I was curious about the changes to Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone’s THE BOOK OF MORMON, which underwent revisions before its post-pandemic return to Broadway in 2021. I imagined a substantial overhaul of the material, along with input from co-director/choreographer Casey Nicholaw (Parker also co-directed). After seeing the show, I can state the changes are minimal. All of the musical numbers are the same, and some of the dialogue may have been altered. But I don’t buy that the Ugandan characters have been given more agency or power. 

Continue reading “Review: THE BOOK OF MORMON National Tour Presented by Broadway In Chicago” →

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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LaDarrion Williams’s world premiere play BOULEVARD OF BOLD DREAMS has a fascinating premise transporting audiences to February 29, 1940 in the hours before Hattie McDaniel became the first Black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The play finds Hattie at a bar at the Ambassador Hotel, where she encounters bartender Arthur Brooks, who aspires to be a Hollywood film director, and Dottie, a cynical maid. While based on real events, the play’s encounter is fictional, and the interiority of Hattie’s thoughts here is in large part the imagination of the playwright. That said, the vision for the play isn’t meaty enough to sustain its one hour and forty minute run-time. 

Continue reading “Review: BOULEVARD OF BOLD DREAMS at TimeLine Theatre Company” →

TONI STONE is a memory play—in more ways than one. Lydia R. Diamond’s play is indeed structured in non-linear (and yet, still mostly chronological order) as the titular Toni Stone recounts her memories as the first woman to regularly play professional baseball. It’s also a memory play in the sense that it captures a moment in history that many audiences may not know before they see the work. In real life, Toni Stone played for the Indianapolis Clowns, a Negro League team, in 1953. The play itself never references that year—or any dates in Toni’s timeline—outright (the program merely lists the setting as “1920’s-1940’s USA.”) Instead, Toni weaves between different moments in her life, diving in and out of them—much like she might dive to catch a ball in the outfield (although she played second base).

Continue reading “Review: TONI STONE at Goodman Theatre” →

To say Alexis J. Roston’s performance as Billie Holiday in LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR AND GRILL is a masterclass in acting and singing is no exaggeration. Roston gives the kind of lived-in, seamless performance that only comes from knowing the material intimately well, and indeed, it’s a role she’s played many times before. For Mercury Theater Chicago’s current production, she’s now co-directing with Artistic Director Christopher Chase Carter. It’s clear that Roston put a lot of work into making this performance happen, but the result is true stage magic. Roston is no doubt putting her all into her portrayal of Billie Holiday, but she makes it all seem effortless. 

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As implied by the title, Christina Anderson’s the ripple, the wave that carried me home is a narrative of homecoming. The play’s protagonist and narrator, Janice, remarks at the top of the show that she doesn’t often talk to her family back home in the fictional town of Beacon, Kansas— in fact, she shares that she only calls her mother on the first and third Sundays of every month, seven out of 10 bank holidays, and during medical incidents. But then Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman of the African-American Recognition Committee in Beacon calls Janice and asks her to speak at an upcoming public event in honor of her father. Janice must metaphorically reckon with her homecoming and her childhood in Beacon.

Continue reading “Review: THE RIPPLE, THE WAVE THAT CARRIED ME HOME at Goodman Theatre” →