Results tagged “theatre”

In case you plan your theater-going 4 months in advance, tickets for the much-anticipated Chicago-run of West End, then Broadway, blockbuster Billy Elliot went on sale yesterday. The show is scheduled to open in March and could be the next Jersey Boys or Wicked. According to the Tribune, the show will play for as long as it makes money. We enjoyed the show in London but we have no idea what the Chicago production will be like. We'd say it's worth the gamble, though.

In case you weren’t listening the first time, you should really go see Death of a Salesman at Raven Theatre. Yes, the title might conjure up some high school nightmares, but this production is top notch and has just been extended through January 16. Arthur Miller is all over the Chicago map this season, and while we can’t speak for the other productions, Raven does it right. It’s also a great show to enjoy with the folks for the holidays. (In case there weren’t already enough holiday performances going on.) Though not technically an upper, Salesman will make you appreciate what you have and come together with the ones you love. Isn't that what the holidays are all about?

Tickets might be going for $1800 on Craigslist for Second City, but you can still hear and see some funny (and cultural) things on the cheap at the Chicago Humanities Festival. From the dance lecture “Foot is a Funny Word” to the panel “Laughter and the First Amendment” and, a personal favorite, “Laughter Bollywood Style,” the final weekend seems to be full of reasons to chuckle. So what if Tony Kushner was a round last weekend and we missed it?

At the center of End Days is the Stein family. There’s Sylvia (a neurotic mother who, despite her Jewish upbringing, has recently found Jesus and Evangelism), her husband Arthur (a former corporate bigwig who lost his entire staff on 9/11), and their daughter Rachel (a high schooler in a goth phase). Add to the picture Nelson Steinberg, a newcomer to Rachel’s school who’s in love her (and his Elvis costume, which he always wears), Jesus, and Stephen Hawking, and it sounds like a ridiculous farce. But it isn’t. On the contrary, its earnestness is what makes it both successful and a bit too neat.

Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is too funny. There are too many overused jokes, too many corny gags, and too much suggestive language. Watching the musical at the Cadillac Palace Theatre is like overdosing on Halloween candy. Sure it’s enjoyable and delicious, but in the end, you’ve consumed nothing substantial and you feel a little sick.

Broadway doesn’t love Chicago as much as it led on. Just one week after the opening of Chicago director David Cromer’s Broadway debut with Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, producers posted a closing notice for Sunday and cancelled plans for Broadway Bound, another Cromer-directed Simon show scheduled to open in a few weeks. Memoirs received mixed reviews, but apparently it needed rave reviews to live on. The show didn’t do well in the box office and advance ticket sales were weak.

Call it a hunch, but we’re guessing you weren’t invited to Redmoon Theater’s Halloween performance at the White House. Yeah, we weren’t either. But no worries, there are plenty of shows to check out this weekend. In no particular order:

First off, we should tell you that we’re more familiar with Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” than Mary Shelley’s original novel. Or the Boris Karloff movie. Or any other version, really. (Our apologies to the Chicagoist Literary and Film Offices if they’re ashamed of us in any way.) The point is: We fully accept that The Hypocrites’ Frankenstein may have included references that went right over our heads. That being said: Prior knowledge and research certainly enrich the audience’s experience, but they shouldn’t be required. Throughout this entire show, we couldn’t shake the feeling that we had missed something. It was a frustrating 70 minutes.

It seems like every other day we're reading about yet another theatrical project that makes us wonder if the success of Glee has caused some kind of collective brain short-circuiting. [Ed. note: I can't wait for Glee to die. How has no one else noticed it's just a cross between American Pie and the 4th season of Ally McBeal?!] Read for yourself.

There is a reason we read certain plays in high school. Sure, they’ve been done countless times across the country, occasionally in god-awful productions. Their plot summaries are all over the internet, and they can be a little boring to read. But sometime, somewhere, those words came to life onstage and changed the landscape of American culture. So before you groan that Death of a Salesman is at Raven Theatre for its second time, you should really go see it.

“Every exit is an entrance somewhere else,” Tom Stoppard writes in his Tony-award winning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, currently playing in an excellent production at Writers’ Theatre. When the actors leave the stage where do they go? For Stoppard, the characters in Hamlet leave Shakespeare’s world and enter Stoppard's twisted universe of philosophical contemplation that left our heads spinning, in a good way.

The 41st Annual Equity Jeff Awards were held on Monday night - and since we couldn’t attend, we have to admit we were pretty amused to read that the ceremony was a bit of a mess. But despite our predilection for schaedenfreude, we do sincerely congratulate all of the winners - even if some of them didn’t bother to show for the ceremony. Extra kudos to TimeLine’s The History Boys for taking home more awards than any other production (five).

When we saw the advertisements for Lookingglass’; Fedra: Queen of Haiti, we were worried about taking our parents to the show. This “explosive” retelling was sure to bring out the junior higher in us during our folks’ visit, but we braved it anyway. However, we didn’t feel uncomfortable once. Maybe it’s a sign that we’ve outgrown parental awkwardness, but we’re pretty sure that’s not the case. The show simply did not deliver on its promises.

Lettice and Lovage, which opened Redtwist Theatre’s season last week, was written by playwright Peter Shaffer specifically for Maggie Smith. Although it won Dame Smith the 1990 Tony Award for "Best Actress In A Play" and was nominated for "Best Play" in that year, to be honest, we don’t think the script is that good. We certainly appreciate a show that provides two meaty roles for women, and yes, it’s cute - but it’s also way too long, and kind of…fluffy. Fluffy shows can be great, if they’re well-executed. Lettice and Lovage isn’t sharp enough to compensate for its fluff - an issue we suspect was not as prevalent with Maggie Smith driving the show. We just can’t help but wonder: why choose this play?

Yes, we know the headline is cheesy - but if you can’t take it, you probably won’t like the show. Yeast Nation (the triumph of life) is a new musical from the creative minds behind Urinetown, Mark Hollmann (music and lyrics) and Greg Kotis (book and lyrics). Now in its Midwest premiere at American Theatre Company, the show takes place four billion years ago, when single-celled organisms floated in the primordial soup. Although it’s written in the same self-aware style as Urinetown, the music is decidedly more 80s hairband. Perhaps more importantly, any sexual tension written into the show is tempered not only by the fact that yeasts produce asexually, but also - and this isn’t addressed - everyone is related, as they are all descendants of the same yeast. The whole thing is a bit odd - but then again, it’s about a bunch of yeast cells, so what else could it be?

Everyone is afraid of something. Lucinda is afraid of the monster under her bed. but he's not your ordinary monster. And Mia McCullough's brilliant new play Lucinda's Bed at Chicago Dramatists is anything but ordinary. It's plays like these that keep us going to the theater.

There are lots of cheap ways to see theater in Chicago, but free tickets are normally reserved for friends, family and press. Lucky for you, Theatre Communications Group (TCG) thinks you should see shows for free too - at least for this month.

I hope you’ll forgive my forsaking the usual Chicagoist first-person plural on this one - I think it’s warranted.

We realize we’ve written a lot of “but” reviews lately. As in “it’s good, but…” Although it probably wouldn’t be very interesting to read, we really do wish we could tell you everything we see is good - we love theatre, and we want you to love theatre too. So we’re both relieved and slightly giddy to be able to say to you all: The Goodman Theatre’s Animal Crackers is damn good theatre.

At the center of Fake, which opened Steppenwolf Theatre’s season on Tuesday night, is the “Piltdown Man.” A reconstructed skeletal head consisting of skull and jawbone fragments allegedly discovered in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England in 1912, Piltdown Man was considered to be the missing link between man and ape. Although its authenticity was challenged almost immediately, it was not declared a forgery by the scientific community for 40 years, when advances were able to prove that the reconstruction was actually an orangutan jawbone combined with the skull of a modern man. Got it? Now on to the actual play.

We didn’t know much about Brendan Behan’s The Hostage before we showed up at Griffin Theatre's opening night, but after reading dramaturg Stefka Mihaylova’s program notes, we figured we were up to speed. It’s 1960, the Republic of Ireland is independent from England but separate from Northern Ireland, and former I.R.A. (Irish Republican Army) member Pat is renting his inn as a brothel to make ends meet. It sounded pretty heavy. But then some drag queens started doing a jig. And we realized we should’ve brought some whiskey to the party.

After giving ourselves a little vacation (aka “working overtime at our paid jobs”), the theatre staff at Chicagoist got back down to business this week. We’ll have a bunch of reviews coming up for you next week, but we figured we should all catch up on some news first.

Want to interview Oscar-nominee Michael Shannon in Venice? $1500, please. Want to see him star in the world premiere of a new play here in Chicago? $30. Chicago's sure been getting dissed a lot lately. But a recent news item suggests that perhaps you can still get more bang for your buck right here.

Did you catch the forty person masked chorus making random appearances throughout the city this summer? That was Redmoon Theater’s Momentary Opera. Have you seen weird mechanical contraptions being installed at Belmont Harbor? That’s for Redmoon’s Spectacle ’09 (subtitled Last Of My Species: The Fearless Songs of Laarna Cortaan). What is ricocheting around in these people’s brains? We have no idea. But we tried to find out.

We may regret admitting this, but there are some nights when we just don’t want to go to the theatre. We’re moody, we’re tired, it’s gross outside, but some very nice person has arranged for us to see his or her company’s play, and we know we have to go. We try very hard to leave our grumpiness at the door, but it doesn’t always work. These were the conditions under which we attended the opening of Under Milk Wood - the fact that we left charmed, uplifted and impressed is a testament to the strength of Caffeine Theatre’s production.

Recently transplanted from Kalamazoo, The Ruckus is a company dedicated to finding fresh ways to develop new work, and, according to their mission statement, bringing the ruckus. The world premiere production of Heist Play doesn’t quite bring the ruckus, but it’s on the right track. With a few cuts and some refining, the script has the potential to be as sharp as some of its killer one-liners.

We’re gonna cut to the chase on this one. Watch this - if your time is limited, skip to the 3 minute mark.

Ekphrasis: Cave Walls to Soup Cans is intended to be a hilarious romp through the history of western art. It started out fine. Some missteps in comedic timing kept the Curator’s introduction from breaking out of the realm of “cute.” But we were still interested. Our first example of art-in-development: a scene between a French cave couple. Still just cute. Long, but cute. We figured the cast and script were just warming up. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there.

If you find yourself without plans at any given point this weekend, you’re in luck: No matter what time it is, you can check out a play. Starting tonight at 7:15, Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company will host more than 50 companies in a non-stop theatre marathon until midnight on Sunday. The plays’ lengths vary from ten minutes to an hour, and attendees can come and go as they please.

Edward Albee’s adaptation of Carson McCullers’ novella of the same name, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is a folktale about love, infatuation and loneliness. Signal Ensemble Theatre’s production impressed us with its compelling and tenacious performances, but the script ultimately left too many questions unanswered.