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With its snappy dialogue and film noir milieu—trench coats, crime scenes and stolen microfilm—Michael Hollinger’s “Red Herring” transforms all the usual clichés into comic fodder. It’s not a bad idea. It would be a stronger one if Hollinger had a better fix on things. A 1952-set murder mystery, the play centers on three couples whose lives become intertwined when a dead body turns up at the harbor. The stylish but somewhat pointless production at Northlight Theatre, directed by Jessica Thebus (who brought a similar sensibility last year to About Face Theatre’s Sapphic-noir comedy, “Pulp”) blips along with a plucky, entertaining rhythm, but the proceedings feel scattershot. Essentially, the play is an echo chamber of a genre comedy, where the laughs and gaffes ricochet around without ever hitting a target. That being said, the production features some very canny performances: Tracy Michelle Arnold as a police detective brings to mind a smoky-voiced Patricia O’Neal, circa “A Face in the Crowd,” and Lesley Bevan as the racy-innocent spawn of red-baiter Joseph McCarthy. (Nina Metz) 

This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Piled high in some metaphorical junk heap of failed aspirations are thousands of movie scripts that never got made. So what. Unless one of those scripts is by Tennessee Williams. “One Arm,” an atmospheric downward spiral about a onetime boxer reduced to street hustler, was originally published with a collection of short stories in 1948. Not quite twenty years later, Williams wrote the screen adaptation—and no one in Hollywood would touch it. The script just kind of disappeared, as these things do; an echo of the dare it once was. Playwright and theater director Moises Kaufman (“I Am My Own Wife”) must have pretty good ears. In a three-way collaboration between Kaufman’s New York-based Tectonic Theater Project and Chicago’s Steppenwolf and About Face Theatres, Williams’ screenplay is brought to life in a noirish combination of stage and cinema. It is, literally, a staged version of the movie that never was. Read the rest of this entry »

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We’ve always known we were a town for theater. But this year perhaps we needed outsiders to remind us of just how great Chicago’s theater community is compared not only with New York, but with the rest of the world. Venerable London theater critic Michael Billington went so far as to herald our city as the “current theatre capital of America” after a recent visit, citing not only the three big S’s (Chicago Shakespeare, Second City and Steppenwolf), but also Victory Gardens and the Goodman. Other critics from New York and Toronto sent similar, although not quite as superlative, love letters this year. So it seems fitting this year that  our Players issue, in the past reserved for members of the theater community who wield the most power, focus on the artists—those both on stage and behind-the-scenes who make out-of-towners go home and drool. Read the rest of this entry »

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At the risk of sounding dismissive or pat, “Winesburg, Ohio” is essentially a musical version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” with darker elements of Willa Cather’s “My Antonia” thrown in here and there. It’s all roughly of the same era and spirit—the paradoxical comfort and claustrophobia of small-town living, before cars and TVs and world wars shoved rural Americans into the modern age. For my taste, these nostalgic recollections always seem to work better on the page than the stage, but this joint About Face-Steppenwolf production is an exception. Andy White, a strikingly natural actor whose performances are clean of affectation, plays the Writer, a guide of sorts who acts much like the Stage Manager in “Our Town.” He steers the action from one vignette to the next: A man is wrongly accused of child molestation, a woman is abandoned by her lover, a schoolteacher pines for romance, an artist makes the big move to New York City. About Face Theatre artistic director Eric Rosen, who wrote the book and lyrics, finesses a warm combination of sentimentality and palpable sadness. Under the precise, efficient direction of Jessica Thebus, the production deftly avoids those potholes labeled “quaint” and “cute.” The music (and additional lyrics) are courtesy of Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman, better known for their work as first-rate sound designers. It is the score that stays with you, a pleasing, layered wave of harmonies, like muslin gently undulating in the breeze. (Nina Metz) Read the rest of this entry »