Theater Review

CHICAGO – As a testament to its set design, it wasn’t immediately clear if certain structures were naturally part of the Strawdog Theatre space or if they were fabricated specifically for the “Old Town” production.

CHICAGO – While Johnny Depp’s portrayal of the demon barber of Fleet Street in the 2007 film iteration sells you on his fiendish ways, actor and singer David Hess in the musical bobbles more in purgatory rather than living hysterically in hell.

CHICAGO – It’s not in calm seas but within torrential rains when we lay bare our true colors. Lauded playwright Neil LaBute was fixated on testing these human limits and exploring our different styles of conflict resolution when he minted the three-person play “In a Dark Dark House”.

CHICAGO – Three of the planet’s most examined scribes of all time – a trio of Victorian spinsters, in fact, who are credited with some of the most passionate literature ever written – are resurrected in the meticulous Chicago production of “Brontë” from illustrious playwright Polly Teale.

CHICAGO – Tucked surreptitiously at the way-way-way-off-Loop location of the Prop Thtr – Chicago’s oldest-surviving non-equity theater in the area – the signature that is “Ceres” is its high-octane energy. The cast act in harmony much in the same way as the “X-Men” character Juggernaut: once their momentum is synthesized, it can’t be stopped.

CHICAGO – There was opportunity aplenty for director Kristina Schramm to miss this mark and leave theatergoers with acidic resentment. Tasked with the tall order of bringing to life Ray Bradbury’s classic anthology “The Martian Chronicles,” though, she wasn’t bested by the oddity of the undertaking.

CHICAGO – If you don’t live in Chicago, you’ll have either never heard of the Chicago Transit Authority or you’ll think it stands for something aside from the mass-transit system that it is. If you are a Chicagoan, though, it’s inconceivable not to know about the CTA and certainly improbable to have never used it.

CHICAGO – The minds who bring alive this risqué Chicago remount took their time to unearth their manipulatively seductive emcee.

They spent five years, in fact, to dig the now-coined “Dreadful Penny’s Exquisite Horrors” up from its resting place and rework the production into the quintessence of sex, violence, fear, fantasy and all the faults that make humans humane while also quite the contrary.

CHICAGO – There’s a fine line between being batty and being brilliant. If there’s anything the world’s most brilliant inventors have taught us, it’s that most world-altering creators blurred that very line or visited the crazy farm before the world acknowledged their genius.

CHICAGO – With Chicago’s art gallery district as its conversational and thought-provoking backdrop, the free thinking “Bird Dog Sedition” is written, directed and performed explicitly to dangerously deconstruct theatrical conventions.