Events Search – Recommended
The Magic Parlour
Open run: Fri 8 and 10:30 PMTheater & Performance
This 60-minute, late-night magic show is exactly what it should be: funny, lively, intimate, and utterly baffling. House Theatre of Chicago member Dennis Watkins blends quick-witted improv and physical comedy with freewheeling patter as he performs classic illusions. Though his sleight-of-hand is impossibly subtle, it was the mind reading tricks that seemed to have drawn several inquisitive skeptics back for another look on the night I attended. A curio-shop intimacy and cash bar encourage audience participation, and Watkins, with his Eagle Scout looks, clearly takes a mischievous pleasure in the unexpected. Just let your cell phone go off during the show and see what kind of fun he has. --Keith Griffith $75
The Magic Cabaret
Open run: Wed 7:30 PM,
773-404-7336Theater & Performance, Halloween
Now in its fourth year, P.T. Murphy and David Parr's show continues to "take the 'ic' out of magic." Classic bits involving card tricks and swallowed needles blend with anecdotes about Chicago's history as a magic capital and Murphy and Parr's own youthful obsessions with the craft. The two deliver a bombast-free evening of chamber illusions, bantering easily with each other and the audience in a spare and intimate setting. A chilling interlude invoking H.H. Holmes, the serial killer immortalized as the "devil in the White City," reminds us that no amount of prestidigitation can reveal the motivations of monsters. --Kerry Reid $20, no one under 13 years old admitted
El Stories
Open run: Sat 11 PM,Theater & Performance
Waltzing Mechanics founders Zack Florent and Keely Leonard accompanied Englishman Adham Fisher last April, as he attempted to win a Guinness mention by circumlocomoting all 144 CTA el stations in record time. Their account of his quest runs like a local train on the express track, but it's the only disappointment in this bawdy, 60-minute collection of verbatim commuter stories. The other 16 quick-hit bits highlight the zaniest and sweetest moments in public transit, providing a reminder that no one knows how to enjoy an awful train ride more than Chicagoans. —Asher Klein $15
Dinner With the Elams
Open run: Thu 8 PMImprov/Sketch
It takes a great deal of good chemistry for an improv group to click—without it, funny riffs go hanging and good scenes are cut short. Dinner With the Elams has an unfair advantage in that department, as three of the performers are siblings and the other two are marrying into the family: joining Erica, Brett, and Scott Elam in the experienced team are Brett's fiancee, Jet Eveleth (artistic director of the Chicago Improv Festival), and Scott's fiancee, Lisa Burton. It's an enticing hook and makes for plenty of ribbing, like on the night I went, when Erica started off the show by having Scott tell how he lost his virginity. But it doesn't devolve into awkward teasing and gross-out humor, and only once did siblings threaten to kiss. Instead, the family builds scenes unselfishly, working as a really poised and awfully hilarious unit to bring out the best in each other. If their Thursday night show is this good, the family reunion must be formidable. —Asher Klein $12
Story Club
Open run: Thu 8 PM 773-929-3680Spoken Word/Poetry Slams/Open Mikes
An open mike for storytellers.
Free
ComedySportz Theatre
Open run: Thu 8 PM, Fri 8 and 10 PM, Sat 6, 8, and 10 PMImprov/Sketch
Part of a national chain of comedy clubs, this company is known for quick improv games (think Whose Line Is It Anyway?), but it also stages long-form improv. LCD screens and sophisticated lighting and sound systems amplify the sports-style improv of the company's eponymous production, ComedySportz. There's a snobbery in the Chicago improv community that looks up at the "art" of the long form, with its emphasis on story and characters, and down on the "entertainment" of the short, with its emphasis on games and punch lines. ComedySportz falls emphatically in the entertainment camp; its bottom line is laughter, and it gets plenty of it. The show is structured as a competition between two teams performing multiple games that require audience participation. A referee ensures that the players--a rotating roster from a company of about 50--work clean or they finish the game with a brown bag over their heads. The formula is practically foolproof: players may flash their quick wits in winning responses, but they're even funnier when they fail. In one game a team had to devise a pick-up line, each member contributing a word. Moving rapidly from player to player, the line developed: "Tonight-I'll-tango-with-your-face." Probably wouldn't work at a bar, but at ComedySportz it killed. --Ryan Hubbard
$19
The Improvised Shakespeare Company
Open run: Fri 8 PMImprov/Sketch
Seven strapping men in swashbuckler shirts improvise a two-act Shakespearean play based on a title suggested by the audience. At the show I saw, "The Taming of the Jew" inspired the Bard's usual themes (religion, family, betrayal) and plot devices (murders, disguises, fortunes gained/lost) as well as an uncomfortably funny circumcision. Director-performer Blaine Swen, a veteran of long-form Shakespearean improv who swears they don't conspire during the intermission, has assembled a vigorous ensemble of actors and proven improvisers. Their experience doing Shakespeare flowers in the language: they relish iambic dialogue, execute perfectly timed asides, occasionally utter rhyming couplets (some hilariously forced: "Let us be quick-sa, and get to the bar mitzvah!"), and drop parodic phrases ("scurvenous knave," "midfortnight report") and well-placed anachronisms (the bar mitzvah had a DJ). Even the ending echoed the real plays: story lines resolved tidily--and uproariously. (RH)
$14
A Nude Hope: A Star Wars Burlesque
Open run: Sat 7:30 and 9 PMTheater & Performance
Answering the prayers of nerdy straight guys everywhere, this Geek Girl Burlesque show features a bunch of scantily clad women reenacting the first Star Wars movie. The only character who isn't played by a woman, R2-D2, is represented by a trash can. M.C. Curran's script closely follows the plot of the original except that the action frequently pauses so cast members can strip down to pasties and panties. Even Chewbacca gets a turn. In the spirit of Minsky's, Timothy Bambara's staging is more suggestive than raunchy and as concerned with laughs and novelty as with titillation. It also offers the rare chance to see Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi perform a posthumous striptease to the Bee Gees' "I Started a Joke." —Zac Thompson $35
Whirled News Tonight Presents Newspeak
Open run: Sat 8 PMImprov/Sketch
The current incarnation of director Jason R. Chin's production is smart. On the night I attended this show, based on audience contributions of news stories, a sketch involving Bipedal Locomotion Enterprises would have taken a prize for vocabulary alone. The ten-member ensemble also made casual references to Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and William Golding. And how many twentysomethings can do an accurate Alfred Hitchcock impression extempore? Instead of going for the broad and vulgar, these folks more often opt for the microcosmic. A patriarchal defense of polygamy is transformed into a wife lamenting the responsibilities of having multiple husbands. A report about terrorists plotting via Internet cafes sparks visions of subversive activities impeded by spam, pop-ups, and IMing. The players exhibit a genuine rapport: articulate dialogue unfolds logically, swiftly, and concisely. --Mary Shen Barnidge $14
Late Nite Catechism
Open run: Thu and Sat 8 PM 312-988-9000Theater & Performance
A bona fide born-in-Chicago international hit, this simultaneously nostalgic and satirical comedy by Vicki Quade and Maripat Donovan concerns a nun instructing her students—that's you—on the dos and don'ts of dogma. —Jack Helbig $30
First Monday
Open run: the first Mon of each month, 12:15 PMClassical
Abandon your regular lunchtime smoke break, nap, or illicit tryst for something a bit classier. Join the Chicago Chamber Musicans as they present First Monday, a monthly lunch-hour concert series. This month features cafe music by Astor Piazzolla and Paul Schoenfield. —Jamie Keiles
The Sound, the Soul, the Syncopation
Through 3/15:Galleries
Sam Worley writes, "With photos and text, 'The Sound, the Soul, the Syncopation' looks at how close-knit subsidized communities in Brooklyn, Houston, Detroit, and other cities have helped produce talents like Barbra Streisand, Kenny Rogers, and Diana Ross." Check out the rest of his review right here.
The Empire Brings Sexy Back
Through 2/23: Sat 10:30 PMTheater & Performance
An all-female version of Star Wars is an interesting proposition to begin with. When those females end most scenes by stripping down to pasties, it just gets even more, well, interesting. The Gorilla Tango Theatre cast pulls it off beautifully in a funny, clever reimagining of Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back that references the original without getting too bogged down in plot. Among the many successful scenes is one where Yoda teaches Luke Skywalker the ways of the Force, a power that in this version is activated through vigorous shimmying. When Luke gets frustrated and complains that she's not well enough equipped to levitate the X-wing fighter, Yoda displays her own modestly sized breasts and gently advises that "cup size matters not." —Julia Thiel $20
The Unveiling and Dozens of Cousins
Through 2/9: Fri-Sat 8 PMTheater & Performance
James Joyce had Stephen Dedalus, David Mamet had Bobby Gould. And Vaclav Havel had a hapless alter ego named Ferdinand Vanek, bearing witness to life's absurdities in four plays that Havel wrote over the course of 25 years. Trap Door Theatre mounts the first and the last of those plays. In 1975's The Unveiling, Vanek spends an excruciating evening with maniacally status-conscious Vera and Michael, who are hell-bent on "resolving his situation" by turning him into a consumerist clone of themselves. In 2010's Dozens of Cousins, Vanek returns to find the dissolute but defiantly condescending couple in the throes of collapse. Beata Pilch's manicured, high-strung staging makes the submerged menace of the pieces hilarious, bracing, and deeply disturbing. Her laser-sharp cast turn 65 minutes of increasing irrationality into a giddy psychological thrill ride. —Justin Hayford $20-$25
Pygmalion
Through 2/10: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PMTheater & Performance
This fine Stage Left/BoHo Theatre coproduction reminded me how much richer and deeper George Bernard Shaw's 1912 comedy is than its sentimentalized musicalization, My Fair Lady. The tale of a misogynistic phonetics professor who teaches a cockney flower girl to speak well—and in so doing, transforms her into an independent woman beyond his control—Shaw's classic brilliantly satirizes gender roles, class, and morality, even as it delivers a sublimated but potent romance. In Vance Smith's staging, leads Steve O'Connell and Mouzam Makkar bring bristling intelligence to their strong-willed characters, both of whom use intellectual achievement to harness their chaotic emotions. —Albert Williams $25
