897 stories by "Lawrence Bommer"
A PASSION PLAY FROM PLACID Like a baby on a breast, Lifeline Theatre thrives on adaptations of "coming of age" novels. Like many memory-rich predecessors, Jessica Wright Buha's clear and pre…
SHRINK, ENLARGE THYSELF! Christopher Hampton's dramas are marvels of complicated construction, starting in the past and finding us fast. A retelling of the "creation myth" of psychoanalysis,…
DARK DOINGS IN POSTWAR PARIS Now in an appropriately driven local premiere by Chicago Opera Theater, Tobias Picker's two-and-a-half hour opera from 2001 delivers a bleak harvest of shame. Th…
A VICTORIAN TALE FOR TODAY Jackie Robinson was not, it seems, the first black baseball player in the major leagues. Long before 1946, Moses Fleetwood Walker was a catcher for the Toledo Blue…
DOOMSDAY THERAPY The peculiar premise behind Matt Lyle's lifestyle comedy, now running in a moderately intriguing Midwest premiere by The Ruckus, is that for some folks the end of the world …
ALL KINDS OF ADMISSIONS A peculiarly persuasive puzzle play, Daniel Pearle's resonant A Kid Like Jake strategically omits the title character from the cast of characters. That's very right: …
VOGUEING IT AT VERSAILLES The putative appeal of David Adjmi's Marie Antoinette is that everyone likes to watch a train wreck. Now exfoliating in Steppenwolf's upper stage in a dispensable C…
BEING ALIVE"AND SONDHEIM Way overdue and instantly invaluable, Porchlight Music Theatre's Sondheim on Sondheim delivers the inside look on Broadway's brightest. Rich with new arrangements fo…
GAGA FOR GANESHA Now in residence at Victory Gardens Theater, the newly minted Rasaka Theatre Company is in hot pursuit of more diversity on Chicago stages. Their mission: to share the tales…
VERY FINE FRENZIES Winter can be wonderful in Chicago"well, if you're safe inside the Auditorium Theatre for the ten performances of Unique Voices. The Joffrey Ballet's three-work showcase o…
IT'S ALL FOR THE WORST…IN A GOOD WAY With his typical topsy-turvy perversity, Charles Francis Addams might have been happy had the 2009 musical inspired by his sardonic New Yorke…
ELEVATING THE SUBWAY There's a very specific springboard for Redlined: A Chicago Lyric, 75 minutes of slam protest poetry: It's the elevated transit line that runs through the Windy City's N…
TITS AND ASSHOLES Gay activists who deride this delight forget just how radical the musical was in 1983 (the original film even more so in 1973). A third of a century later, it's still a mer…
WILL OF FOOLS You can't take it with you"but that doesn't mean you go gently into that good night. Dividing the Estate, Raven Theatre's latest offering, is the late Horton (The Trip to Bount…
ROUGH STEPS FOR A TEAM OF TEN It was worth the wait. It's been way overdue for Giordano Dance Chicago to finally play the Auditorium Theatre, part of the treasure house's ongoing 125th an…
PASSIONLESS PRONOUNCEMENTS Freud's enduring question persists: "What do women want?" Gina Gionfriddo's aggressively hip drama, now in an equally frenetic staging by Kimberly Senior, offers a…
THE JUICY APPLES' SLICE OF LOVE You can't keep an eloquent family down. TimeLine Theatre Company's concurrent productions of election-night episodes from Richard Nelson's Apple Family Plays …
ACTION SNAPSHOTS IN AN APPLE HARVEST Commissioned by New York's Public Theatre, the four-part saga Apple Family Plays by the prolific Richard Nelson is a remarkable effort to preserve the pr…
RELUCTANT HEROISM IN A CHANGING CAUSE Oracle Theatre, Chicago's 44-seat public-access venue where tickets are free, just unleashed another populist piledriver. It's a play with several sourc…
NO BOYS IN THIS BAND In only 80 minutes, Grant James Barjas's Accidentally, Like a Martyr assembles the very actual denizens of an obscure, unnamed gay bar on Manhattan's East Side"and ma…
ONE HAND, ONE HEART"ONE HIT! Sadly, hate conquers all in West Side Story, but the love we see and feel can hold its own. Though over a half-century old, the Bernstein/Laurents/So…
LET THERE BE DARK In endurance sagas such as Lord of the Flies and The Blue Lagoon, stranded youngsters on deserted islands try to reimagine civilization by mimicking adult classics, or else…
CAUGHT IN TENNESSEE'S WALTZ An opera disguised as a play, Tennessee Williams' 1951 labor of longings The Rose Tattoo is the first and last word on heartbreak. The master made a good choice t…
SING OUT, ETHEL! What a difference a vowel makes! After his catchy title The Book of Merman, it seems that Leo Schwartz' delightful world premiere musicale practically wrote itself: Yo…
ONE MIRACLE TOO MANY A very righteous offering from Stage Left Theatre, Penny Penniston's world premiere Keys of the Kingdom is a well-intentioned attempt to build bridges between ideologica…
