Who hasn’t fantasized about time travel? Reliving your happiest moments, correcting your most regretted mistakes, maybe encountering a few aliens on the way. The House Theatre has decided to trek back to 2005 and revive their production of “Dave DaVinci Saves the Universe”—having transported to their new home at the Chopin Theatre. I did not see the show’s first incarnation, so I can’t say this revival is, as the press release claims, sharper, tighter or more heartfelt than before. I can, however, wholeheartedly say that the current production is visually sleek, finely tuned and incredibly touching. The story of a Dave, the mathematician (played by both Stephen Taylor and Dennis Watkins) and his musician wife Nora (the always wonderful Stacy Stoltz ) who, devastated by the suicide of their prodigal daughter, science-fiction writer Purdi DaVinci (Paige Hoffman), lay all their hopes and faith on Dave’s homemade (from a cell phone) time machine as the instrument by which they can save Purdi’s life. The past, present and future plays out alongside the fictional world of Purdi’s stories, inhabited by a young, fiery space captain named Cass Meridian (Hoffman again) and her trusty (and phenomenally costumed) sidekicks, a robot named T.H. (Joshua Holden) and the large, looming space bear Arcturus (Carolyn Defrin, who also takes on the role of Nora from the past). Despite some fuzzy logic as the time travel begins to get frantic, the entire production runs like a well oiled-machine under the direction of Nathan Allen, who shares playwriting credits with Chris Matthews and Jake Minton. (Valerie Jean Johnson)

At Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, (773)251.2195, through November 8

RECOMMENDED

“The Attemptors” is the new one from The House and it seems to be a bit of a departure for those sly storytellers. On the one hand, it displays the childlike delight in telling tall tales that has always characterized the best of The House. On the other, this fifth-season closer admirably abstains from phantasmagorical narrative and sleight-of-hand staging to concentrate on character. That character, as imagined by playwright Shawn Pfautsch and director Marika Mashburn, is Danny Hackles, a socially inept, un-fabulous, solipsistic, overachieving 17-year-old with abandonment issues. In other words he is your typical teenager. And “The Attemptors’” boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl story would have been agreeable and charming at best, formulaic and unenlightening at worst, if not for its dialogue, as well as the presence of actor Chris Matthews in the title role. Indeed, from the euphonious character names—Wayne Vane; Nola Charley; Sam Sommers—to the cliché-ridden, popular song-lyric seeping-dialogue that characterizes Hackles’ argot, Pfautsch’s writing has a visceral theatricality that never lets up. Smarty pants prolix? Yep. Self-consciously ingratiating at times? Absolutely. But also fun, fast and rhapsodically well-realized by Matthews, an actor of limitless energy who clearly relishes the opportunity to let it rip. I enjoyed the confidence with which “The Attemptors” wore its sentimental heart on sleeve, even if it could have benefited from a little more Housian wistfulness. Then again, Pfautsch is at his best when dramatizing teenage awkwardness instead of teenage angst. It’s a small cavil for this entertaining and unassuming play with a bold performance at its heart. (Fabrizio O. Almeida) 

At the Building Stage, 412 N. Carpenter, (773)251-2195.

This production will run at the the Theater on the Lake, 2401 N. Lake Shore Drive, (312)742-7994, Jul 23 through Jul 27.

RECOMMENDED

Part buddy play, part music appreciation lecture, part Holocaust drama, Jon Marans’ “Old Wicked Songs” tries to go off in so many different directions that the audience is worn out trying to keep up. And kudos to the stellar performances of Vincent L. Lonergan and the House Theatre’s Shawn Pfautsch in this Christopher Prentice-directed Signal Ensemble Theatre production that we want to—we really do. Their characters are so likable and seem to need each other so badly—Lonergan plays a lonely, crusty old music professor and Pfautsch plays a young, brash and shallow prodigy—that when Lonergan finally agrees to reveal his troubled past to Pfautsch, we feel immensely cheated that the scene simply fades out and we never get to hear the old man’s life story in his own words. Some audience members were so confused by such an awkward fade-out that they began clapping, assuming the play must be over. Even more bizarre—potential spoiler alert—is that we are asked to believe that a man who has survived the horrors of Dachau would make glib, anti-Semitic remarks as a pre-emptive strike in a 1986 Vienna that is about to see Kurt Waldheim become president of Austria despite his then newly revealed Nazi past. Robert Schumann’s song cycle “Dichterliebe” acts as a leitmotiv throughout the play, and both actors are able to play and sing bits of it at a reasonably competent level, Pfautsch having to go from singing it through his head and in a monotone manner to full diaphragm-singing evoking the emotional meaning of Heinrich Heine’s poems. These musical moments of self-discovery are the best in the play, even if they are seldom reflected in how little is ultimately revealed about the characters themselves. (Dennis Polkow)

 At the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, (773)278-1500. This production is now closed. 

RECOMMENDED

Holiday fare tends to fall into two camps: warm and fuzzy and dark and dreary. The endlessly adaptable appeal of the likes of rare gems such as “A Christmas Carol” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” is the brilliant way that both are able to straddle both joy and terror, but few yuletide works are able to walk that tightrope effectively without polarizing over into one or the other. House Theatre’s world-premiere version of “The Nutcracker” is able to do so in a manner that is so fresh, so imaginative and so convincing that it seems destined to become a true holiday classic. The premise is simple enough: take the bare-bones outline of E.T.A. Hoffman’s original story, remove the sugar-plum fairies, tutus and Tchaikovsky score and contemporarize the setting with the tangy twist of a bereaved Clara working through the sudden loss of her elder brother with the help of her Uncle Dresselmeyer, who has brought her a nutcracker likeness of her brother that comes to life with her other toys to help her deal with the problem of menacing mice in the house. Her parents are worried that they are losing a daughter in addition to a son, and the demons that the entire family faces in the battle of the mice versus the toys becomes an odyssey into the world of childhood fears, phobias, resilience, self-reliance and loss that really makes you remember what it is like to think like a child in a very unromanticized manner. Unlike adults who, children have no control whatsoever of their lives, and the omnipresent parental dictum that Clara may have to “go away for a while” after the New Year because of what her parents perceive as a festering obsession is as ominous as any seven-headed rat king, real or imagined. Whatever losses we encounter, whether as children or as adults, we have rituals and rules for helping us let go—vastly different though they may be—and this work offers the constructive alternative of allowing a child to cope head-on with grief in a healthy and liberating way rather than our usual cultural approach of sweeping death under the rug where children are concerned. (Dennis Polkow)

At the Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, (312)335-1650. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

The surprise hit of the year, the House Theatre’s original fable so captivated audiences that its original seven-week sold-out run at the Viaduct Theatre continued on at Steppenwolf for another six-week sold-out extension before being shrewdly picked as a Broadway In Chicago offering at the Apollo Theater for the rest of year, giving those of us who are curious about “The Sparrow” phenomenon a chance to experience it for ourselves. I should say up front that I did not see the original mounting, but it is clear that this would be a far more engaging show in the Viaduct than the Apollo with live rather than canned music, as is the case here. The piece does make use of House’s signature manner of direct audience involvement, but the Apollo configuration is not able to fully engage the sides of the stage. The first part of the show is able to remind you in excruciating and unpleasant detail the adolescent angst that most of us mercifully forget and that so many shows romanticize via rose-colored nostalgia glasses: trying to fit in when you are new and strange to the established social order, trying to feign interest in classes that hold no interest for us, getting along with teachers who are as miserable if not more than we are, trying to keep from being the last one chosen on a team and attempting to avoid being a dodge-ball magnet, trying not to get sick when you have a dissection in biology class, et al. Where the show takes a bizarre and derivative pop culture plot turn—and I’m aware that this is what attracts many of its admirers to it—is the way that its fatal bus-accident survivor and unlikely heroine (brilliantly played with subtlety to spare by Carolyn Defrin as kind of a “I was a teenaged Ugly Betty”) copes with her trauma by taking Walter Mitty-like daydream dance “flights” that rupture into a disruptive reality for those around here who begin to see her as what the Japanese would call a kami: a strange and mysterious god among us. Where reality ends and fantasy begins is never divulged, nor is the point of all of this, which may be much of the show’s attraction for would-be shy superheroes. (Dennis Polkow)

At the Apollo Theater, 2540 N. Lincoln, (312)902-1400. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Magicians—they don’t get respect. Dennis Watkins, professional Harry Houdini and now first-time playwright with “The Magnificents,” the House Theater’s fifth-season opener, is determined to change that. And while I admired this attempt to lace a series of fun and undeniably entertaining miniature magic shows with gravitas, the results are at best a mixed bag of tricks. Yet what a cool bag of conjuring tricks they are! Three little red balls and wooden cups are used for some sensational sleight-of-hand sequences. Routine card tricks are anything but. Familiar classics like the orange, lemon and egg canary are lovingly evoked. Bodies are sawed in half, caskets levitate and a “clown chorus” of three House veterans help move along the action (sometimes literally, as when they magically unfurl designer Collette Pollard’s giant dollhouse of a unit set). Unafraid to wear its heart on its sleeve, the show—based on the playwright’s experience with his late grandfather, also a respected magic man—concerns an ailing old magician (Watkins), his sweet and uncomplicated wife (Marika Mashburn) and the young boy they befriend (Tommy Rapley) who is dazzled by the white-haired wizard and to whom he apprentices himself briefly before the old man’s untimely passing. There is little dialogue and much of the storytelling is accomplished via the House actors’ highly emotive facial expressions and trademark physicality. Particularly entertaining is Mashburn and her turn as an Edith Bunker-esque loveable dingbat of a wife limited to nonsense dialogue comprised of Yiddish, Russian and English gibberish. The result of this dramatic admixture is a show from which, when you’re not being happily distracted by the magic and multimedia (there is sophisticated use of video and cartoons), you contemplate some interesting themes: the life of an under-appreciated magician; the value of mentorship; magic as a dying craft; the struggle to introduce wonder and whimsy into a cynical world. A tighter focus on the narrative, a stronger script and a brisker pace—House company member Molly Brennan directs for the first time—would have more satisfactorily explored these rich themes and better justified the reason for this sentimental tribute to Watkins’ grandfather/magical concept show. For Watkins, each performance of “The Magnificents” must offer one last chance to spend time with the memory of his grandfather. For the audience, it should have been a better opportunity to get to know him in the first place. (Fabrizio O. Almeida)

At the Viaduct, 3111 N. Western, (773)296-6024. This production is now closed.