Photo: Saverio Truglia

“Sixty Miles To Silver Lake,” billed as a coming-of-age depiction of Denny (Ethan Dubin) as his divorced father Ky (Sean Bolger) drives him from his soccer game to his dad’s home in Silver Lake, is actually only about the self-centered schmuck Ky; we don’t get the personality of the son. Dubin is a superb actor in reacting to his father’s clumsy attempts at hilarity and explaining sex. The play, with its fifties-era thinking; the meaningless work the father does and the father’s progressive disintegration, reminds me of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” But here, the father has no redeeming characteristics, and the gay- and women-bashing gets tiresome.  Read the rest of this entry »

This Bailiwick Chicago/New Colony musical collaboration focuses on a dystopian future where every American family is limited to one child; every additional child is raised underground, ignored by the surface world. If you can’t remember that, it tells you so in the program. Five musical numbers reinforce the show’s thesis. We get it already. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Lee Miller

The Midwest premiere of Obie Award-winning Adam Bock’s play offers up many references to the lakes of Minnesota, fly-fishing and casting—and a sinister undertone, like a dark stain coming up through the water to engulf us. It’s about how we compartmentalize, as with a fishing-gear box; it’s about how we set the boundaries of our lives and ignore what we don’t want to acknowledge. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo courtesy John Sisson Photography

By Sharon Hoyer

“In this day of YouTube and mediated ways of having engagement and interaction, I feel it’s very important to have human-to-human direct experience in the same space,” says Nicole LeGette, founder of blushing poppy productions. “There’s something that situation enables that’s not possible through a mediated technology. That’s one thing with my performance work—it works a lot with energy and with how to activate the imagination and the invisible space. Those things are very difficult to translate in video. It’s about the live, shared experience between performer and audience in a very visceral and I think very human way.” Read the rest of this entry »

Jazz-based Inaside presents a spring program packed with pieces by new choreographers on the scene as well as a few from established dance makers. Richard A. Smith, Inaside’s artistic director, premieres a new trio based on notions of justice and objective truth. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The third time is the charm, as it turns out. Handel’s “Teseo” (“Theseus”), crowning Chicago Opera Theater’s spring season and the penultimate opera of Brian Dickie’s general directorship, is also the last of COT’s Baroque opera “Medea” trilogy that began with 2010’s production of Cavalli’s “Giasone” (“Jason”) and continued with last year’s production of Charpentier’s “Médée” (Medea). Taken as a whole, this cycle stands as one of the most important artistic initiatives COT has brought us.

Medea was last seen in the climax of “Médée” setting fire to Corinth and murdering her two children, but between Charpentier’s opera and Handel’s she has made her way to Athens to seek asylum and betrothal from King Egeo who has no heir since his only son Teseo is unknown to him due to a promise the king made to Teseo’s mother. In Handel’s “Teseo,” the young hero fights for the king without either knowing their identity and with both courting Agilea. The king plots to kill Teseo while Teseo is magically seduced into cohorting with Medea, and so on. If it all sounds a lot like Handel’s “Rinaldo,” seen recently at Lyric Opera though set during the Crusades, only the setting and names are substantially different. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Rachel Elizabeth

Coriolis Theater Company is launching a live sitcom “airing” in Chicago this summer. Written by four local comedians and directed by Grayson Vreeland (a.k.a.“Ketchup” from the Colbert segment on Occupy Wall Street), “Maggie and Coco Save The World” delves deep into the insecure hilarity of post-collegiate slacktactivist culture, conspiracy theories and nature documentaries. Vreeland explains: “After six months of confronting police and engaging in direct actions, Coco has to move back in with her longtime best friend and roommate, Maggie, and attempt to reintegrate herself back into her old life with her old friends, while still trying her best to save the world.” Read the rest of this entry »

Megumi Eda and Luke Manley in "The Watteau Duets"/Photo: Erin Baiano

RECOMMENDED

Noise rock meets ballet in a revival of Karole Armitage’s 1981 piece “Drastic-Classicism.” Dancers share the stage with the band, which includes Chicagoans Mike Vallera and Shelly Steffens. Armitage’s aggressive movement vocab captures well the adolescent rage and sexual fervor that made your parents hate the music and wait up for you in the living room with the lights off. Is this piece really more than thirty years old? Read the rest of this entry »

Photo courtesy Herbert Migdoll

RECOMMENDED

The Joffrey closes their season on a Romantic note—the capital R specifically pointing to Edwaard Liang’s “Age of Innocence” and Jerome Robbins’ “In the Night.” Both pieces are favorite Joffrey standbys: the former a lush ensemble piece inspired by Jane Austen, in which white-clad dancers play out formal, yet passionate courtships before three red velvet curtains; the latter a series of duets depicting three different romantic dynamics. 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 »