897 stories by "Lawrence Bommer"
STOOD UP YET AGAIN… "Birth was the death of him": Terse to the point of cruelty, Samuel Beckett here devours the human experience in six words. Waiting for Godot, his minimalist masterp…
OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF CENTENARIANS "Life is short. It's up to you to make it sweet." No cliché in Emily Mann's moving 1993 play, this is one of many hard-earned pearls of wisdom in her gener…
PATTI QUAKES, PATTI SHAKES. PATTI GETS HER CAKES You can only listen and love: The former Patricia Louise Holt-Edwards oozes energy on stage. She kicks off her shoes in sheer delight. Loving…
PROMETHEUSÂ SETS THE STAGE AFIRE Imagination sometimes seems abstract. It's a term you can't always savor — until you see it blossom before you. It's in full force in City Lit's revi…
YOUR FLIES ARE OPEN The running joke behind this unauthorized musical based on a 1954 novel and a 1963 film is how it hides its homage: To avoid copyright infringement, we never hear "Flies"…
NOT A TENNESSEE WALTZ The strangest thing about Suddenly Last Summer is that the main character is never seen. But, talked about for 90 minutes by two dangerously partisan women, he's …
A LOT OF BLOOD WILL OUT Blood will have blood. It also sells tickets. And the theater's thirstiest sanguinary spectacle remains the unspeakable Scottish tragedy. The darkest doings the Bard …
A ROTTEN KIND OF GUN CONTROL It's an inhuman term, “collateral damage.” Usually it's reserved for supposedly dispensable victims, necessary sacrifices for a nobler cause. But wha…
A PLAY THAT POOPS ON ITSELF The animal realm (we won't say kingdom) fairly teems with same-sex survival. In all, over 1,500 species experiment with alternative lifestyles: Sapphic seagull…
A GLOBAL FLASHPOINT BECOMES A THEATRICAL FLASHFLOOD Until the Flood lasts only 70 minutes. But its concentrated running time delivers a devastating drama. A ton of truth-telling now on to…
"KICK ME" CHARACTERS Born to be bad, Nicky Silver is an acerbic gay playwright who has employed his outsider status to skewer the American family (Pterodactyls), relationships (The Food Chai…
JOFFREY STEPS OUT OF A DREAM, OR DELUSIONS OF A SCANDINAVIAN SOLSTICE First, a necessary clarification for A Midsummer Night's Dream: The title and the setting could easily confuse lovers…
REVOLVING FATES — AIN’T IT GRAND? Like the chandelier in Phantom of the Opera or the helicopter in Miss Saigon, a revolving door is the all-purpose metaphor for Berlin's…
CHRISTMAS CAN BE CRUEL More than most, life's victims need their storytellers. William Inge (1913-1973) wrote his characters from the inside out — theirs and his. A heart surgeon witho…
DOUBLE VISION, OR LOST IN THE LAFFS Can a forced farce make a theater audience howl with laughter, never realizing until the very end that the joke is on them? That's almost a rhetorical …
MY FAIR SIGNORA, OR DONIZETTI, SOUP TO NUTS He didn't just write Lucia di Lammermoor, Don Pasquale, L'Elisir d'Amore, Poliuto, The Daughter of the Regiment, Maria Stuarda, Robert Devereux…
A CON IS NEVER "EX" The nickname Lettie comes from the Greek term "Letitia" or "joy.” That's one of many bleak ironies that stalk the anti-heroine of Boo Killebrew's survival saga, a w…
SCATTERSHOT SATIRE AIMS AT MOVING TARGETS It's easy to think that humor is subjective — until an entire audience's spontaneous guffaw undermines any such abstraction. Often enough, tha…
SWEET BIRD OF TRUTH The Gentleman Caller was the original name for a breakthrough "memory play" that, opening at Chicago's Civic Theatre in late 1944, made Tom "Tennessee" Williams famous…
PRETTY UNLIKELY WOMAN When worlds collide: A celluloid fantasy about an L.A. call girl suddenly thrust into affluence, the much-loved 1990 film Pretty Woman starred a suave, salt-and-p…
A VICTIM'S IMPACT STATEMENT Critics always worry about giving away too much — in spoilers and such. And, yes, at first that fear seemed real with hang by U.K. playwright debbie t…
CERRUDO'S SPRING FLING It's now dance history but, performed last weekend at the Auditorium Theatre, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's annual Spring Series, An Evening of Alejandro Cerrudo, …
DANCE DELIRIUM As jukebox musicals go, On Your Feet! really earns its exclamation point. No question, the music alone, which won 26 Grammy Awards, would justify this 2015 tribute to th…
CAGE-MATCH COMBAT: IBSEN VS. TRUMP Right now, the biggest prize fight in Chicago is at Randolph and Dearborn. More polemically urgent than psychologically penetrating, a new treatment of Hen…
DIFFICULT TO PICTURE The Picture of Dorian Gray is its author's self-portrait — perversely paradoxical, sardonically aesthetic, and (necessarily) obsessed with concealment. First pu…
