Chicago Shakespeare Theater Artistic Director Barbara Gaines cleverly marries play and production concept in THE COMEDY OF ERRORS for her final production. 

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With a musical like TINA THE TINA TURNER MUSICAL, I come in expecting two primary elements: Big hits and star power. Fortunately, this first national tour delivers big-time on the star power with Zurin Villanueva in the title role. Villanueva is a definitive STAR: She has an immensely powerful belt, she emulates Tina Turner’s distinctive, gravelly belt, and she has boundless energy. I was exhausted watching Villanueva (who alternates the role with Ari Groover) perform it all without batting an eyelash. Villanueva has iconic performer energy in spades.

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Martin Yousif Zebari’s LAYALINA is a heartwarming multigenerational family play that spans from Baghdad to Skokie. While Zebari doesn’t shy away from portraying the family’s trauma and the challenges of their immigrant experiences, LAYALINA is the opposite of many other family plays. It’s about how the central family tries to reconnect and find commonalities, despite their generational and cultural differences. I first saw LAYALINA at Goodman Theatre’s New Stages Festival in 2021, and I thought it was beautifully structured and touching at that time. The structure remains the same, but now it’s even more hopefully optimistic. 

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Rajiv Joseph’s DESCRIBE THE NIGHT, now in its Chicago premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, is a sprawling exploration of the blurring of fiction and fact, censorship, and the quest to preserve truth. In that vein of “truthiness,” DESCRIBE THE NIGHT also brings fictional representations of historical figures and entirely fictional characters together. It’s also a test of my (admitted lack of) knowledge about 90 years of Russian history; it was only AFTER seeing the play that I realized Jewish writer Isaac Babel, Russian secret police officer Nikolai, and his wife Yevegenia were in fact real people. 

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