Events Search – The Short List (Theater)
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich
5/16-5/19: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PMTheater & Performance
Suppose I told you that Australia's Back to Back Theatre works with "intellectually disabled" actors? What would you expect from one of their shows? Drama therapy? Elementary theater games? A bunch of sweet simpletons making an endearing hash of, say, a scene from The Odd Couple? Or The Boys Next Door? I know I imagined all sorts of feel-good crap—until I saw a DVD of Back to Back's Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, as staged at Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne. Believe me, the thing is utterly, wittily, sometimes even brutally crap-free. Continue reading >> $28
Collected Stories
Through 5/19: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PMTheater & Performance
"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The saying comes from Zen tradition, but it refers to an archetype as universal as mortality itself, expressed in artworks from Oedipus Rex to All About Eve: children must destroy their parents—biological or spiritual—in order fully to become themselves. Still, there's nothing to say that the parent has to go quietly. Ruth Steiner is a literary lion and Lisa Morrison her grad-student cub; Donald Margulies's canny 1996 script follows their relationship over the course of six years, during which Lisa gets big enough to be dangerous. Gwendolyn Whiteside is unnecessarily skittish as Lisa—more like a naive freshman than somebody going for an advanced degree. But the role of Ruth is built for a tour de force, and Carmen Roman delivers a fine, strategically ambiguous one. As directed, appropriately, by the mother-daughter team of Mary Ann and Jessica Thebus, this American Blues Theater production culminates in a knock-down, drag-out that leaves welts. —Tony Adler $10-$49
2433 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago, IL 60614
Near North
773-871-3000Oklahoma!
Through 5/19: Wed-Sun, times vary; see websiteTheater & Performance
Lyric Opera's mounting of Rodgers and Hammerstein's landmark 1943 musical offers audiences a rare chance to see Agnes de Mille's original choreography, with its innovative melding of folk dance and classical ballet, performed by top-flight dancers under the guidance of de Mille protegee Gemze de Lappe. And it's great to hear Robert Russell Bennett's arrangements of Rodgers's score played by an opera house orchestra under James Lowe's baton. But despite splendid vocals (notably soprano Ashley Brown in the female lead) and expertly timed comic supporting performances (kudos to Usman Ally as a womanizing traveling salesman), director Gary Griffin's handling of the story's dramatic core—the rivalry between a cocky cowboy and a threatening farmhand for the love of a headstrong farm woman—is shallow. The result is sometimes exhilarating and always entertaining, but Oklahoma! is capable of more. —Albert Williams $32-$153
Still Alice
Through 5/19: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 PM, Sun 3 and 7:30 PMTheater & Performance
The most succinct first-person account of living with Alzheimer's disease remains the one provided by the first person diagnosed with it. Auguste Deter was 51 years old and otherwise healthy when she was brought, in 1901, to Dr. Alois Alzheimer's clinic in Frankfurt, Germany, with a strange case of what looked like premature senility characterized by confusion, volatile behavior, and severe memory lapses. "I have lost myself," she said. That about sums it up. The plaques and tangles Alzheimer would find in Deter's brain after her death, five years later, were strangling more than her neurons. They were destroying her identity, too. The past makes us who we are; if we lose access to it, we lose access to ourselves. Continue reading >> $36-$70
Water Tower Water Works, 821 N. Michigan Ave.
Gold Coast/Mag Mile/Streeterville
312-337-0665Roadkill
Through 5/22: Wed-Fri 6:45 PM, Sat 1:45 and 6:45 PM, Sun 1:45 PMTheater & Performance
This immersive, site-specific drama, directed by Cora Bissett and written by Stef Smith (it debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 2010), is staged on a bus and in a nondescript Bucktown apartment that soon starts to feel like a lower circle of hell. We arrive there with Mary, a teenage Nigerian girl, and her countrywoman Martha, who has promised Mary a prosperous life in America. Before long, the girl has been relieved of her passport, raped, held against her will, and forced into a prostitution ring run by a merciless Russian. The apartment's bland seediness and close quarters reinforce the feeling of entrapment and moral squalor, and bring us into almost unbearable proximity to Mercy Ojelade's heartrending Mary and Adura Onashile's tormented Martha. —Zac Thompson $45
The Lake Effect
Through 5/26: Tue-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat-Sun 4 PMTheater & Performance
Playwright Rajiv Joseph is best known for Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, which was introduced to Chicago last winter by the Lookingglass Theatre Company. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2010, the play offers a dreamlike, absurd, yet morally and politically serious evocation of Dubya's Iraq war—narrated by the title cat, who's killed for biting off an American soldier's hand only to find himself walking the ruined streets of Baghdad as a ghost. Don't expect the same sort of experience from The Lake Effect, the Joseph script getting an uneven but involving world-premiere production now at Silk Road Rising. This one is a totally different animal. Continue reading >> $35
By the Way, Meet Vera Stark
Through 6/2: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PMTheater & Performance
For certain kinds of people, achieving the American dream has always been a stealth operation. Coming up during the Depression, for instance, my dad obscured his Ashkenazic roots by Latinizing his first name (Maurice, from Moishe), classicizing his middle name (Alexander, after Alexander the Great) and Teutonizing his surname (Adler, from, well, something that wasn't Adler). Others have had to resort to more extreme methods. Obviously, a name change alone wasn't going to give a Negro access to the good life in pre-Civil Rights Act America, though a high-yellow complexion and careful locution might. Too dark to pass? Then it was a good idea to be phenomenally talented and resourceful. Josephine Baker found stardom by flirting with scandal en Francais. Musicians like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, by inventing jazz. Actors like Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen, and Stepin Fetchit, by simultaneously playing to and humanizing ("subverting" is too strong a word) white society's standard catalog of black caricatures. Continue reading >> $25-$81
Othello: The Remix
Through 6/15: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PMTheater & Performance
This slick hip-hop-style reinterpretation of Othello dumbs down Shakespeare's verbal, psychological, and emotional complexity to adolescent levels, draining the drama from the classic tale of a jealous husband who murders his adoring wife. Turning Othello from a Moorish military officer into a rapper from the ghetto, writer-directors Jeffrey and Gregory Qaiyum (aka the Q Brothers)—along with actors Postell Pringle and Jackson Doran—narrate the action in singsong, often sloppily rhymed couplets backed by an insistent electronic beat. The all-male crew tackle multiple roles, resorting to cartoonish caricatures. Oddly, Othello's doomed bride, Desdemona, is represented only as an invisible synthesized voice, while other female characters are played as bimbos or nags—a troubling take on an ever-timely story of male sexual jealousy and domestic violence. —Albert Williams $20-$35
Henry VIII
Through 6/16: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PMTheater & Performance
Barbara Gaines is a great leader, no doubt about it. She took a little Lincoln Avenue storefront theater—not even a storefront, really, but a rooftop-patio-over-a-bar theater—and built it into a big-name, big-budget, high-prestige cultural institution with a well-earned reputation for connecting Chicago to the international theater community through its World's Stages program, which I dearly love and sincerely respect. I think about what she's achieved every time I walk into her wood-paneled temple to the Bard on Navy Pier, Chicago Shakespeare Theater. But I've got to admit, I often find her directing hard to take. Continue reading >> $48-$78
The Most Important Week Ever
Through 6/22: Saturdays, 7:30 PMImprov/Sketch
Performers use each week's news headlines to create a satirical sketch show. $8-13
She-nannigans' Comedy Challenge
Through 7/18: Thu 7 PMStand-Up
Five to six comics compete for a $500 prize every week.
The Book of Mormon
Through 10/6: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PMTheater & Performance
I know it'll seem incomprehensible to you fans of talking turds, but I've never paid Comedy Central's South Park much mind one way or another. And when New York fell all over itself last year appreciating The Book of Mormon, I wondered if there wasn't just a smidge of hyperbole in calling the musical by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone (along with Robert Lopez) the best of the "century." Now that I've seen the Chicago production, however, I've been—well—converted. A wise mix of nasty satire and compassionate truth telling, Parker, Stone, and Lopez's tale of Mormon missionaries in Uganda is as entertaining—and, strangely, uplifting—a piece of work as anything in recent American theater. Although the book draws whole quivers full of big red arrows to everything that's ludicrous about the Mormon way, it also ends up making a case for the hope we all derive from silly myths. Meanwhile, playful as it is, it ranks up there with Lynn Nottage's Ruined in exposing the danger, dignity, and distortions of African life. The cast is uniformly and perfectly seductive. And is that Steppenwolf's famously earnest James Vincent Meredith, showing a new side of himself as the Ugandan village chief? Incredible. —Tony Adler
$65-$125
Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!
Open run: Thu 7:30 PM 312-948-4600Theater & Performance
Chicago Public Radio's satirical twist on the classic quiz show is taped before a live audience. Host Peter Sagal and crew mine news stories for quiz questions, with different panelists from the worlds of literature and entertainment and audience members participating each week. Politics supply the jokes du jour, but what happens off microphone is often funnier. —Ryan Hubbard $24.75
Maggie and Coco Save the World
Open run: the last Fri of each month, 8 PM,Theater & Performance
Given the cultural ascent of really good TV, it's surprising that there aren't more efforts, like this one, to adapt the serial structure to the stage. In Coriolis Theater's live "pilot" episode, angry 99-percenter Coco returns to Chicago from a six-month stint with Occupy Wall Street—to the surprise of her roommate Maggie, who's more inclined to occupy the couch and watch American Idol. There's little plot or action, but these 50 minutes do the one thing a pilot must: establish interesting characters you want to see again. Grayson Vreeland's cast is already more realistically diverse and relatable than the white-bread lineups you find on most young-adult urban sitcoms. If the show's writers develop compelling story lines for them, they might earn the repeat following that Coriolis is banking on. —Keith Griffith $10-$15
The Magic Parlour
Open run: Fri 7:30 and 9:30 PM; also Sun 5/12, 1 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
