The arch dialogue in James Goldman’s 1966 drama The Lion in Winter (turned into a 1968 film starring Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole) about the eventful Christmas of 1183 at the English court hasn’t aged well—it calls too much attention to its own cleverness while often failing to advance either the plot or our understanding […]
Author Archives: Kelly Kleiman
Oh, the Places You’ll Glow hits the switch on warmhearted comedy
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. […]
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 […]
The American Dream as nightmare
Strong acting and a powerful theme can’t quite bring Juan Ramirez Jr.’s world premiere at Subtext Studio Theatre (part of Destinos: 6th Chicago International Latino Theater Festival) to life. Though Kairis Rivera (who also translated) and Jorge Aguilar invest their characters of undocumented migrant and coyote with genuine feeling, and director Omar Vicente Fernandez paces […]
Lighting up the years
Noah Haidle’s play got absolutely savaged in New York, with the critics’ main objection being that the story of a family over time had already been told in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and The Long Christmas Dinner. Apparently they’d never heard that there are only seven plots in the world. In any case, I could […]
A superb View
When it’s directed wrong, Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge comes off as a dated melodrama about the unthinkability of incest. Fortunately, director Louis Contey at Shattered Globe understands it’s actually a piece about self-deception leading to self-destruction and thus is as much of a punch in the gut as it was when it […]
The love language of dance
It’s incredibly ambitious for a Chicago company to choose A Chorus Line, because although the city has a strong dance community, it’s not one with a tradition of crossing over into theatrical dance. So director Wayne Mell and choreographer Susan Pritzker have done a creditable job in staging a show that’s all about theatrical dancing. […]
Theatre L’Acadie’s Today Tonight Soon wears out its welcome
It looks so simple: two people occupy a stage, waiting for something and talking about nothing. But Waiting for Godot works because Samuel Beckett was a genius, and because waiting itself was his subject. Few imitators can make the same claims, and neither holds true for Melanie Coffey’s world premiere with Theatre L’Acadie, Today Tonight Soon. […]
Amped-up oligarchy
It’s not clear that there’s anything funny about the life story or legacy of John D. Rockefeller, which raises the question of Corn Productions’ attraction to the material and goal in presenting it. Unfortunately, although clever bits appear throughout this satirical history lesson, Ryan Stevens’s production of his own play relies on the actors’ shouting […]
Elegy for the Age of Aquarius
Hair is such an icon—profanity and naked people on Broadway, oh my!—that it can be hard to remember it’s an actual play with a plot (Gerome Ragni and James Rado wrote the book and lyrics for Galt MacDermot’s score), and even a subplot. Kudos to director Derek Van Barham for focusing on the story of […]
A ‘miraculous’ West Side Story
In most productions of West Side Story (and I’ve seen half a dozen or more), Tony is the weakest link: the character just isn’t as cool as Riff or as sexy as Bernardo. He’s kind of a dork, in fact. But in the Lyric’s remounting of its own 2019 revival of the show, Tony is […]
Big-box problems
If verisimilitude and timeliness were all it took to create a great play, Ken Green’s world premiere comedy-drama about working in big-box retail would be a home run. Its dialogue captures every cliche and bit of doublespeak in the corporate human resources dictionary, not to mention every grouse and plaint ever uttered in a workplace—and […]
The broken double helix of pain
Donnetta Lavinia Grays’s play is about the limits of love—both in what it can accomplish, even when it feels infinite, and in what it can tolerate before it disappears. Monique (the protean Ayanna Bria Bakari) shows up at her sister’s house with her 11-year-old daughter in tow and an undisclosed agenda. (Daughter Sam is played […]
A mother of a play
Motherhouse begins with a recently bereaved daughter struggling to write her mother’s eulogy. Her mother’s four sisters arrive to help with the task but instead reenact every unresolved family trauma. (Suffice it to say that the best-adjusted of the sisters is the one estranged from the others by her membership in a cult.) Under the […]
Bed to crime to bed
Directors have two jobs: to help the audience understand what the play is about and to stage it so the audience can see it. Director Fred Anzevino has failed at both here. The Threepenny Opera is, like most Bertolt Brecht works, a critique of respectability: its antihero Macheath is a charming criminal, while its villains […]