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 […]
Category: Theater Review
Highlands hijinks
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 […]
Blackademics offers a course in code-switching
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. […]
Born under punches
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 […]
Apocalyptic vaudeville
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 […]
Rocking With Chekhov
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 […]
Satchmo at the Cadillac Palace
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 […]
Whose body?
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 […]
Games people play
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, […]
Ghosts and dysfunction
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 […]
Lucha Teotl brings bodyslamming storytelling to the Goodman
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 […]
Peter Malmö gives a Wisconsin makeover to Pedro Páramo
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 […]
Junie B. Jones celebrates kids being kids
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 […]
A third time around for Grimm
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 […]
Arsenic and Old Lace is delightful at Beverly Arts Center
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 […]