Author: Colin Douglas
A Surreal, Gay Intergalactic Adventure
I Promised Myself to Live Faster
Following a wild and welcoming opening number by a lovely chanteuse, we’re introduced to an Everyman, named Tim. He’s an affable gay young guy who needs a change. Right now, he’s just too overcome by his disappointing love life to even get out of bed. His blankets are strewn with trash, old magazines and empty Chinese restaurant takeout containers. A jovial barkeep suddenly appears out of nowhere, trying to help Tim by curiously directing him to the grungy men’s room. All of a sudden Tim finds himself tumbling through a portal, bound for a surreal, gay intergalactic adventure around the universe.
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A Feminine Focus
The Last Queen of Camelot
The lights dim, cries of battle fill the intimate Edge Theater, swords clash and royalty reigns. In Idle Muse Theatre Company’s world premiere, skillfully adapted and capably directed by Evan M. Jackson, audiences revisit the world of King Arthur, Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere. In this new script, Jackson takes a step back to 14th century Briton, and breathes new, feminine focus into a story that’s become a familiar legend over the centuries.
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Gallows Humor
Dying For It
No mere cry for help, he’s really going to do it. Semyon Semyonovich has decided that there’s nothing left to live for and no one will miss him if he’s gone. Masha, his nagging wife, constantly carps at him and Serafima, his live-in mother-in-law, reminds him that he’s an idiot. Semyon is poor, unemployed, has no prospects of finding work and doesn’t contribute anything to either his home or society. So the depressed man wakes up early one morning and concludes that the world would be better if he’d just kill himself. Sounds really depressing, right? Well, nothing could be further from the truth.
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A Play With Music
The Threepenny Opera
Light the candles, chill the champagne and cut the cake! Unbelievably, Theo Ubique is celebrating it’s 25th anniversary of excellent musical and dramatic productions, while (thankfully) showing no sign of slowing down. Artistic Director extraordinaire, Fred Anzevino, once again dons the director’s cap himself to personally guide this peerless production. And it is, indeed, a stellar, full evening of theatre.
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Women On Top
A Town Called Progress
Promethean Theatre Ensemble’s Spring production seems to be an allegory. It’s a work of art that, beyond the story, can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning of some kind. Often this buried message within it is a moral or an ideal. Like George Orwell’s political satire, Animal Farm, or even the iconic theological allegory by John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, Chicago playwright Trina Kakacek’s latest play, now having its world premiere, is an allegory about people striving to establish a Utopian society that allows everyone, particularly women, their personal freedom.
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Lights, Cameras, Action!
The Comedy of Errors
In a stellar career that spans decades, Barbara Gaines, the gifted Artistic Director and founder of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, is retiring. She’s directed this latest offering at CST as her final production at the theater’s home on on Navy Pier. Having helmed nearly 70 productions since 1986, Ms. Gaines has guided 33 of the Bard’s histories, tragedies and comedies during her career. In her directorial swan song, Barbara reunites with her long-time collaborator, Second City veteran, Ron West to create, as she says, this “love letter to theater making.” This creative, comic adaptation of Shakespeare’s earliest and shortest play, the production reimagines the play as a WWII era film.
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The Queen of Rock & Roll
Tina: The Tina Turner Musical
When the most satisfying moments of a musical arrive following the curtain call, something is amiss. After the more than two dozen talented cast members take their well-deserved bows, the show explodes into a concert presentation of the best of the best. Commonly found in jukebox musicals, we get a mega-mix of three of Tina Turner’s greatest hits, allowing the entire cast to delight the audience by singing and shaking their groove thing. The audience is invited to sing along, and they do so with gusto. This kind of joyous choral camaraderie erases the sad memories of Tina’s tragic life that we’ve just experinced and sends the audience home feeling like they’ve had a good time. But before this, theatergoers have to endure a whole lot of troubling, cringeworthy melodrama.
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A Gem of Gender Splendor
Layalina
Little does a multigenerational Assyrian family, living in Baghdad in 2003, realize they’re about to undergo a huge change. The month of March that year was a turbulent time for Iraqi citizens as a United States-led coalition invaded the country to help overthrow the brutal government of Saddam Hussein. A joint resolution of Congress claimed the invasion would disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11. In addition, it sought to end Hussein’s reign of terrorism and free the Iraqi people. The War would continue for the next eight more years, claiming many thousands of lives.
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Truth is a lie; Lies Are Truth
Describe the Night
Fascinating, intriguing, gripping and often funny—these adjectives all appropriately describe Rajiv Joseph’s mesmerizing new drama, now playing in-the-round at Steppenwolf’s Ensemble Theater. The story is an intricately layered labyrinth of characters, locales and historical periods. Some of the people are real, while others are purely fictitious. The story, that bounces around through time and place, is sometimes humorous, frequently gripping and truly mind-boggling. Rajiv Joseph (the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”) spins a story that illuminates the ethical enigma that is modern Russia.
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Life Lessons and Puppet Pornography
Avenue Q
This upbeat, lovable musical opens with an infectious, toe-tapping “Avenue Q Theme,” which kind of serves as a prologue. Then an optimistic 23-year-old named Princeton, newly graduated from college, wanders through the audience. He rhetorically asks the musical question, “What Do You Do With a BA in English?” Princeton’s already lined up his first job but he needs an affordable place to live in New York City. With limited funds, bills piling up and student loans to pay, Princeton has journeyed through Alphabet City, down to the less-expensive part of Greenwich Village. Princeton’s life lessons are about to begin on Avenue Q.
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