Kelly Kleiman, author at Chicago Reader

A woman in a long red dress and fur-trimmed cloak stands left. On the right is a man in a gold gown and a crown, carrying an evergreen branch.

Court’s The Lion in Winter slices through the surface

by Kelly Kleiman November 15, 2023November 15, 2023

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

Theater Review

The American Dream as nightmare

by Kelly Kleiman October 10, 2023October 10, 2023

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 […]

A middle-aged woman sits left at a kitchen table, across from a middle-aged man on the right. She is wearing a full apron. He has his hands on either side of what appears to be an unwrapped birthday present of a fishbowl.

Theater Review

Lighting up the years

by Kelly Kleiman September 21, 2023September 20, 2023

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 bald middle-aged man kneels on the left, holding the hand of a young woman who is crouching on the right.

Theater Review

A superb View

by Kelly Kleiman September 14, 2023September 14, 2023

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 […]

Nine performers of various races and genders stand in a line. They are wearing rehearsal clothing.

Theater Review

The love language of dance

by Kelly Kleiman September 14, 2023September 14, 2023

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. […]

Two women in white dresses stand at a distance from each other at the shore of a lake.

Theater Review

Theatre L’Acadie’s Today Tonight Soon wears out its welcome

by Kelly Kleiman August 22, 2023August 22, 2023

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. […]

Two people wearing boxing gloves fight in front of a banner for Standard Oil.

Theater Review

Amped-up oligarchy

by Kelly Kleiman August 1, 2023August 1, 2023

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 […]

Three people onstage. One is playing a guitar while sitting on a bench. The other two are on the right, reclining on the floor and listening.

Theater Review

Elegy for the Age of Aquarius

by Kelly Kleiman June 29, 2023July 19, 2023

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 […]

Maria, a Latine woman and Tony, a white man, stand embracing on a fire escape.

Theater Review

A ‘miraculous’ West Side Story

by Kelly Kleiman June 8, 2023June 8, 2023

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 […]

Five actors stand in front of a walls of cardboard boxes. Four of them are wearing light-blue work shirts and vests, as in a retail store. On the front right is a woman in a light tan cardigan, holding a clipboard and confronting a man who is facing her.

Theater Review

Big-box problems

by Kelly Kleiman May 4, 2023May 4, 2023

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 […]

A young Black girl sits on a couch holding a stuffed toy. A Black woman sits next to her. She looks like she's telling a story to the child.

Theater Review

The broken double helix of pain

by Kelly Kleiman April 21, 2023April 21, 2023

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 […]

Five women are seen in a kitchen set. Two are seated at a table, with a younger woman with long brown hair on the left and an older woman with shorter brown hair on the right. The older woman is looking at a cell phone. Two other older women are standing behind her, bending over to look at the phone. The one bending over on the left has long dark hair, the one on the right long blonde hair. At the rear, in front of a stainless steel refrigerator, holding up a glass of white wine and looking skeptical

Theater Review

A mother of a play

by Kelly Kleiman April 14, 2023May 10, 2023

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 […]

Two lines of performers (three per line) stand onstage. They are dressed in vaguely 19th-century garb, holding up metal drinking mugs Their left legs are all raised akimbo and they are leaning to the right of the photo. They are surrounded by cabaret tables and chairs.

Theater Review

Bed to crime to bed

by Kelly Kleiman March 23, 2023March 23, 2023

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 […]