Launching BoHo Theatre’s fifteenth season, Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s BRIGHT STAR is an earnest and charming show that wears its heart proudly on its musical sleeve. Martin and Brickell have composed a rousing and heartfelt bluegrass-tinged score, which BoHo’s band beautifully and spiritedly delivers. This North Carolina-set musical centers on Alice Murphy and her unusual life story, toggling back-and-forth between 1923 and 1946 as it relays this narrative. While Alice’s backstory and her star-crossed love with Jimmy Ray form the heart of BRIGHT STAR, the show weaves this together with a secondary story of the young, idealistic writer, Billy and his childhood friend and love interest, Margo. Alice and Billy’s stories intersect in a surprising way.

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Lynn Nottage’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning SWEAT, now in its Chicago premiere at Goodman Theatre under the direction of Ron OJ Parson, focuses on a group of blue-collar factory workers in Reading, Pennsylvania. Bound together by the toils of working-class life in the town’s steel-tubing factory, these friends and family members gather at a local bar to let off steam and celebrate special occasions. And though the work at the factory may not be fulfilling, Nottage makes clear this work is vital for the characters’ livelihoods. For many of them, a life of working at the factory dates back generations. As the play toggles between 2000 and 2008, Nottage also reflects how her characters’ lives intersect with current events and questions of race, class, and success in America.

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In HANDS ON A HARDBODY, now making its Chicago premiere with Refuge Theatre Project, the mobility offered by that titular hardbody truck is not just of the wheeled variety. Instead, the contest among 10 working class Texans to be the last to have their hands on that Nissan truck also becomes a rather obvious symbol of the American Dream. While book writer Doug Wright, lyricist Amanda Green, and composers Green and Trey Anastasio are not subtle in their treatment of that metaphor, HANDS ON A HARDBODY is a thoughtful meditation on how elusive that dream can be.

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The national tour of A BRONX TALE, now playing Broadway In Chicago’s newly renamed James M. Nederlander Theatre, tries to fit in many themes in its swift run time of just two hours. Based on the play by Chazz Palminteri, with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Glenn Slater, the musical introduces us to Calogero, a young man living, of course, in the Bronx. At the age of nine, young Calogero (Frankie Leoni) does a favor for Sonny (Joe Barbara), a mob man of sorts living in the neighborhood. As thanks in kind, Sonny takes Calogero under his wing and tries to teach him the ways of the world. But Calogero’s mother, Rosina (Michelle Aravena) and father, Lorenzo (Richard H. Blake, reprising the role from the Broadway run), espouse an entirely different life philosophy based on hard work. Lorenzo, in particular, tells his son he despises nothing more than wasted talent. As Calogero (Joey Barreiro) reaches high school, he must decide how to develop his own moral compass.

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Jackie Sibblies Drury’s WE ARE PROUD TO PRESENT A PRESENTATION…, currently onstage as the second production in Steppenwolf for Young Adults’ season, opens up challenging questions about history, who has the right to tell what story, and how best we can represent critical moments from the past without complete information. In the play, Drury lays bare the white washing of much of history and how the identities that we bring into the room shape our understanding of the past. Under the direction of Hallie Gordon and Gabrielle Randle, the six actors of the ensemble dive into the complexities of this play with full force and with a clear trust and respect for one another. WE ARE PROUD TO PRESENT A PRESENTATION…offers up issues that are not only provoking and challenging for students, but for any audience member.

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