Theater Review Archives - Page 2 of 106

A woman in white dress and fur coat, wearing white makeup, stands center in dim light. Behind her we see figures in black clothing and white makeup. The one on the left is wearing a red MAGA hat and waving an American flag.

Commedia Divina: It’s Worse Than That is Dante for the age of MAGA

by Kerry Reid November 15, 2023November 16, 2023

Editor’s Note: Due to illness in the cast, the remainder of performances for this show have been canceled. Please contact the company for information on refunds. Feel like you’ve been living in hell the past several years? The Conspirators understand. In their latest offering, Commedia Divina: It’s Worse Than That, writer Sid Feldman concocts a […]

A young woman with dark hair, wearing a gothic black lace dress, stands left with arms crossed. On the right is Beetlejuice in green hair and a black-and-white striped suit He has his arm draped over her.

Theater Review

Beetlejuice is a demonic good time

by Kimzyn Campbell November 15, 2023November 15, 2023

Thirty-five years after its film debut, the classic Tim Burton Halloween comedy Beetlejuice has been reimagined, first set loose like a demon as a 2019 Broadway musical (score by Eddie Perfect, book by Scott Brown and Anthony King, and directed by Alex Timbers), and now playing at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. My inner goth jumped at […]

A woman in a Puritan style of dress stands holding a broomstick. She appears to be smirking.

Theater Review

Witch casts half a spell at Artistic Home

by Emily McClanathan November 9, 2023November 9, 2023

In Jen Silverman’s 2018 play, Witch, the devil goes down to a quiet English village and finds a lot more than he bargained for, including a supposed witch who is surprisingly resistant to selling her soul. Loosely based on The Witch of Edmonton, a 1621 play by Thomas Dekker, William Rowley, and John Ford, Silverman’s […]

Actors are clumped together onstage, their arms outstretched. The woman in front wears a long black dress with a somber expression

Theater Review

Stupid F#@ing Bird* makes Chekhov both timeless and contemporary

by Kimzyn Campbell November 9, 2023November 9, 2023

Stupid F@*#ing Bird is my kind of play—the kind that plumbs the depths of despair as if it were a vaudeville skit. “I’m in mourning for my life,” says Mash, quoting a line straight out of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Presented by Bluebird Arts and directed by Luda Lopatina Solomon, not every line is directly translated […]

An older Black woman dances at left, wearing a crown of flowers on her head. At right a young Black woman dances beside her. We see a drummer in green sitting rear left.

Theater Review

Once on This Island illustrates the beauty of storytelling

by Jack Helbig November 9, 2023November 9, 2023

Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1998 Tony Award-winning score for Ragtime (book by Terrence McNally) has many virtues—strong songs, strong characters, moments of great drama—but for my money, it cannot hold a candle to Ahrens and Flaherty’s earlier, less complicated, but no less ambitious musical, Once on this Island. First produced on Broadway in 1990, […]

Three women and two men stand onstage in a clump. The man in the center is making a funny face, with his hands held out in front of him. The woman on the right wears a cowboy hat.

Theater Review

Oh, the Places You’ll Glow hits the switch on warmhearted comedy

by Kelly Kleiman November 9, 2023

This was the first time in a long time that a Second City performance didn’t seem to be an audition for Saturday Night Live. The company of four women and two men (a refreshing change of balance) were right there, engaging with the audience and each other in the moment—the very definition of genuine improv. […]

Four actors stand in a line onstage. They all hold pistols in one hand and are pointing upward with the index finger of their other hand.

Theater Review

Assassins at Theo examines the real national pastime: violence

by Catey Sullivan November 9, 2023November 9, 2023

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Stephen Sondheim’s appallingly timely tale of U.S. assassins (and wannabe assassins) since it premiered in 1990. I can tell you that Theo’s production hones in on the pure, unadulterated rage that defines the show with a fervor I’ve never encountered before. In director Daryl Brooks’s staging, […]

Eight actors dressed in Caribbean clothing dance onstage against a backdrop of palm trees and a pink-lit archway.

Theater Review

Twelfth Night is a perfect ten at Chicago Shakes

by Kerry Reid November 8, 2023November 13, 2023

They couldn’t be more different in tone and setting, but Tyrone Phillips’s current gorgeous staging of Twelfth Night at Chicago Shakespeare and Robert Falls’s brilliant 2013 reimagining of Measure for Measure at the Goodman have one thing in common: bold directorial choices at the end that resolve nagging questions I’ve always had about how Shakespeare […]

A woman lies on her back on a fainting couch. Behind her is a drawing of the Manhattan skyline.

Theater Review

Chaos in the co-op

by Matt Simonette November 3, 2023November 3, 2023

A stellar cast more than makes up for some of the inherent unevenness in Charles Busch’s The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, produced at Skokie Theatre as part of MadKap Productions’s 2023-24 season. Julie Stevens is terrific as Marjorie Taub, an Upper West Side housewife recovering from a nervous breakdown—triggered after the death of her […]

A man is on his hands and knees on the left in front of a woman on the right, who is sitting on a chair and beckoning him. Three other people are on a sofa in the background

Theater Review

Neighborly nightmares

by Kerry Reid November 3, 2023November 22, 2023

If you look at French-Canadian playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin’s Right Now with an eye toward finding narrative antecedents, you won’t be disappointed. There’s the young couple living across the hall from an older couple who seem a little too interested in them (shades of Rosemary’s Baby). There are boozy parties (and a possibly imaginary child) straight […]

Three young women in white clothes kneel and crouch in the background. Slightly in the foreground, second from right, is an older woman in a sleeveless black dress, clutching a white cloth tied into a noose.

Theater Review

All about their mother

by Emily McClanathan November 3, 2023November 13, 2023

The four sisters in Teatro Vista’s ¡Bernarda! often complain about the heat, but the stifling Spanish summer is no match for the passions roiling under their mother’s roof. This stylish, sexy new adaption of Federico García Lorca’s 1936 play, The House of Bernarda Alba, is written by Emilio Williams, directed by Teatro Vista producing artistic […]

A child in overalls sits on a bench on the left. On the right is another child in dress, clutching a doll. Kneeling between them is a man in brown trousers and a vest. There is a kerosene lamp next to him.

Theater Review

City Lit’s The Night of the Hunter is a satisfying dark yarn

by Albert Williams November 3, 2023November 3, 2023

City Lit Theater’s stage adaptation of Davis Grubb’s 1953 novel has a dark, homespun, campfire-tale feel that suits the folksy tone of its suspenseful Southern Gothic narrative. The Night of the Hunter recounts the ordeal of two runaway children—ten-year-old John Harper and his five-year-old sister, Pearl—being pursued by a vicious killer in rural 1930s West […]

A Black man and woman stand together on the left in what looks like a wrestling move. A young Black woman sits on the couch watching them and an older right woman is at the right sitting on the arm of the sofa.

Theater Review

All the single ladies

by Kerry Reid November 3, 2023November 7, 2023

Doing a gender reversal for Company, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1970 ironic comedy of marriage vs. singledom, is such a great idea it’s surprising that nobody thought to do it before Marianne Elliott’s 2021 revival. In Elliott’s production, bachelor Bobby is now Bobbie, a woman turning 35 and wondering just why everyone (meaning, her […]

A Black man and a white man are seen cradled together in bed holding hands. The wall behind them is covered with graffiti art.

Theater Review

This Bitter Earth dives into the roots of political and personal commitment

by Matt Simonette November 3, 2023November 3, 2023

At one point in Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre’s excellent production of Harrison David Rivers’s This Bitter Earth, the central character, Jesse (Matthew Lolar-Johnson), says to his activist boyfriend, Neil (Tiemen Godwaldt), that “all lives matter.” Neil, surprised and disgusted, replies, “Saying all lives matter is like running through an anti-cancer rally and saying, ‘You know, there are […]

Mafer Roussell (left) and Roma Díaz in La Jom Atenda, presented by Repertorio Latino Theater Company as part of Destinos: 6th Chicago International Latino Theater Festival

Theater Review

La Jom Atenda shows the complexities of caregiving

by Kerry Reid October 26, 2023October 28, 2023

Plays about the relationships between caregivers and their clients aren’t new. The late Chicago playwright, actor, and disability rights activist Susan Nussbaumʼs well-received No One as Nasty, about a disabled woman and her caregiver, was produced by Victory Gardens back in 2000. Martyna Majok’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize–winning Cost of Living also examined two pairs of […]