“Cruella de Vil, Cruella de Vil, if she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will….”
Was there ever a scarier, freakier villain than Cruella de Vil? The scrawny, witchy society dame determined to make dog-skin coats out of Dalmatian puppies is scarier than ever in “The 101 Dalmatians Musical,” playing in a short run at Cadillac [...]
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“Does Fox News have a theater critic?” I wondered, after viewing Second City Theatricals’ “Rush Limbaugh! The Musical.” Probably not. Live theater may be deemed too effete for their NASCAR- and gun sports-loving audiences. City Lit Theater in Edgewater cooks up a gritty, physical version of “Macbeth,” Shakespeare’s spookiest tragedy, boiling with energy and full of sound and fury. Every time I attend a show at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, I wonder, all over again, who had the bright idea of putting a theater on Navy Pier? To be sure, the theater complex has gorgeous views of Lake Michigan, but who cares about the views outside a theater? It’s slow and awkward to get onto [...] Don’t go to ‘The Addams Family’ musical expecting ‘Christmas with The Addams Family.’ Creative team: Uh, well, we’re basing it on the original Chas. Addams cartoons, not the TV show. Charles Ludlam’s most famous campy comedy, “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” gets a first-rate revival at Court Theatre in Hyde Park under the direction of Sean Graney. I’ve noted before that hard times evoke nostalgia in theater directors, but George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s “You Can’t Take It With You” needs no such impetus to be worth a revival. In Lookingglass Theatre Company’s “Fedra: Queen of Haiti,” playwright J. Nicole Brooks moves the ancient Greek myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus into a near-future alternate Haiti that’s become a world power. Given the island’s rich history and culture (the first Western Hemisphere country after the U.S. to achieve independence from imperial Europe … the first [...] In 1988, John Waters’ edgy film “Hairspray” looked back at the 1960s civil rights movement. In an ironic twist, Waters equated prejudice against people over skin color to bigotry against people over size, much as Randy Newman’s satirical song “Short People” had done a decade before. |
 
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