Performing Arts Search
2013 Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month Celebration
Tue., May 21, 12 p.m.Theater & Performance
Celebrate Asian-American Heritage Month with Chinese music, dance and martial arts performances.
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
Shaping Sound
Tue 5/28, 8 PMDance
Choreographers and dancers combine music and movement in a unique form of visual art. $39-$89
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
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
Life Without Roses
Through 4/26: Fri 7:30 PM; no shows 4/19Theater & Performance
Founded in Chicago in 1914 by Margaret Anderson, The Little Review was one of the most important periodicals for literary modernism, publishing work by T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and many others. June Sawyers's one-character play, based on Anderson's memoir My Thirty Years' War, traces the bohemian editor's career from her arrival in Chicago to her 1917 departure for New York. Sawyers does a creditable job of capturing the era's glamour and sense of possibility, and there's an added frisson to seeing the show on the same floor of the Fine Arts Building where the magazine had offices for a while. But Cynthia Judge's genial, script-in-hand performance as Anderson lacks the requisite daring and panache. —Zac Thompson $10
