I am not a theater critic but I have been devoted to covering theater since my early 1980s report on the explosion of Chicago storefront theaters for National Public Radio. On The Mara Tapp Show in the 1990s, I was honored to host weekly conversations about and offer scenes from some of Chicago’s best shows, and delighted when those interviews filled houses for our local theaters.

In 2015, at the request of friends, I started a series of emails with recommendations for shows I thought worthy of patrons. Some years later, actors, directors and publicity people in Chicago’s theater world prevailed on me to share these raves, a request I accepted, especially in light of the increasing tensions in the theater world and need to keep Chicago theaters healthy.
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Find out what the critics think at the Review Round-up on the website of TheatreInChicago.com.

Breaking News

Celebrate the best Chicago’s Fall plays with “It’s Theatre Season,” courtesy of the The League of Chicago Theatres. Get buy one, get one half-price tickets to select shows on Hot Tix from October 1 – October 31, 2026, for certain performances October 6 -December 2, 2026. Find a complete list of shows and purchase tickets at https://hottix.org/itstheatreseason/. See the League of Chicago Theatres Fall Theatre Guide at https://chicagoplays.com/chicago-theatre-guide/.

Here are my recommendations about shows to see now and later this Fall!

Two magnificent shows that I raved about are back! They are A Red Orchid Theatre’s Birds of North America and Kokandy Productions’ Jekyll & Hyde, which is now playing at Broadway in Chicago. Both have been honored with multiple Jeff Awards. My original raves are below. If you didn’t catch these shows the first time around, make sure you do this time, and if you’ve already been moved by them, why not see them again?

Theater Raves has been renamed Raves to reflect the fact that I am now also raving about music performances and art exhibitions. Here’s to raves about all the arts!

I’ve stepped into the 21st Century and you can find my raves on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/tappraves/. Please follow me to shine a spotlight on the excellent performing arts organizations and artists I am honored to cover.

Theater Raves

The Birth of the Pill

TimeLine Theatre Company through October 11

Recommended

Who knew you could write a comedy about the discovery of the birth control pill? TimeLine’s latest show does just that.

The Birth of the Pill began 15 years ago when TimeLine’s Artistic Director PJ Powers got a package of books by Chicago Journalist Jonathan Eig with a note saying he was “a neighbor and a fan,” and saying he’d love to chat if TimeLine ever wanted to adapt one of his books. Thus began a collaboration involving a book Eig, who later won the Pulitzer Prize, was still writing. Powers reached out to Playwright Jessica Huang who reinvented Eig’s for the stage. Eig focused on four major players – Activist Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood, Philanthropist Katherine McCormick who came from money that grew exponentially when she married a Chicago McCormick, Scientist Gregory “Goody” Pincus, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and his Research Fellow Min Chueh Chang, a Cambridge-educated immigrant whose father was a Chinese magistrate. There are, of course, others in this story, many of whom Huang included in her play. She also tried to correct Eig’s lack of emphasis on the scope of the pain and side effects the 1,500 Puerto Rican women who lived in poverty endured as the first human test subjects – many without understanding what they were given or giving their consent – of a much stronger version of the pill. Huang does this by framing her play with a vivacious and outspoken puertorriqueña, who praises Eig’s book and claims the play as her story. Unfortunately, these moments undercut the play by plugging Eig’s book at the beginning, and offering him a chance to apologize at the end for not giving this critical part of the story proper emphasis. Making Ramona Delgado, our charming guide, represent all of the women who were part of the study, seems dangerously close to tokenizing her, placing an unfair weight on her shoulders.

Fortunately, María Victoria Martínez. the actress who plays Ms. Delgado, and a number of other roles, is so stellar that she manages to overcome these weaknesses with her engaging inhabitation of the lively storyteller. Sandra Marquez, a respected actor and director, deftly guides the action. Her star-studded cast that features some revered Chicago actors makes it sing. A few are always a joy to watch. Janet Ulrich Brooks rings the right dose of strength, perseverance and integrity to the role of Margaret Sanger, revealing a stubborn, often humorless power even when she’s on a cane. Mary Beth Fisher is perfection as Katherine McCormick. She is regal yet radical in every syllable and move, smart – no surprise since McCormick was one of the first women to graduate from MIT – and all too familiar with the ironies of life. Mitchell J. Fain gives us an appropriately scrappy “Goody” Pincus, never forgetting his immigrant roots or the bruises from losing a Harvard University faculty position, though at times the script treats him as be more stereotypically “Jewish” – something he plays to – than other roles. David Parkes is the magnetic and confident Dr. John Rock to whom Pincus appeals for the next step of the scientific trials. Parkes embodies Rock’s ability to balance his Catholicism with his devotion to science. “I’m a doctor and religion is a poor scientist,” he tells Pincus. Rock’s is the healthiest attitude about the pleasures of sex and responsibilities of parenting. The scene in which Pincus seeks out Rock in a locker room is priceless. It perfectly captures the tensions between Jews and Gentiles at Harvard in a time of Ivy League quotas and tremendous antisemitism. Rammel Chan channels calm professionalism and ethics in his portrayal of Min Chueh Chang, who does the heavy lifting in the lab while Pincus flits in and out.

The Birth of the Pill has many fine and funny moments but it has major flaws as well. What makes it worth watching, aside from the fine acting, is its parade of incredible ironies and obstacles that are so that are so in keeping with American self-deception and bureaucracy. After the show, the Brilliant Redhead and I spent some time on serious questions it raised for us, ones worth pondering and discussing. For example, what lens should we apply to history – our contemporary one that judges past actions from a modern perspective or the lens of its time in history when ethical questions were often presented but hideous events still happened. How much history do we have to know to judge historical figures? Do the ends ever justify the means? Probably not but if people get upset enough good ends can emerge from unforgiveable means. No one can call the Chicago Fire anything but a tragedy and yet from its ashes came our gridded streets and an excellent public library system. The Tuskegee Experiment was an abdominal transgression but now every institution of higher learning that does experiments involving human subjects must have their consent.

In a time when many believe that government policies are simply ways to get rid of the poor, and black and brown people, this play has a certain resonance.

The Humanities

Victory Gardens Theater through October 4

Highly Recommended

Who hasn’t sat through a drowned-in-dogma or way-too-woke play without wondering whether your brain or backside hurts more? It’s hard to imagine avoiding such well-intentioned shows in our traumatic times in which battles between the Right and the Left, along with many other perspectives, leave one exhausted & reduced to reading, watching or listening to drivel so tame that it neither offends nor interests anyone.

Nothing about The Humanities is tame but it is timely. Suffice it to say, all passions run high here, including those of everyone reacting to the play’s central conflict of a Conservative Activist coming to speak on campus. Think Charlie Kirk but don’t stop there. Conflicts have arisen over such speakers for decades.

Nowhere is the battle more heated than on the campuses of colleges and universities. It has been raging for decades, starting in the 1960s and ‘70s when I lived with my professor parents and observed the tensions unfold at the University of Chicago. When I returned as a graduate student, the Progressive/Conservative War was still smoldering and by the time I married a U of C professor in the 1980s, it persisted but in a different form since higher education had become increasingly corporatized. As a journalist, I covered education for more than 30 years and this was a frequent subject. Even a place like the U of C, known for rigorous pursuit of the intellectual life in a particularly humorless way, fell victim to bean counters and presidents who, rather than honoring the tradition of being appointed from U of C faculty, well-versed in education, came from outside.

The wonder of The Humanities is that it turns a contemporary lens on the legacy of this tragic march to uniformity in higher education uniform, this appeal to the consumerist approach to pedagogy, which often leads to a decline in the quality of the very process it claims to embrace. Even better, Playwright Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s smart and sensitive script captures the humor, the horror and the humanities with subtlety and depth. I became a fan of Ayers Dohrn when I saw Revolution(s), an extraordinary play for which he collaborated with Rock-and-Roll-Hall-of-Famer Tom Morello, best known for his time with Rage Against the Machine, at Goodman Theatre in October 2025. Both men have impressive radical roots. Morello is the nephew of Jomo Kenyatta, the Kenyan anti-colonial activist and politician who served as its first president. Ayers Dohrn is the son of Chicago residents Bill Ayers & Bernadine Dohrn, part of the leadership of the Radical Weathermen AKA Weather Underground, a militant offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society. Their protests against the Vietnam War included bombing the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, actions that led them to live underground for a decade. Both moved into the world of higher education. So did Zayd Ayers Dohrn, who also is a professor and Director of the “Writing for Screen + Stage” MFA program at Northwestern University. Full disclosure: we shared several meals when Ayers Dohrn was a pre-teen through a mutual U of C faculty friend.

Ayers Dohrn clearly learned a lot underground and following his parents’ surrender. He is worth hearing. Yet he could not have done this alone. Director Eddie Torres, a veteran of Chicago’s theater scene who is also a talented actor, animates the script. The irony here is that Torres caught the theater bug from the adored and revered Dennis Zacek, who co-founded Victory Gardens Theater with his equally talented wife. The made it into a powerhouse on Chicago’s dramatic scene with a team of playwrights and professionals who fostered new work and created a home for creative souls and original plays. All that was destroyed by an increasingly corporate board that had a different vision. Of course, it’s more complex but the similarities to The Humanities are uncanny and heartbreaking.

Back to the play and the creative forces that make it sing. The actors are uniformly excellent with their nuanced portrayals that display valor and a compromised coming to terms with the reality of their worlds. Kudos to some of the stars of this show: Ernest Bentley, the Black professor at the center of the current controversy, eschews stereotypes with calmness and wit but is also capable of revealing a lack of confidence when appropriate. Chicago veteran Steve Pickering is the plainspoken AKA somewhat clueless older white professor, a role he plays with all the right notes. Naomi Evans is his professor wife, and gives us a woman with lots of snap, smarts, rage and conflicts. Isa Arciniegas is persuasive in her portrayal of the radical professor who gets caught in the middle. Seeing all the professors teach is illuminating not only because it reveals more about their characters but because it serves as testament to the value of higher education and intellectual pursuits that crack one’s head open, which is what I believe education should do. The actors who play the students – Devaughn Asante Loman, Piper Murphy and Derrick Sanders III – embody this with fitting spunk and spirit though not always in the ways their professors might want. And then there’s the dean, an excellent Sabine Wan, who deftly administers and conveys her sense that higher education is worth saving even in its current compromised state. Were she Malcolm X, she would be saying, “by any means necessary.” My focus and interest are with the moral issues and the politics of the play but there are many conflicted affairs of the heart or other organs here.

What’s particularly impressive about The Humanities is how fair it is to all parties though its one weakness is that the Right-Wing activist is the most stereotypical. In this time of “Cancel Culture,” this play shows people really wrestling with its consequences and the efforts to turn colleges and universities into businesses. Each of them has strengths and weaknesses so that instead of the usual predictable or cardboard pedantic, politicized nonsense we often see here we are treated to fully-fleshed-out characters and we can empathize with almost every one of them. Ayers Dohrn also possesses an uncanny insight into the politics of institutions of higher education and the need to keep colleges and universities alive even in their most ugly corporatized form. This is not an argument that attracts Progressives but the proof lies in the empathy that the dean, the least sympathetic character of the Left elicits. The role allows audiences to see her point of view and perhaps even puts to sleep the improper old joke adored by anthropologists about why cannibals won’t eat deans – because they’re impossible to clean. I found this this dean compelling and that is a rare statement for me, having liked only three deans in my life.

The final assessment on The Humanities comes from one of my star students, a brilliant and talented young woman who first came to me in 1^st grade. This play was part of her college graduation present, more sophisticated than the children’s theater to which I took her years ago. She deemed it spot-on, insightful and intellectually engaging. She should know and I second her recommendation. The Humanities closes soon to don’t miss your chance to see it.

Birds of North America

A Red Orchid Theatre through October 4

Highly Recommended

As Leo Tolstoy famously said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The beauty of the father-daughter relationship in Birds of North America is that they and their family fall between these opposites – as do most of us in our familial relationships.

The story here is about an extremely intelligent father and daughter who love and regularly wound each other with brilliant, biting jabs. The play starts with the Caitlyn’s desire to bond with John over his beloved birding. What follows is a decade of generational discord, dismay about the disappearance of the bird species that become the proverbial canaries in coal mines of climate change, accompanied by debates on how to live. He wants to save the world. She wants to save herself. To be fair, Caitlyn lives in the uncertain economy of those in their twenties and thirties.

And yet father and daughter are deeply connected by their belief in science, their intelligence and offbeat irreverent humor. What could be pedantic isn’t thanks to Playwright Anna Ouyang Moench’s script, which gives us two people we can really care about who also challenge us with their smarts and problems. Red Orchid Artistic Director Kirsten Fitzgerald, herself a brilliant, fierce actor in many shows, brings that script to life with the help of two talented actors.

I was ready to see this show because of the excellence of Chicago Veteran John Judd, a favorite on many stages, and Cassidy Slaughter-Mason, impressive in several roles. What a joy to watch these talents coalesce into a show that focuses on thoughtful people about whom you really care. Judd gives us a man who is uncompromising in his dedication to improving the world. He makes us feel John’s iconoclastic inflexibility, and the way that his values eclipse compassion and block the human side of his quest in medical science. When John describes a snowy owl a friend saw that he regrets missing, his daughter says maybe he will get a chance someday and he notes that it’s unlikely given global warming. When she agrees and says that’s depressing, he tells her, “It’s the end of the world. It should be depressing.” When she tries to offer support for his work, he snaps, “This isn’t about me. It’s about contributing something to the world.” Slaughter-Mason portrays that daughter as a young woman who respects what her father is trying to do but is clear-eyed about his human failures, and adept at navigating their interpersonal messiness. She’s especially fine at showing Caitlyn’s frustration with her father through expressive face and body movements. The interplay between the two of them is lovely to behold and very authentic. Even though Caitlyn’s mother is never on onstage, her presence in the lives of her husband and daughter, as they discuss her and her unflagging support for her husband’s work, makes her seem like a full-fledged character. The presence of climate change, and John’s continuing and passionate concern about it, is critical here. How refreshing to see two smart people face such a major issue as they try to connect emotionally, to see lives lived with the very issues that challenge us. Morgan Laszlo’s realistic back porch with its suburban lawn furniture and flagstones provides ideal support for everything that takes place here.

The Brilliant Redhead was eavesdropping on the way out and almost every audience member she overheard made a connection with a personal story. Indeed, this play reminded me of my beloved and inspiring but demanding parents. I joke that they started each day asking us how we would make the world better. My husband and I tried to model such behavior rather than insisting that our children regularly practice it but, indeed, they are making the world better, a pride point for any parent. Some of the plays we’ve seen about families offer endings that begin to heal dysfunction, the Brilliant Redhead noted. Here there is no such catharsis, which I argue lends authenticity, but there is love, humor and a genuine attempt to understand and forgive each other. That human connection is huge and makes Birds of North America a poignant and essential piece of theater for any of us who have complicated family relationships. And isn’t that really most of us?

Jekyll and Hyde

David Moreland and the cast of Jekyll & Hyde. Photo by Evan Hanover.

Kokandy Productions, Broadway Playhouse at Water Tower, Broadway in Chicago through November 8

Highly Recommended

“There’s such a fine line between a good man and a bad,” says Dr. Henry Jekyll. And, in this oh-so-familiar story, he will cross that line repeatedly. His transgressions become so frequent that the line bears repeating.

Kokandy Productions’ arresting revival of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic horror novella electrifies this iconic tale thanks to the Drama Dream Team of Director Derek Van Barham, Music Director Nick Sula, who leads a talented 15-person orchestra, Choreographer Brenda Didier, whose steps are always sublime, and a flawless cast of 12. Together they elevate the 1990 musical that ran for four years on Broadway. That adaptation reimagined Stevenson’s tale as one about a brilliant young research doctor whose father’s mental illness drives him to explore a cure for the evil in all of us that he believed caused it. Unable to persuade his colleagues to let him use human subjects, Jekyll decides to experiment on himself, leading to his dual existence as the good doctor and evil murderer. The musical also features two women, one for each man.

Leading the talented Chicago cast is David Moreland, passionate and acrobatic in his portrayal of the moral romantic Dr. Jekyll, as well as the evil, menacing Mr. Hyde. Moreland expertly moves between these opposites, showing kindness, ethics and love as Jekyll and snarling rage driven by a twisted set of ethics as Hyde. His portrayal reveals when his murders of hypocrites go awry. Nathan Calaranan gives Jekyll’s compassionate senior colleague, Sir Danvers Carew, the wisdom and gracious honesty of a man who advocates for Jekyll’s scientific pursuits, and is equally convincing as the adoring father of Jekyll’s fiancé Emma. Emily McCormick’s Emma is ideal and in beautiful voice as the loving woman who will stand by her man without losing her spirit or herself. Ava Lane Stovall is stunning and sexy as the other woman, Lucy Harris, star of a house of entertainment, and the prostitute with whom Hyde becomes obsessed. Her singing drew enthusiastic applause at the performance my Ingenious Editor and I saw. Kevin Webb is winning as Gabriel John Utterson, Jekyll’s devoted but appropriately skeptical lawyer and best friend. Jon Parker Jackson’s Bishop of Basingstoke is as pompous and righteous as he should be. Rounding out the cast are a collection of lords, ladies, sirs and secretaries – Ismael Garcia, Quinn Kelch, Quinn Rigg, Gabby Sauceda-Koziol, Quinn Simmons and Maiko Terazawa – who are disingenuous and odious in all the right ways. Everyone but Moreland as the divided Jekyll and Hyde plays multiple roles and all shimmer in each, be it in their acting, their singing or their dancing.

What’s remarkable about this Jekyll and Hyde is how nearly perfect it is. The actors excel. The directing, music and choreography are flawless. The production team is exemplary. All deserve kudos but a few merit more words of praise. Sotirios Livaditis two-level set and G “Max” Maxin IV’s lighting suit the action and allow the musical to easily morph from Henry and Emma’s engagement party to Jekyll’s lab to a house of entertainment and prostitution to the late-night streets of London. Rachel Sypniewski’s costumes hug and define everyone. One of the great pleasures of this production is the way she brings out the beauty in all shapes and sizes, especially in the Rubenesque women and portly men. Her vision of Emma as a confection in pink and white is a heavenly dream, and her black-and-red form-fitting outfits for Lucy lift the temperature. I’ve never seen such gorgeous belts on women so effectively used – or costumes, for that matter, that walk the line between Gothic, innocent and dominatrix. And Sypniewski is not restrained by gender, which is fitting – pun intended – for a cast that crosses gender lines. The lace-up vest she puts on Henry Jekyll is breathtakingly provocative and hints as his other side. The see-through shirt that the music director shows off when he removes his jacket after intermission is delightfully revealing. The white asylum caps that the orchestra members wear locate us.

A word about the songs: Lyrics here seem accessible yet they convey profound emotions and truths that define each of the relationships. They are deceptively simple and, at the same time, profoundly expressive. When Emma steps out of a loving duet with her concerned father, widowed way too young, and notes that he hoped she would “grow up and look like her” mother, one can’t help but be struck by her insight.

Redtwist Theatre through March 22

Highly Recommended

Dominique Morisseau’s plays always grab me with their truth, beauty and wit. That was the case with The Detroit Project, her trio of plays – Paradise Blue, Detroit ’67, Skeleton Crew – as well as Sunset Baby and Pipeline, each beautifully done by Northlight Theatre, TimeLine Theatre Company and Victory Gardens Theater between 2013 and 2019. Redtwist Theatre’s production of Confederates persuaded me that it may be Morisseau’s best play for its juxtaposition of a life nearly destroyed by the American sin of slavery with another mired in the challenges and obstacles contemporary Blacks endure. It was therefore reassuring to discover in Morrisseau’s Author’s Note that she considers this play different from all her others.

A compelling piece, Confederates offers linked tales of two women. One is a political scientist revered for her scholarship, high standards for her students and active use of intelligence to combat institutional racism. The other is a spirited slave with spunk, smarts, sass and an ability to survive her abuses as she fights for her freedom. The play opens with the sharply dressed professor displaying a disturbing photo of a Black woman nursing a white baby. This scholar, Sandra, carefully notes that she is neither “averse” to nor “embarrassed” or “fatigued” by “images of slavery.” She watched all of Roots at her “mother’s insistence” – “her idea of summer vacation” – she explains before reciting a litany of her willing encounters with the history and experience of slavery. Her monologue ends with Sandra’s demand that an investigation be launched to determine who put this photo on her office door. Next, we are transported to a slave cabin inhabited by Sara, who is busy stitching up her brother’s wound while they debate their relative status – hers as a slave and his as an escapee who’s joined the Union Army. The connection between Sandra and Sara will emerge over the course of Confederates.

Mind you this is not a tiresomely “woke” play. Its beauty lies in Morrisseau’s ability to reveal and challenge every aspect and nuance of these two women’s lives, every form of privilege, discrimination, racism, sexism and classism and, indeed, of our America. She is fierce in her examinations, and she is funny about it. That balance between humor and tragedy is authentic and genius. “Sometimes existing in the middle of racism, sexism, classism, and the insanity of it all is like living in a farce,” Morrisseau notes.

Pulling this off requires excellent acting and directing. The Confederates crew has both. Aaron Reese Boseman deftly directs an exquisite cast. Monique Marshaunportrays Sandra with all the toughness she needs, and with a sophisticated understanding of the many conflicts and overlaps in dogma and ideology. She is a marvel and a joy to watch. Shenise Brownbrings the same skills to Sara who, though lacking an Ivy League degree – how could she have one? She’s a slave! – is canny, resourceful, skilled at hiding her talents and playing people off each other. The other three actors inhabit double roles, which sometimes seem twinned and, under Morrisseau’s pen, bring out the complexities of their characters and what they face. Makari Robinson-McNeesen is equally fine as a smart but challenging student of Sandra’s and as Sara’s adoring and extremely brave brother. Madelyn Loehr plays Sara’s plantation mistress in deliciously evil Gone-with-the-Wind fashion and is ideal as Sandra’s federal work study assistant who acknowledges her white privilege but manages to be simultaneously clueless about it. Toccara Castlemanis more than believable as a calculating slave perhaps due to her abuse and excellent as Sandra’s manipulative and tough colleague.

Marquecia Jordan’s costumes fit each character perfectly from Sandra’s stylish jackets, shirts and slacks to the Gone-with-the-Wind plaid hoop skirt and matching bonnet of Sara’s mistress. Nick Barletson’s props are lift the story from the Civil War rifled musket to sticky notes. Kevin Rolfs’ set nicely transitions from Sandra’s office to Sara’s slave cabin with a shelf, chair and table that, like the actors, play dual roles.Quinn Chisenhall’schoice to have Sara’s quarters dimly lit could be in keeping with the time and slave poverty or it could be a metaphor for the absence of the light of liberty. Sandra’s bright office offers the contrast of the illumination that comes with education.

This is a play about Black women trying to control their destiny, and about self-preservation or, one could argue, survival. “I trust you to find the laughter, the profundity, the rage, and the heart,” Dominique Morriseau urges directors and actors in her Author’s Note. “Let’s make art and get free…” I would say the same to audiences about this play that examines morality and reality. Don’t miss Confederates. It has much to say to us now.

Birds of North America

A Red Orchid Theatre through March 22

Highly Recommended

Eureka Day

Jürgen Hooper, Gabrielle Lott-Rogers, PJ Powers, Aurora Adachi-Winter and Rebekah Ward in Eureka Day. Photo by Brett Beiner Photography.

TimeLine Theatre Company with Broadway in Chicago through February 22

Highly Recommended

Even though it won the 2025 Tony, I’ll admit to being a bit nervous about seeing a play revolving around parents at a fancy private California school as they grapple with issues of quarantine. I feared it would be an evening of entitled, self-absorbed liberals who make your hemorrhoids hurt. Eureka Day erased my concerns almost immediately like the ideal No. 2 pencil with its wit, timeliness and depth.

Welcome to the progressive-to-the-point-of-being-irritating Eureka Day School. It is ideally located in Berkeley, and it embraces inclusiveness to the degree that its governing entity does everything by consensus. All is nirvana until a child gets mumps and liberal values are tested by reality – so often the way to break them, and reveal ugly truths. What follows is an epic battle about the value of vaccines, what personal freedom really means and how to cope with viral misinformation. The highlight is the scene in which the school’s Executive Committee takes the matter to the parents in what turns out to be its misguided effort to be inclusive. Without giving too much away, technology presents obstacles, not the least of them the parents’ Zoom meeting comments that are like so many online expressions i.e. unfettered by etiquette or kindness and full of hateful vile comments. Anyone who’s ever read online comments – BOT or not – knows what I mean.

But those comments are hilarious since Playwright Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day is, after all, a satire about parenting, personal liberties and differing perspectives. An especially savory moment is when commission members recall setting the school’s dramatic adaptation of the classic Peter Pan in outer space to avoid insulting any racial, ethnic or gender group. Eureka Day is also a play of incomplete sentences because the five parents on the Executive Committee either cut each other off in their need to dominate and express themselves or don’t know what they are saying and can’t complete a sentence in their search for the perfect woke words. Pauses are critical here. Such interactions require exquisite timing. These five actors have it, and they are expertly directed by Lili-Anne Brown, a South-side native with acting and directing experience. Sometimes that makes a play better; sometimes it doesn’t. Here it’s a plus apparent in Brown’s and the actors’ ability to make Spector’s script snap.

PJ Powers, long TimeLine’s artistic director and a regular on its stages, is ideal as the earnest, well-meaning committee chair who would love nothing more than the contentment of harmonious consensus, especially if there are some good business practices behind it. Rebekah Ward strikes a fine balance by embracing the squishiness of laid-back yet politically correct California parenting with a calm and seemingly sweet demeaner that hides a control-freak with a sad story and the stereotypical less-than-liberal views. Jürgen Hooper is persuasive as her closest ally and a stay-at-home dad who can never quite say what he means but manages to derail everyone else with his interruptions. Aurora Adachi-Winter starts as a straight-ahead mother who is quickly unhinged by the situation. Fortunately, the newest commission member, and the only Black one, emerges as the single person with a clear grasp of the science, and the best way to address this situation. Gabrielle Lott-Rogers plays her to perfection, calm and compassionate but tough.

Lucie Greene’s school library is a spot-on set with its shelves of children’s books and diminutive, cheerful primary-colored furniture. Janelle Smith’s costumes match each character’s personality while stroking their stereotypes.

What could be a slight satire with cardboard characters evolves into something more as the dramatic corps grapples with hard issues such as whose perspective is right, how to keep their children safe and the value of expertise. These are not new debates nor ones that will disappear so it’s no surprise that Eureka Day was written in 2018 or that it remains timely. Lest you think me conservative or liberal, let me explain that dogma in any form alarms me. I’ve embraced equality of all sorts, transparency and expertise long before “politically correct,” “woke” or “false news” became part of our language. I deplore the erasure of history, preferring to teach our children about the good and the bad, and to be honest about racism, sexism and other evils. The Black Art-loving friend who accompanied me to this show shares those values and happens to work in the world of education. We laughed our way through Eureka Day even as we appreciated its exploration of the limits of being woke. This play is about the mess that happens when the best of intentions goes awry, as she noted, and the characters do hash it out in the best democratic ways. We were delighted that it manages to move beyond the headlines and catch phrases to actually examine issues with humor, giving us much to talk about. Don’t miss it.

2025 Raves

Amadeus

Steppenwolf Theatre through January 25

Highly Recommended

Amadeus is a play about art and ambition and how their combination can be toxic. At its center are Viennese Court Composer Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who needs no introduction.

These two driven composers and musicians are the engine for Steppenwolf’s passionately high-pitched production, not only because of the men involved but because of the actors who portray them. This show really belongs to Salieri, whose jealousy of Mozart’s genius causes him to devise schemes that ensure his junior colleague’s artistic downfall in Vienna and, arguably, contribute to the young genius’s early demise. Ian Barford is perfect as the manipulative, malevolent Salieri, always plotting, his insecurity fueled by his awareness that his music is pedestrian. A Steppenwolf ensemble member and frequent lead on its stages, Barford rises to new heights here, hitting every note with his faux-suave, smooth-talking, oily composer who sucks up sweets and seduces women for gain. He also adeptly reveals the depth of this tortured man. Perhaps it’s because the role seems meatier than some he’s played. Whatever the case, Barford owns Salieri. He is matched by David Darrow as Mozart. His Mozart is a barely mature man who still behaves like a spoiled child prodigy, irrepressibly brilliant and puerilely profane in equal measure – pun intended. Darrow’s portrayal is electric and fevered. He leaps from being a live wire whose inappropriate remarks and flatulence jokes are forgotten when he gets musical, brilliantly composing on the spot or giving us ethereal compositions that, even in snippets, reign supreme. This man so completely devoted to his music is the perfect counterpoint to Barford’s polished Salieri. And then there is the deity, with whom the Italian-born musical Machiavelli tries to cut deals. After all, when your competition’s middle name is Amadeus AKA “lover of God,” and you already have the emperor on your side, where else can you turn?

I found myself turning to Maurice Sendak. “Art has always been my salvation,” said the author of Where the Wild Things Are (I believe Mozart’s Magic Flute inspired a critical action in that story). Mozart was one of his “gods,” someone he believed in “with all my heart.…I know that if there’s a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.” One of the pleasures of this show is the music we get to hear, especially when it is Mozart’s. It reminds us of why we still listen to his work, and how it can lift our hearts. There are a couple delightful moments in Amadeus when Playwright Peter Shaffer even suggests Mozart’s inspirations – his reworking of Salieri’s plebian welcome march and, far more amusing, his silly babytalk flirting games with his wife, one of which becomes the famous Papageno-Papagena syllabic duet in The Magic Flute.

Jaye Ladymore plays Mozart’s beloved wife Constanze with all the right touches, matching his childish games and tempers but able to be supportive and encouraging when he needs it. A chilling scene with Salieri, expertly delivered by Ladymore, proves Constanze’s defiant but practical devotion to her husband and his music. The Amadeus ensemble is excellent in creating a sense of Vienna in the time of Mozart and Salieri. Particular praise goes to the always-sublime Ora Jones as Venticello 1. “Venticello” is Italian for breeze, light wind or air, ideal for a play about musicians. Jones is especially elegant and graceful here as she and Sawyer Smith, a splendid and tougher Venticello 2, glide through 18^th and early 19^th Century Vienna. They are often in Salieri’s ear, making sure he hears what he needs to know and guiding him as if they were in his service or attending acolytes or both. They are generous with their gossip, whispering updates and asides to the ensemble and audience. This cast is well directed by Former Goodman Artistic Director Robert Falls, who took over for Anna Shapiro, Steppenwolf’s former artistic director and, coincidentally, Barford’s spouse.

Amadeus is elevated by Amanda Gladu’s spectacular costumes from Mozart’s orange unkempt wig and iridescent, psychedelic jackets and Constanze’s matching orange dress to the tamer and resplendent tones of the Viennese citizens and emperor’s entourage. Todd Rosenthal’s period-perfect armchairs and piano benches roll on and off the stage as the scenes change. Chandeliers drop when appropriate from beneath symbolically broken windows that top the stage, and a fortepiano is always almost always present. Mikhail Fiksel’s musical supervision and original music heighten the differences between Mozart and Salieri, and make it seem like they are really playing the pieces.

It all adds up to an enjoyable evening making the play’s three hours and lack of historic truth irrelevant. After all, where is artistic license more at home than in a piece about artists? Amadeus’ impressive pedigree only contributes to the whole. Playwright Shaffer drew on Russian Writer Alexander Pushkin’s short 1830 play Mozart and Salieri, which Russian Composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov made the libretto in his 1897 opera of the same name.

All of this takes me to the words of another composer and pianist. “It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years,” Songwriter and Harvard University Math Professor Tom Lehrer famously quipped in his many performances. It’s always been one of my favorite Lehrer lines, more often quoted since his death this year. Indeed, Steppenwolf’s Amadeus proves Mozart’s genius yet again while having fun with his faults and noting his obstacles. Treat yourself to this entertaining yet tragic tale of the dangers of rivalry and revenge.

Jekyll and Hyde

Kokandy Productions at the Chopin Theatre through January 10

Highly Recommended

Kokandy Production’s arresting revival of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic horror novella electrifies this iconic tale thanks to the Drama Dream Team of Director Derek Van Barham, Music Director Nick Sula, who leads a talented 15-person orchestra, Choreographer Brenda Didier, whose steps are always sublime, and a flawless cast of 12. Together they elevate the 1990 musical that ran for four years on Broadway. That adaptation reimagined Stevenson’s tale as one about a brilliant young research doctor whose father’s mental illness drives him to explore a cure for the evil in all of us that he believed caused it. Unable to persuade his colleagues to let him use human subjects, Jekyll decides to experiment on himself, leading to his dual existence as the good doctor and evil murderer. The musical also features two women, one for each man.

At intermission, my Insightful Editor and I turned to each other to express our astonishment and delight at the genius of this show. Between us, we’ve spent decades seeing musicals and plays, good and not, but this one grabbed us both. Do yourself a massive favor and see it before it closes. Aside from the brilliance of the cast and production, it will rattle your ethical and moral world even as it engages and delights your every sense.

Musical Homage

Tom Lehrer performing in Copenhagen, 1967

Remembering Tom Lehrer

I was about 11 when Tom Lehrer jumped into my consciousness and stole my intellectual heart.

I’ll blame it on my parents who were crazy about this genius mathematician-turned-showman, the author of some of the wittiest satirical songs most of us had ever encountered. We spent many a night after family dinner wearing out the vinyl on Lehrer’s That Was the Year that Was. By the time I was12 I knew all the lyrics on that album, and a couple other well-worn records by Tom Lehrer. For true Lehrer devotees, picking a favorite song is impossible but singing as many as possible as often as possible is impossible to resist – much to the annoyance of non-Lehrer fans or other sorts of American Puritans he would most certainly eschew. Fortunately, my parents were far from that, and I had the good luck to marry a man who happily sang Lehrer along with me, though he was usually in key. So Lehrer’s late July death at 97 hit me with enough of a smack that it’s taken me a while to collect my thoughts, and to trace his impact on my life.

In my junior year of high school, my mother was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard Law School, an opportunity she happily accepted for many reasons, not least among them that she’d not been able to accept the full scholarship Radcliffe offered her because her parents couldn’t afford to send her across the country for college. Already a surly teenager, I was eager to escape the irritating pretensions of the University of Chicago, where the administration often made racist and other horrible decisions that eclipsed the good work and politics of my parents and their friends and colleagues. My parents took the view that while the Hyde Park neighborhood had some merits and lots of smart and wonderful people, it also possessed a cloyingly small-town nature that required true city folks like us to leave it often to explore the delights of Chicago, and to find decent restaurants. Given this, my adolescent spirit was prepared to dive into in the cosmopolitan charms of Cambridge and Boston. That disappeared as soon as I discovered that pretense and academic pedigrees were an art form at Harvard compared to the rumpled, multisyllabic, grumpy nature of your average U of C habitué or Hyde Parker.

The fact that I was sent to a “school for young ladies” in a Cambridge house did not improve my teenage outlook. However, one fact, and that school’s proximity to it, elated me. Tom Lehrer taught at Harvard and lived nearby. Call me naïve but, at 15, I thought the best way to meet him was to go to his house every day after school and sit on his steps in the hopes that he would emerge or come home after work whereupon I would express my admiration of his brilliant lyrics and fawn all over him. Weeks went by. This did not happen. Finally, one cold afternoon, the door opened and my heart leapt. A woman peered out and asked me why I was sitting on her porch every day. I explained that I wanted to meet Lehrer and asked if this wasn’t his house. Yes, she replied, but he had the good sense to go to Santa Cruz that winter and she was renting his house. Crestfallen, I went home and consoled myself with art. At that time, I intended to be a dancer and choreographer so I persuaded one of my two school friends, both also outliers, to join me in creating a dance to Lehrer’s “The Vatican Rag.” Her Czech mother sewed our nuns’ habits from old pillowcases, and we used Mardi Gras beads that doubled as belts we could swing around and as rosaries.

We started performing our “Vatican Rag” around Cambridge. People seemed to like it, except for one woman who found it scandalous and turned to express her view to my father, who was sitting next to her. “That’s my daughter,” he said with some pride. He was a professor of humanities and religious studies among other subjects so I like to think that it was more than mere paternal pride.

The Cambridge grapevine, it turns out, was as good as the Hyde Park one. When Lehrer returned to Cambridge in the spring, word reached him that two girls were performing a dance to his “Vatican Rag” around town. Connections were made, and Lehrer came over to our house, singing and playing the piano while I performed our dance for him. His delight was contagious but not nearly as enormous as mine. My mother, herself delighted, filmed this encounter. Alas that ancient videocassette returned with me to Chicago only to become the one piece of my luggage the airlines have lost forever so all I have is the memory of that remarkable afternoon – and, of course, Lehrer’s glorious song.

I headed off to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in the Fall but was so smitten with Lehrer that I managed to stay in touch with him. He was campaigning for George McGovern by singing at fundraisers, and the Twin Cities were on his tour. I got to spend an intoxicating evening following Lehrer around and watching him work his magic on crowds. By then, he’d performed on Sesame Street, singing adorable little ditties about “silent e” and its alphabetical relatives. He tickled the Twin Cities audiences by sharing the “Adult X-rated” version of “Silent E.”

As I’ve revisited his repertoire since his death, I’ve been struck by the giddy joys Lehrer’s lyrics cause in songs like “New Math” and “The Elements,” and the relevance of his lyrics in so many songs from “Pollution” to “Who’s Next?” Consider these from “National Brotherhood Week:”

Oh the white folks hate the Black folks
And the Black folks hate the white folks
To hate all but the right folks is an old established rule
But during National Brotherhood Week
National Brotherhood Week …
It’s fun to eulogize the people you despise
As long as you don’t let them in your school
Oh the poor folks hate the rich folks
And the rich folks hate the poor folks…
Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Muslims
And everybody hates the Jews
But during National Brotherhood Week
National Brotherhood Week
National Everyone-Smile-at-One-Another-hood Week
Be nice to people who are inferior to you
It’s only for a week so have no fear
Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year

I was moved to discover in the many odes to and obituaries to Lehrer that he decided to release the rights to all his songs, telling his fans, “So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.” He even had a website created for people to download his songs.

No doubt that only expanded Lehrer’s following, as does his songs’ infectious singability, which has made me continue to sing Lehrer’s songs across so many decades whenever and wherever the spirit moves me, which is often. Our children grew up on Lehrer’s songs as well, and I am now introducing my grandbaby to his oeuvre. I’m sure she’ll enjoy the kiddie versions of his Sesame Street songs when she learns to read but, for now, we’re working our way through the age-appropriate highlights of his adult repertoire so she can decide what her favorite will be.