you as guests as the real Poe would do, reading “The Bells.” Read the rest of this entry »

Scott Bradley/Photo: Jennifer Bisbing

RECOMMENDED

Watching a young Michael Myers reach for a kitchen knife as a gently crooned version of The Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” rolls over the audience (along with a great deal of smoke-machine fog), it quickly becomes evident why The Scooty & JoJo Show’s “Carpenters Halloween”—a multimedia smorgasbord of video, puppetry, live music, and cartoonish props that crosses John Carpenter’s “Halloween” with the music of The Carpenters—has become a Chicago cult favorite now in its fourth year of production. As teenager Laurie Strode, director and co-creator Scott Bradley leads a cast of actors (and puppets) in an almost word-for-word re-imagining of the classic horror film, with Myers, still surprisingly spooky even when surrounded by lampoonery, stalking the cardboard-cutout neighborhood of Haddonfield, Illinois while a frantic Dr. Loomis puppet searches for him. The camp factor is appropriately high and the Circuit Nightclub, with its dangling disco balls, offers a more than suitable backdrop for this laugh-out-loud tribute. (Zach Freeman)

Circuit Nightclub, 3641 North Halsted, (800)838-3006. Through October 31. $15-$25.

Described as “a murder mystery, meets Tony & Tina’s Wedding, meets zombies,” “Zombies Attack Chicago” returns to Uptown’s The Spot (4437 North Broadway) on Thursday for its third straight Halloween run. Not so much a play as an “interactive theatrical event/zombie attack simulation,” “Zombies Attack” puts its audience at ground zero of a zombie outbreak and then lets them take it from there. “It’s a zombie movie you can be a part of,” says the show’s creator, Zack Geoffroy. “The military barges in to take over the bar because of a bio-terrorism threat, then someone turns into a zombie, and things get a little hairy.” The actors have a basic story to work from, but it’s the audience that gets to decide the direction it goes in: who to interrogate, who to quarantine and, most importantly, who to kill. It’s literally a different show every night. “It completely depends on the audience,” says Geoffroy. “It can get really interesting if the audience is interested in the background of the story, but with drinkers usually they just want to see blood. That’s the half-hour show.” Which, Geoffroy is quick to point out, is not necessarily a bad thing. “We’re not worried about the run time, we’re worried about the body count.” (Jonas Simon)