Onstage
Friday, February 24, 2012
Onstage Film Performing Arts Arts Margaret: Immature
Posted by Tony Adler on 02.24.12 at 09:00 AM
As Reader movie critic J.R. Jones noted in his review, the original version of Margaret was much longer than the one that reached theaters. Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan was forced to cut the running time down to 149 minutes in order to get it released, and it's interesting to speculate on what exactly is missing from the tale of Lisa Cohen, a privileged Manhattan teen who goes a little mad after inadvertently causing a bus accident that kills a woman. Jones points, convincingly, to scenes involving Matt Damon as Mr. Aaron, Lisa's far too understanding math teacher. I tend to think some of the cuts must've come out of a subplot involving Lisa's divorced mom, Joan, and her courtly Colombian boyfriend, Ramon. Guilt and mourning are heavy presences in Margaret, and Joan has good reason to feel both when it comes to Ramon. In effect, he's her bus accident. And yet the scene in which she addresses the wreck directly seems to have been snipped from the movie.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Paranormal Onstage Lit & Lectures Music Performing Arts Arts Books If you liked Manual Cinema's Ada/Ava . . .
Posted by Tony Adler on 02.23.12 at 02:03 PM
That's how I felt on seeing Manual Cinema's Ada/Ava last summer.
All shadow-puppet plays necessarily look at least a little bit alike, so it was familiar in that respect. And the subject matter—an exploration of what happens when inseparable old twins are finally parted by death—seemed redolent, picking up on ingrown-sibling lore that runs from the pixilated sisters in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town through the murderous ones in Arsenic and Old Lace to the weird ones in Macbeth (with a side trip to the hoarding Collyer brothers of books, plays, movies, and reality). What took me by surprise was the Dante-esque journey undertaken—part willingly, but part not—by the devastated surviving twin, Ada, as she tried to master her loss. A visit to a traveling carnival yielded twisted images and false exits worthy of the hall-of-mirrors shoot-out in The Lady From Shanghai.
Onstage Performing Arts Dance Arts The latest Reader performing arts reviews
Posted by Sharon Lurye on 02.23.12 at 11:00 AM
- Johnny Knight
- Rush Pearson in Diary of a Madman
Also recommended are DreamLogic Theatrework's Elder Gods, a promenade-style adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness; the Actors Gymnasium's sweet Lost and Found: A Recycled Circus, featuring an outstanding cast of adults, teens, and kids; and They Are Dying Out, Trap Door Theatre's version of a 1973 satire by Austrian provocateur Peter Handke. The intimacy of a black-box set makes for great theater in Mary-Arrchie's revival of the 2008 Tracy Letts comedy Superior Donuts and (Re)discover Theater's Hamlet, which amps up the classic play's sex appeal by emphasizing the relationship between the melancholy Dane and Ophelia. (Hurry if you want to see Hamlet: it closes Saturday.)
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Onstage Performing Arts Dance Arts The latest Reader performing arts reviews and previews
Posted by Tony Adler on 02.16.12 at 01:24 PM
- Suzanne Plunkett
- Hunger
Meanwhile, we have five Chicago-made shows to recommend.
Teatro Luna premiered Crossed late last year. The Reader's Julia Thiel liked it then, but the Lunas revised it anyway. Now this montage of scenes about immigrants, legal and otherwise, seems angrier in tone, and it's also jettisoned one of Thiel's favorite bits (a disembodied voice at an airport, sorting passengers for "additional screening based on the color of their labia"). But overall, we're sticking by our earlier assessment.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Religion Onstage Performing Arts Dance Arts Piety The latest Reader performing arts reviews and previews
Posted by Sharon Lurye on 02.09.12 at 02:45 PM
- Michael Brosilow
- Hesperia
Friday, February 3, 2012
Onstage Performing Arts Arts Mamet alert: Race runs on
Posted by Deanna Isaacs on 02.03.12 at 05:49 PM
Onstage Performing Arts Arts Why didn't Bruce Norris play the game?
Posted by Tony Adler on 02.03.12 at 03:28 PM
- Clybourne Park
- Michael Brosilow
Winning the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Clybourne Park may have been the worst thing that could've happened to former Chicagoan Bruce Norris. The 51-year-old playwright and actor had spent years designing a life that left him free to be as sharp-tongued, difficult, misanthropic, and iconoclastically brilliant as he wanted—and he clearly wanted, quite a bit. Thanks to the occasional role in a movie (The Sixth Sense) or TV series (Law and Order), Norris was able to maintain the economic independence he needed to write scabrous satires like The Pain and the Itch, which revolves around a four-year-old girl's genital rash. And he was nurtured, often in spite of himself, by a cadre of supporters at Steppenwolf Theatre. Artistic director Martha Lavey put her company's considerable resources and prestige behind him. Amy Morton directed two of his scripts there, including the world premiere of Clybourne Park. And another Steppenwolf director, Anna Shapiro, has finessed his tirades and tolerated his provocations through no less than five projects.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Onstage Performing Arts Arts Hubris Productions comes out of the closet on snarkiness
Posted by Tony Adler on 02.02.12 at 03:13 PM
Onstage Performing Arts Comedy Dance Arts The latest Reader performing arts reviews
Posted by Sharon Lurye on 02.02.12 at 01:47 PM
- Jim Newberry
- The Hunchback Variations Opera
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Onstage Performing Arts Comedy Dance Arts The latest Reader performing arts reviews
Posted by Sharon Lurye on 01.24.12 at 04:47 PM
Less successful is I Love You Permanently, which tells the tale of an entire relationship over the course of a single night but seems to drag on much longer. Curious Theatre Branch paterfamilias Beau O'Reilly, meanwhile, tells a sweet, cracked Irish love story in Our Kate Takes a Trip.
