Photo: James D Palmer

RECOMMENDED

In 1916, The Sparks Circus brought its show to small-town Erwin, Tennessee. The result was that the ghosts of cruelty tarted up with sequins and called the greatest show on earth.

The show’s star attraction, Mary the elephant, murdered its abusive handler; the townspeople’s bloodlust demanded its execution in return. Red Tape creates a sepia-toned flashback with rootsy old-time songs from house band The New Switcheroo and a versatile cast that knows how to sing them. Read the rest of this entry »

Stephanie Leigh Rose/Photo: Cory Dewald

RECOMMENDED

As theater, Erasing the Distance’s piece discussing bipolar disorder is not very good. The staging is stagnant, the performance decisions and narrative angles are repetitious, and the sound and lighting don’t add as much as they could. I’ve seen director Genevieve Thompson’s work before; she has a great deal more to offer.

But that’s not the point.

Even today, mental illness has such a stigma attached to it that just to discuss the details of the illness brands those who suffer from it as Other, as lesser. The opportunity to stand on a stage and tell the war stories, share helpful tips and simply offer encouragement is rare and did not go unappreciated by audience members the night I saw it. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Ireland isn’t idyllic, and the Aran Islands aren’t meant to be a tourist trap… Inishmaan isn’t supposed to be an escape but a prison–something nasty, brutal and short.” So says the dramaturg’s note on the playbill of Redtwist Theatre’s newest production. The near-claustrophobic theater space, with stark grey stone for the walls and floor and a spartan collection of set pieces, makes for an immediate confrontation with Inishmaan’s nastiness. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonathan Weir and Shannon Cochran/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

Although Writers’ Theatre is celebrating its twentieth anniversary season, it only began performing musicals a few seasons ago and with mixed results. But with William Brown on board to direct an all-new production of Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” perfectly suited to its intimate stage, Writers is giving us a musical production worthy of an important anniversary year.

“A Little Night Music” is the closest Sondheim work to an operetta, with its consistent use of waltz-like rhythms—virtually everything is in triple meter—and some of his most melodic material, including his most popular song, “Send in the Clowns.” It is also Sondheim’s most elaborate use of the kind of counterpoint that Leonard Bernstein had experimented with in the climax of “West Side Story,” for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics. Musically, it ranks among Sondheim’s most ambitious and adventurous works.

That the acting would be of the highest caliber was no surprise, for that is a Writers’ Theatre trademark. But that the musical component should be rendered so exquisitely was a welcome surprise given the unevenness of past musical productions. Musical director Valerie Maze—who also conducts from the piano and celeste—and her extraordinary tiny orchestra (including a tucked-away harp) render Sondheim’s lush score with surprising richness for such small forces. And each performer sings the score superbly even in the complex ensemble numbers, no small feat for how removed the performers often are from the orchestra. Read the rest of this entry »

Billy Fenderson and Hilary Williams/Photo: Tom McGrath

RECOMMENDED

Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” is a play bursting with heavy themes and dichotomies, ranging from science versus literature to order versus chaos to thought versus feeling. Though the action all takes place around one large table in an English country house (well-imagined by scenic designer Michelle Lilly), the time period repeatedly shifts between the early 1800s, where Septimus (Billy Fenderson) tutors his young charge Thomasina (Hilary Williams), and today, where hubristic academic Bernard (Dan Granata) attempts to find evidence for a scandal involving Lord Byron and author Hannah (Marsha Harman) works on a piece about hermits. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

What’s the secret to getting a dystopian future rock opera to harken back to the childhood sentiments of Generation Y? Environmentalism! Au Naturale’s production of Admiral Earth will feel like old hat to lovers of the nineties animated television show “Captain Planet”—it even includes a musical piece that both acknowledges the influence and scorns the comparison. Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Agard, Alan Schmuckler, Andres Cruz, Derrick Trumbly/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

That director David Cromer has developed a reputation for an ability to work magic on even the most taken-for-granted shows made his interest in “Rent” particularly intriguing, to say the least. No ordinary show, part of the mystique of “Rent” was the stranger-than-fiction reality that the composer of this updated transposition of Puccini’s “La bohème” from a nineteenth-century Paris garret with tuberculosis looming overhead to a 1990s flat in Greenwich Village with AIDS as the culprit, died suddenly of a burst aortic aneurysm on the night before “Rent” was to open in 1996. A mere thirty-five years old when he died and so living the bohemian lifestyle described in the show that the set designer made sure that the flat actually looked better than the composer’s own so as not to make him feel self-conscious, the late Jonathan Larson never lived to see or benefit from the extraordinary success of a work that he personified both in his life as a struggling artist and his untimely early death. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Farabee and Mary Winn Heider/Photo: Liz Lauren

RECOMMENDED

With the numerous struggling-to-move-forward “new economy” stories littering the cultural landscape currently, from HBO’s “Girls” to Tom Hanks in “Larry Crowne,” Theater Wit’s latest might have proved to be a teeth-clenching endurance exercise. But Kim Rosenstock’s off-kilter tale of people struggling to heal avoids clichés and displays true heart.

Sherry (Mary Winn Heider) returns home post-college with an art-therapy diploma and a case of deep depression. She’s joined by sister Grace (Kasey Foster), who endures a breakup by watching “Top Gun” on constant loop, and a mother who never leaves her bedroom. Fortune changes when Sherry begins teaching art at Joseph’s (Guy Massey) school and treating his grieving son Zack (Matt Farabee). Read the rest of this entry »

Jared Fernley in "Gospel Hour" (inspired by the song "State Trooper"), written by Dan and Drew Caffrey and directed by Aaron Henrickson/Photo: Paul E. Martinez

RECOMMENDED

While successfully evoking the deep isolation and suffering present in Bruce Springsteen’s legendary “Nebraska,” the newest production from Tympanic Theatre also adds doses of surreal imagery and humor. With eleven playwrights paired with ten Chicago directors each using a different song to draw inspiration, the plays run the gamut emotionally. The dim, intimate space at the Right Brain Project lends the impression that all the characters exist more or less “nowhere,” isolated and forced to live with their regrets and mistakes regardless of their present circumstances. Alongside their humane pathos lies an undercurrent of violence and menace, but it is not always clear whether the characters fear or court this danger, or both. The first play, “Man Will Meddle,” draws this ambiguity particularly clearly by giving us a glimpse into the life of a wife and mother (Sarah Mayhan) on the day her former lover (Kevin Murray), the serial killer of Springsteen’s song “Nebraska,” is to be executed. When she reads the paper announcing the execution, her husband (Jereme Rhodes) forces her to confront her past, revealing her persistent infatuation with the killer’s malt-shop fifties-era brand of machismo.

Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Goetten, John Taflan, Justin C. Turner, Kyle A. Gibson/Photo: Chris-Ocken

RECOMMENDED

John Webster’s 400-year-old Jacobean revenge tragedy is most famous now for its violent incestuous themes and high body count. This has come to overshadow the accomplishment of “The Duchess of Malfi”: Long before the concept of psychoanalysis had been created, Webster made a complex and penetrating study of  human nature’s self-destructive and pathological tendencies. The plot line—two brothers conspire, out of clearly psychopathic sexual perversions, to kill their widowed sister the duchess after she remarries secretly and below her station—is only the beginning of a story that ultimately finds its moral center on the double-crossing spy-murderer Bosola, who’s as close to a proto-existential character as Hamlet. Read the rest of this entry »