Photo: Clayton Hauck

RECOMMENDED

Second City’s one-hundredth revue jumps right into election year by kicking off with a bit where race, religion and Fox News take the forefront. From the opening moments, director Matt Hovde has shot the entire show through with a fast-paced, slightly unpredictable quality that makes for the best kind of sketch comedy. Even when we find ourselves in a familiar place (a pool hall or a couple’s living room) the characters we meet are captivating and original (without being caricatures… okay, without being complete caricatures). Read the rest of this entry »

Eddie Bennett and Rob Lindley/Photo: Michael Brosilow

Review: Angels in America/Court Theatre

RECOMMENDED

Perhaps the best theatrical experience is always personal, but ever since I saw “Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches” during the premiere run of its national tour at the Royal George in 1994, I’ve had a particular attachment to this show, which I’ve long considered the best new play of my adult lifetime. Read the rest of this entry »

Simon Callow/Photo: André Penteado

By Dennis Polkow

If veteran British stage and screen actor Simon Callow seems a bit late to the one-man-Shakespeare party given how many such plays there have been, consider that Callow has been doing various solo shows for years.

“‘Being Shakespeare’ is the direct offspring of the Dickens show that I did in Chicago about eleven years ago,” Callow explains. “This is more biographical investigation, or perhaps biographical evocation. In other words, I, the narrator, share with an audience the discoveries I have made about the character but I do that through their plays, their words and also the context. The idea is a bit like a Ouija board: you summon the character, the subject by means of smoke and mirrors, is the truth of it. A little biographical speculation, a little context and the discovery of that subject matter in the writer’s words.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Playwright and chess master Cándido Tirado’s rumination on the brutality of human beings uses the chess board as a jumping-off point for covering a range of cruel behavior—from genocide to racism to unfair eviction—as three seasoned chess hustlers bicker and collude with each other while working to lure in challengers (referred to as fish) and take their money at the board.

The action takes place in the round, with set designer Collette Pollard’s tables and benches perfectly capturing the comfortably worn feeling of New York’s Washington Square Park and Jesse Klug’s lighting design (including some glowing chess tables) adding a touch of the heightened abstract. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Michael Brosilow

Mixing historical figures like General William Tecumseh Sherman along with fictional counterparts who expose a greater range of the impact of Sherman’s march across Georgia and the Carolinas that devastated the South and hastened the end of the Civil War, Frank Galati’s faithful adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s acclaimed novel “The March” manages to assemble twenty-six actors playing thirty-nine roles onto the stage, across dozens and dozens of days and places, all without driving the audience batty in the process, though it does take a couple of scenes to adjust to the pace of change. Read the rest of this entry »

Sara Heaton and Paul LaRosa/Photo: Liz Lauren

RECOMMENDED

Brian Dickie has certainly given Chicago many firsts and many thrills in his twelve years as general director of Chicago Opera Theater, but Dickie has saved one of his best for last: the professional Chicago premiere of a satirical musical by, of all people, Dmitri Shostakovich.

With Stalin having declared modernism and the avant-garde anathema in 1936, operetta became a regime-approved art form and began flourishing during the Soviet era. Operetta houses were built next to theaters and opera houses, large orchestras and repertory casts engaged, and an entire generation of Soviet composers began writing a new species of still popular Russian operetta that remains largely unknown in the West. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It has been nearly five years since “Jersey Boys” first took Chicago by storm with a subsequent two-plus-year-run that had it following the Broadway In Chicago “Wicked” template of opening here with a national tour but subsequently creating its own Chicago production. The 2006 Tony Award-winning musical which tells the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons—warts and all and complete with the group’s hits meticulously recreated—has emerged as not only one of the most successful shows of the “ought” decade, but also one of the most emulated. As a national tour made it back to its old haunt the Bank of America Theatre, it was hard not to be swept away by the brilliance of the show which has stood the test of time remarkably well. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

On the one-year anniversary of her husband’s disappearance, Valerie (Kirsten Fitzgerald) must deal with her shady pharmacist daughter Midge (Missi Davis), her eccentric police-officer sister-in-law Gail (Natalie West) and the new arrivals in the neighborhood—her long-absent brother-in-law Donal (H.B. Ward) and his timid wife Sevenly (Lara Phillips). The rumor in town is that she had a hand in her husband going missing. Read the rest of this entry »

Gerard McBurney/Photo: Todd Rosenberg

By Dennis Polkow

“Musical” and “Shostakovich” are two words few might expect to hear together. “Various people looked at ‘Moscow, Cheryomushki,’” explains the work’s adapter Gerard McBurney over tea, “but the reaction of most presenters in the West was, ‘Shostakovich? Oh, he wrote gloomy symphonies and string quartets. Not exactly a marketing dream.’”

McBurney—a composer, arranger, broadcaster and musicologist best known in the area for his popular “Beyond the Score” presentations at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra which he has overseen, written and narrated since that program’s inception in 2006—was commissioned in the early 1990s to take the piece’s large orchestration and make it performable for a production in his native England. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo courtesy Amitava Sarkar

For good and ill, the American century had some important lessons for the globalized millennium to come—about the creative power of multiculturalism, about the permeable and sometimes illusory nature of identity, about confrontation and coexistence with the Other… and alongside those the attendant difficult, ongoing lessons about the ugliness of ignorance, racism and marginalization. Shirley Mordine, director of Mordine & Company Dance Theater, and Hema Rajagopalan, director of Natya Dance Theatre, explore cultural collision via dance, bringing their two companies together in a new evening-length work called “Pushed to the Edge.” Read the rest of this entry »