Articles in Theater + Stage
‘The Happiest Song Plays Last’ at Goodman: Counterpoint of old guilt and quest for grace
Review: ★★★★★
‘Still Alice’ at Lookingglass: When dementia seizes a woman’s life, a family is measured
Review: In her play “Still Alice,” author and director Christine Mary Dunford employs a graphic metaphor to illustrate the disintegrating world of Alice, a victim of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Throughout the play, now in its world premiere run at Lookingglass Theatre, Alice’s kitchen appliances disappear one by one, until nothing remains – until the locus, the defining “here,” of this woman’s life is no longer there. ★★★★
Role Playing: Darrell W. Cox sees theater’s core in closed-off teacher of ‘Burning Boy’
Interview: The central character Larry, an English teacher, in David West Read’s “The Dream of the Burning Boy,” is a smart, inspiring mentor to the kids around him. But when they need him as consoling father-figure, after one of their classmates dies, Larry can’t engage their pain or embrace them emotionally. For Darrell W. Cox, who delivers a wrenching portrait of the teacher at Profiles Theatre, such a closed-off, deeply complicated soul is the touchstone of great drama.
As dancing dame on high seas, Rachel York heads up motley tour crew of ‘Anything Goes’
Preview: Rachel York, slyly sinful Reno Sweeney in the Roundabout Theatre production of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” headed for Chicago, sees herself in the proud line of those indomitable dames of 1930s Hollywood.
‘The Whale’ at Victory Gardens: A daughter’s outsized rage, a father’s thin hope of grace
Review: ★★★★
‘Dream of the Burning Boy’ at Profiles: Loss, loneliness and anger shroud a student’s death
Review: ★★★★
‘Big Fish’ star Butz calls the fanciful story-teller his dream role — and that’s no exaggeration
Preview: Norbert Leo Butz plays Edward Bloom, a Herculean story-spinner who supersizes his own legend in the musical “Big Fish.” We caught up with Butz at the Oriental Theatre, where the two-time Tony winner is trying this fabulist father-son story on for size. Butz talks about his role in the Broadway-bound musical, now in Chicago previews. We sneak a listen, too.
Role Playing: Chaon Cross turned Court stage into a romper room finding answers in ‘Proof’
Interview: The interpretive quest that led Chaon Cross to her fierce, blazing portrayal of Catherine, the brilliant but unmoored young woman in David Auburn’s “Proof” at Court Theatre, began in rehearsals with a lot of running around, getting under furniture and throwing things.
Fresh out of college, Stephen Anthony slides into ‘Catch Me If You Can’ — and it’s no con
Preview: There’s a connection you can’t miss between actor Stephen Anthony, recently graduated from Florida State University, and the con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr., whom he plays in the national touring production of “Catch Me If You Can” that opens April 3 at the Cadillac Palace Theatre. They both bounce around the country, never staying long in one place, pretending to be somebody they aren’t and oozing charm all the way.
Cuban troupe’s ghostly ‘Pedro Páramo’ opens Goodman’s Latino Festival with mystic grace
Review: ★★★★
‘Proof’ at Court Theatre: Finding love, other prime factors in calculus of life’s choices
Review: ★★★★★
Role Playing: Dion Johnstone turned outsider Antony to bloody purpose in ‘Julius Caesar’
Interview: The actor who portrays Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” draws one of the greatest speeches in the Bard’s canon: the dramatically pivotal funeral oration for the slain Caesar. But that opportunity, says Dion Johnstone, whose eloquent and driven Marc Antony fires the current production at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, comes freighted with compact and perilous challenges. “From the moment Marc Antony enters the Senate and sees Caesar’s bloody corpse, with Brutus and the other assassins all still there, he’s in serious danger,” the actor says. “And despite his overwhelming grief, he has to think fast.”
Bus named Priscilla is a million-dollar baby and ‘Queen’ of a flamboyant traveling show
Preview: The bus has a name. Priscilla. And the Priscilla that’s coming to Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre is the same ostentatious vehicle with the glittering high heel on top that once revolved on a Broadway stage. “The original creators didn’t think it could be done,” says Scott Willis, who stars as the aging transsexual performing artist Bernadette in “Priscilla Queen of the Desert.” “But when it’s time to shuffle off to Buffalo, they always find a way to do it.” The show plays Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre March 19-30.
‘Body of Water’ at Redtwist: Life as a circular swim with no clue of current, bottom or bank
Review: ★★★
Role Playing: Noir films gave Justine Turner model for shadowy dame in ‘Dreadful Night’
Interview: Funny thing about film noir, says Justine C. Turner, who plays a sultry, sexy 1940s type in Don Nigro’s play “City of Dreadful Night” at The Den Theatre: It brought women out of the shadows, and made them multi-dimensional. “That’s the really great thing about my character. Anna is complicated. She’s both Madonna and whore, not just one or the other but good and bad at the same time,” says Turner, who tuned up for the defining noir style of “Dreadful Night” by watching Ida Lupino films from the 1940s.
Teal Wicks, who’s done a green witch, happy to show other colors in musical ‘Jekyll & Hyde’
Preview: Teal Wicks made a name for herself as the misunderstood but resilient green girl Elphaba in “Wicked.” Shed of the body paint, she’s again playing a young woman who marches to her own drum as Emma, the fiancée (against all prudent counsel) of the mysterious Dr. Jekyll in the musical “Jekyll & Hyde.” Where Wicks is marching with it is right back to Broadway.
Role Playing: Anish Jethmalani plumbs agony of good man battling demons in ‘Bengal Tiger’
Interview: The play is called “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” and while there is indeed a tiger in it – dead for most of the story, wafting in and out of view as an existential ghost – our sympathies are not with the spectral creature but with a real man, an Iraqi gardener brought to heartbreaking life by Anish Jethmalani at Lookingglass Theatre.
‘The City & The City’: Politics, murder occupy the same space in a surreal thriller at Lifeline
Review: ★★★
‘A Soldier’s Play’ at Raven: Sifting through racial prejudice and rage to find a murderer
Review: In an obvious sense, Charles Fuller’s 1982 drama “A Soldier’s Play,” recently opened in a sharply detailed production at Raven Theatre, is about the virulent ugliness of racism as it persisted in the mid-20th century deep South. But more than that, Fuller’s story grapples with the despair and self-loathing that can infect the soul of an oppressed people. ★★★
Role Playing: Gary Perez channels his Harlem youth as quiet, unflinching Julio in ‘The Hat’
Interview: One of the most appealing, indeed endearing, performances to be seen on Chicago theater stages this season is Gary Perez’s quietly philosophical, yet vaguely dangerous turn as Julio, the gay cousin and one true friend in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ play “The ______ With the Hat” at Steppenwolf. Perez credits director Anna D. Shapiro with framing Julio as worldly-wise and possessed of a Zen-like calm, the one really centered character in a collection of loose cannons.
‘Boy Gets Girl’ at Raven: She says sayonara, his bouquets turn to blood-curdling threats
Review: ★★★★
Chicago Shakespeare Theater texts ‘Caesar,’ modernized and picture-perfectly true to Bard
Review: ★★★★
‘Bengal Tiger’ at Lookingglass: Man, beast change stripes, and God’s not in the details
Review: To be engulfed by the despair that sweeps over “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” is to be reminded of the spiritual nausea that seized Jean-Paul Sartre and other French existentialist playwrights who watched their own world getting blown to pieces in the 1940s. Lookingglass Theatre and director Heidi Stillman have turned Rajiv Joseph’s play into one of the peak stage experiences of this season. ★★★★★
Agony and ecstasy of jazz icon Billie Holiday all in night’s work for ‘Lady Day’ star Rogers
Preview: Singer-actress Alexis Rogers thinks of herself as cut from the same cloth as the great jazz vocalist Billie Holiday – a spunky, lively, laughing spirit, and someone who doesn’t mince words. That’s the briefly resurgent Billie Holiday, heroin-addicted and near the end of her life, embodied by Rogers in Lanie Robertson’s musical bio-drama “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” for Porchlight Music Theatre.
Brent Barrett, sporting pirate hat and sneer, gets his Hook into the fantasy of ‘Peter Pan’
Preview: Brent Barrett calls his latest stage fling, as Captain Hook in the national touring company of “Peter Pan,” a 180-degree turn from his most recent starring role in Chicago – the wealthy but world-weary Ben in Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The “Peter Pan” run, with veteran Cathy Rigby in the title role, has been a blast, he says, a Broadway broadside: the furthest thing from walking the plank.
