897 stories by "Lawrence Bommer"
TWO BATTLES IN ONE WAR As sturdily written and swiftly moving as it was in 1982, Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Play remains an enduring testament to the homefront battles that African-America…
SPRINGING INTO SPRING In Chicago, spring can never come early enough. But, alas, it's February, so it has to be an indoor sport. Leave it to our homegrown dance company, the Joffrey Ballet,�…
YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LENDÂ THIS PRODUCTION YOUR EARS Brutal and relentless, Julius Caesar chronicles a fateful course of envy and revenge defeating idealism and loyalty: Brutus and C…
VIRTUAL THEATER Teddy Ferrara, Goodman Theatre's new commissioned work, is almost three hours long. That excess suggests that nobody had the courage to cut or, not knowing what it was about …
THE LADY OF THE GARDENIAS Thanks to Lanie Robertson’s bedrock-basic script, Rob Lindley's dedicated staging and the utter effacement of a good vocalist into a great one, courtesy of Al…
READY FOR HER CLOSE-UP, MR. DEMILLE From the start it seemed strange that anyone would make a musical out of a movie that embodies its medium so completely. Yes, the film All About Eve deser…
SAD TRIUMPH OF HOPE OVER EXPERIENCE It’s like kicking a puppy dog to dislike Charity Hope Valentine. Charity is the cloyingly-named heroine of the 1966 musical by Cy Coleman, Dorothy F…
A CRY TO CARE The 85-minutes of this electrifying protest play begin with a lone microphone suddenly erupting in an ear-splitting feedback. The noise is intolerable, no less than what it ush…
A DAISY CHAIN OF DEAD ENDS MAKES FOR INVIGORATING THEATER Shattered Globe Theatre has uncovered yet another tailspinning drama to live up to their name. British playwright Lucinda Cox shows …
BONDAGE IN EGYPT AND VIRGINIA Of the 150,000 Jews who lived in the U.S during the Civil War, twice as many (6,000) fought for the Union as for the Confederacy. Less well-known is the fact th…
SLOW, SAD AND STRANGE Sooner or later (preferably the former), we expect a play to pay off " to deliver a "gotcha" revelation that makes sudden or accumulated sense out of what seemed to be …
AMERICA'S BEST NOTES Beginning its first new season of self-generated musicals, the Mercury Theater has, true to its name, raised the temperature with A Grand Night for Singing, a heartfelt,…
FIXING WHAT WON'T HEAL Jon Robin Baitz' Broadway drama Other Desert Cities depicts a crisis of apparent betrayal and imminent exposure that besets the Wyeth clan, a wealthy Jewish family she…
ONE RIVER CITY DESERVES ANOTHER If ever a show spelled out summer, it’s Meredith Willson’s 1957 masterpiece The Music Man. Throughout the rollicking story the title character exu…
THAT KINKY KINESCOPE It's a time trip that denies the original intent"a live taping of a dead T.V. series. The iconic archetype of the boob tube's "golden age," I Love Lucy wasn't just the l…
YOU ONLY DIE ONCE One of the great pick-up lines that soldiers and sailors on leave during World War II (and probably the Trojan War too) used to seduce a one-night standee was, "Let's do it…
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD It's easy to see what drew Cameron Mackintosh to revive Lionel Bart's hit musical 18 years ago: Dickens is a lot like Victor Hugo. Like Mackintosh' smash Les Miserables,…
A DICKENS OF A PERFORMER It's been two centuries since Charles Dickens' birth. Miriam Margolyes, famed for her portrayals in Harry Potter, The Age of Innocence, and William Shakespeare's Rom…
A GILBERT AND SULLIVAN FOR 2012 The best show of the year has finally arrived. The Book of Mormon is a perfectly packaged fusion of the satire we need in a sassy musical comedy and the en…
MOLIÈRE FOR DUMMIES Attend David Ives' The School for Lies"a manic contemporary travesty"if you want to fully appreciate Molière's 1666 masterpiece The Misanthrope, as serious a comedy a…
FINDING NEW WAYS TO TURN A BODY The big news from Hubbard Street Dance Chicago as the intrepid troupe launches their four-day "winter series" at the Harris Theatre in Millennium Park? It's t…
A DOCTORED WHO How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical is only 90 minutes long"not much more time than it would take to watch the beloved animation and read the book by the late Dr. Seus…
A TASTY POTPOURRI PASTICHE IS MORE PASTRY THAN PORRIDGE Billed as "a holiday bender" (as in gender), About Face Theatre's 90-minute confection includes a 45-minute "cocktail hour" pre-show w…
A SKIRMISH OF WIT THAT CAN ONLY BE SHAW In 1896, George Bernard Shaw planned to beat Oscar Wilde at his own playful plotting and acerbic wit, so he wrote his answer to the recently successfu…
DOWN HOME TO HEAL UP It's hard to make healing feel dramatic. But that's the challenge to which Julie Marie Myatt mostly rises in this engaging Midwest premiere. In 90 minutes she depicts in…
