Theater Review Archives - Page 3 of 106

Two men in top hats and tails stand onstage. The man on the left is Frankenstein's monster, and the one on the right is Frederick Frankenstein.

A monster of a good time

by Josh Flanders October 26, 2023October 26, 2023

Grab your lab coat and walk this way to Mercury Theater Chicago for Young Frankenstein, the hilarious 2007 musical with music and lyrics by the legendary Mel Brooks, based on his beloved 1974 film of the same name. With a book written by Brooks and Thomas Meehan, it delivers on many of the same laughs […]

A couple stands embracing in the foreground. Behind them onstage is a stone arched bridge, with people in traditional Scottish garb standing on and around it.

Theater Review

Highlands hijinks

by Kerry Reid October 26, 2023October 26, 2023

On a clear day in Brigadoon, you can see Oklahoma. Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner’s 1947 Scottish romantic fantasia is set in a far more mystical and picturesque realm than the Oklahoma territory of 1906, yet there are undeniable points of narrative similarity. But the dramatic stakes in Lerner and Loewe’s musical (which was […]

Three women are shown from the waist up. A white woman stands in the center looking out, while two Black women are on either side of her, looking at her skeptically.

Theater Review

Blackademics offers a course in code-switching

by Sheri Flanders October 26, 2023October 26, 2023

Set in an uber-modern high-end restaurant, the three-person play Blackademics, written by Idris Goodwin, sets up a gilded cage match of the wits for two Black frenemies in academia. Newly tenured professor Ann (Jessica F. Morrison) overcompensates through authentic African garb for what she feels she lacks in “authentic” Blackness due to her upper-class background. […]

Two boxers are caught in close-up. The man on the left has just been hit and we see his head turning away from the boxing glove, which appears in the lower right frame of the photo. The man to whom the the glove belongs is in the upper right of the photo.

Theater Review

Born under punches

by Alejandro A. Riera October 23, 2023October 23, 2023

If boxing is a metaphor for life, as many scribes, boxing fans, and websites proclaim (just type “boxing as a metaphor for life” and you’ll find over 1.5 million results alone), then for the four boxers at the heart of Franky D. Gonzalez’s play That Must Be the Entrance to Heaven, life has delivered some […]

Two Black men in vaudevillian garb stand onstage. The man on the left is clutching a piece of paper in his hand.

Theater Review

Apocalyptic vaudeville

by Kerry Reid October 20, 2023October 20, 2023

There’s a long tradition of Black American playwrights and filmmakers subverting the tropes of vaudeville and other popular entertainments to critique white supremacy and its violent power structures—power structures that of course also include American theater and filmmaking. Douglas Turner Ward’s 1965 satire Day of Absence (which led to the creation of the Negro Ensemble […]

A young woman in a red dress stands at a microphone on the left while a young man standing right holding a guitar looks on. The walls behind them are covered with wooden crates and records.

Theater Review

Rocking With Chekhov

by Jack Helbig October 19, 2023October 21, 2023

There is something about Anton Chekhov’s first successful full-length play, The Seagull, that attracts playwrights to try their hand at creating their own adaptations—faithful or otherwise. Maybe it’s the fact that the characters at the center of this nearly 130-year-old play—the narcissistic mother, her emotionally damaged son, his talented but blindly ambitious girlfriend—feel so contemporary […]

James Monroe Iglehart as Louis Armstrong stands center stage in a tuxedo, holding a trumpet in one hand and pointing out toward the audience.

Theater Review

Satchmo at the Cadillac Palace

by Kerry Reid October 19, 2023October 19, 2023

Now in a short run with Broadway in Chicago before a hoped-for New York production, A Wonderful World still has a ways to go before it feels like a fully realized portrait of Louis Armstrong. Then again, there were so many facets to the musician that it’s hard to imagine anyone could do full justice […]

A man and a woman in elegant dressing gowns stand at a dimly wit window looking out.

Theater Review

Whose body?

by Kerry Reid October 19, 2023October 19, 2023

Last year for the Destinos festival and Teatro Vista, Georgette Verdin directed Paloma Nozicka’s haunting Enough to Let the Light In, which amply demonstrated her ability to create chilling atmospherics onstage. Night Watch, Verdin’s latest production, doesn’t have the same depth as Nozicka’s play, which was as much about guilt, loss, and isolation as it […]

An actor stands left with a propeller beanie cap on his head. An actor in the middle wears a blue dress and a bright red wig. Behind them is an actor in a bowler hat and green sequined jacket.

Theater Review

Games people play

by Kerry Reid October 19, 2023October 19, 2023

Nestled in a strip of storefronts in Marquette Park, Teatro Tariakuri (led by founder and artistic director Karla Galván) has been offering Spanish-language comedies and family shows for 20 years. (They first produced in Pilsen, before rising rents pushed them further south, and took a seven-year break before opening their current cozy venue.) Their latest, […]

A woman crouches behind a chair on which sits an oversized doll. On the other side of the chair, a man is seated on the floor, his legs stretched out and his head thrown back. He is clutching the arms of the doll, and the woman is reaching out to touch him.

Theater Review

Ghosts and dysfunction

by Kelly Kleiman October 19, 2023October 19, 2023

Mia McCullough’s play, now receiving its world premiere at Theater Wit, is about the immovable object (denial) meeting the irresistible force (the past), with a family crushed in between. So far, I could be describing Long Day’s Journey Into Night or August: Osage County, but the wrinkle here is that the past is literally sitting […]

Two lucha libre wrestlers are shown in a spotlight, with a woman on the right holding the leg of the man in the center. On the left stands a referee, and the backdrop is of an Aztec pyramid temple.

Theater Review

Lucha Teotl brings bodyslamming storytelling to the Goodman

by Kimzyn Campbell October 11, 2023October 18, 2023

Pro wrestling fans take heed: a lucha libre play is now up at the Goodman Theatre that celebrates the lively art form and spectacle of Mexican pro wrestling, where técnicos (the good guys) and rudos (the bad guys) face off in weekly matches, settling old disputes and beating the ever-living stuffing out of each other […]

Theater Review

Peter Malmö gives a Wisconsin makeover to Pedro Páramo

by Alejandro A. Riera October 11, 2023October 11, 2023

Considered a precursor to magical realism (Gabriel García Márquez claims that reading it gave him the key to mapping out the story for One Hundred Years of Solitude), Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel Pedro Páramo demands far more attention from the reader than its slim 120-plus pages seem to suggest at first. Not an easy breeze […]

Five actors dressed as school kids hold up letters spelling out SNACKS while an actor playing an older woman stands smiling in front of them. The backdrop looks like an open lined notebook with drawings and sayings in it.

Theater Review

Junie B. Jones celebrates kids being kids

by Kerry Reid October 10, 2023October 10, 2023

Because we live in stupid times, Barbara Park’s Junie B. Jones series of kids’ books about an enthusiastic first-grader ended up at number 71 on the American Library Association’s list of top banned or challenged books from 2000-2009. (God knows what the Moms for Liberty are doing with it right now—I haven’t had the heart […]

Five actors in a tavern setting stand onstage holding chairs and other implements in a threatening manner as they face another actor who is standing on the right.

Theater Review

A third time around for Grimm

by Kerry Reid October 10, 2023October 10, 2023

For the third year running, Theatre Above the Law in Rogers Park presents a cornucopia of fairy tales by and about the Brothers Grimm, concocted by Michael Dalberg and directed by Tony Lawry. Though moments in the 95-minute show feel a bit leisurely in pacing at points, the material in this year’s installation is decidedly […]

Two women in black dresses and mourning veils sit right and left. A young man in a dark suit is seen between and behind them, gesticulating.

Theater Review

Arsenic and Old Lace is delightful at Beverly Arts Center

by Tracy Baim October 10, 2023October 10, 2023

Having never seen the film or previous stage productions of Arsenic and Old Lace, I was in a great position to see it fresh at the Beverly Arts Center (BAC) in its short run that ends October 15. I confess part of the reason I went was to take my dad because several of his […]