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For the uninitiated like I was, just entering the Chicago Magic Lounge on a chilly Wednesday evening was a thrill. Via a secret door, the faux-laundromat entry gives way to a luxe theater both steeped in history with posters of illusionists past and very much alive with a small army of close-up magicians working the room. Rebecca Spectre and Benjamin Barnes capably entertained my guest and I during cocktail hour, warming us up for artist in residence Harrison Lampert’s “maelstrom of insanity” (his apt words). 

MixtapeThrough 3/29: Wed 7 PM, Chicago Magic Lounge, 5050 N. Clark, 312-366-4500, chicagomagiclounge.com, $40-$45

Harrison Lampert is awkward in the vein of some of my favorite cringe comedians (Nathan Fielder, Norm Macdonald) but likeably so, growing on you as you root for his bumbling tricks to pay off. And then realize they’re really a way into some uniquely absurd comedy. If he does one thing he commits to a bit, like his flat “thanks” after every round of applause and using the time it takes to pull out a ridiculously long handkerchief to have a breakdown about the monotony of his childhood chicken dinners. After a string of well-executed, more traditional tricks involving cards, disappearing eggs, linked rings, etc., he goes off script in an improv interlude. Prior to the show, audience members are asked to write phrases on scraps of paper, and he pulls them out of a fishbowl to create his own “mad libs” origin story as a magician. His quick thinking was fun to watch, as was the window into the predictably strange minds of all of us watching magic on a Wednesday.

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In Witold Gombrowicz’s fictional kingdom of Burgundia, the royal court is bored. One day Prince Phillip (Keith Surney) and his consort, Simon (Gus Thomas) happen upon Ivona (Laura Nelson), a cowering and often mute peasant girl. Having nothing better to do and looking to outrage his family and friends, the prince announces that Ivona will be his bride. He gets a lot more than he bargained for.

While rarely speaking, Ivona has an ironclad will and an unerring instinct to do the opposite of what is expected of her. She bewitches and confounds King Ignatius (Bill Gordon) and Queen Margaret (Manuela Rentea) while enraging the Lord Chamberlain (Kevin Webb) and Isobel (Cat Evans). Each has ambitions and schemes which Ivona upends by her arrival. She’s a chaos agent they all want to snuff out for individual motives, but every plot is a threat to all the others. It’s a mess and that’s the point.

Princess Ivona Through 2/18: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland, trapdoortheatre.com, $25 (two for one Thu)

The stage design by J. Michael Griggs is minimal even by Trap Door’s spartan standards: some semitransparent white drapery and a couple of clothing trunks—one long enough to hold a small body. There’s also a picture frame that functions as a mirror one minute, a camera the next. The nonspace in which these privileged little monsters frolic is mostly furnished by their fantasies and desires that seem to mutate and transform whichever way the winds blow. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Rachel Sypniewski’s costumes reminded me of Dr. Seuss and Edward Gorey by turns. They’re as loud as the set is quiet. Lord Chamberlain’s habit of shedding gloves only to find a different colored set underneath is a visual summation of the self-delusion and fickleness of everyone in this royal court. By the time he peels the last pair to expose his hands, he’s both horrified and surprised by their appearance. Neither the chamberlain nor anyone else knows or wants to know who they truly are. Ivona might know but is silenced before she can say.

Burgundia feels like a very familiar kingdom in Jenny Beacraft’s staging. A place where loud hollow pronouncements reign and there’s little patience for inwardness or doubt. A country addicted to self-promotion, and one that will backstab anyone who pushes back on the official narrative. 

Ever been to a place like that?

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It would be hard to find a more appealing trio to embody Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical musical tick, tick . . . BOOM! than the ones in BoHo Theatre’s production—and “embody” is very much the relevant word. Director Bo Frazier chose to cast trans and gender nonconforming actors as aspiring composer Jon, his girlfriend Susan, and his best friend Michael. Some cisgender audience members might find these choices startling to begin with, but before the end of the first number they’ll have transcended their shock and be rooting for youth and raw talent in all its forms.  

Tick, tick . . . BOOM! Through 2/5: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also industry night Mon 1/30 7:30 PM; open captions Sat 1/21 and 1/28 3 PM; Edge Theater, 5451 N. Broadway, bohotheatre.com, $35 general, $20 seniors, military, and first responders, $12 transgender and gender nonconforming people, students, and educational professionals

Alec Phan as Jon takes the part—a composer on the verge of his 30th birthday, trying to decide whether to “sell out” or keep waiting tables to write music—and infuses it with all the passion and terror of anyone who’s ever discovered that life doesn’t unspool as predicted. As Michael, Crystal Claros has a knockout voice and the comic chops to turn into any number of supporting characters, while Luke Halpern is both a persuasive Susie and an indelible neglectful cigarette-smoking New York agent.

The show itself is more revue than true musical: originally performed solo by Larson himself, its narrative was later supplied by playwright David Auburn. But some of the songs are truly moving (“Real Life”) and others witty, and all get their due and then some from the cast and band under music director Harper Caruso. As the characters struggle with their fear of getting old, it’s hard not to reflect on the fact Larson himself never did, dying at age 35 the day before the first Broadway preview of his signature piece Rent.

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I remember when rock was young. So, evidently, does Chicago playwright Katie Coleman, as she well attests in her intelligent, heartfelt play about two young Soviets, hopping and bopping to a thing called capitalist rock (Elton John, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Blondie, etc.). Coleman actually tells three stories here. There’s a bittersweet one about Svetlana and Vitaly (two Soviet kids doing the best that they can); another, much angrier one about the economic and cultural stagnation of Leonid Brezhnev-era Soviet Union (a teenage wasteland for sure); and a third about the history of Krugozor, a state-owned—and thus state-sanctioned—music magazine that brought carefully vetted Western music into Russian homes via the flexi discs that came with the magazine. Krugozor, initiated by Nikita Khrushchev, must have been an attempt to control the flow of western European ideas into the state without threatening the ossifying bureaucratic power elite. How well it worked is one of the themes Coleman explores in this show. (See Berlin circa 1989.)

Krugozor! Through 2/4: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Factory Theater, 1623 W. Howard, theatreevolve.com, pay what you can $5-$100

My summary is making the show sound like something only a history buff would enjoy. But actually, the show is immensely entertaining. The production has a loose Second City feel to it. Scenes are acted out with a bare minimum of props and set pieces.There is also a live band on stage, to give the show a jolt of rock ’n’ roll when things start to get too dark—or light. As if that could happen in a wild, energetic production that mixes performance styles, tone, and mood with the wild, carefree abandon of someone changing stations every few seconds on a car radio. Yet somehow, director Anna Rachel Troy and her cast keep it together, mixing strictly naturalistic scenes, with ones with a more Brechtian tinge, as when the script breaks the narrative flow to relate some facts about Soviet history, or Krugozor, or the myriad ways rock ’n’ rollers overcame government attempts to keep that “decadence” out of the country. (These included “bone music”—the underground trading of bootleg recordings pressed into discarded X-rays.) 

Troy has assembled a strong multitalented cast here, most of whom, at one point or another, join the band to sing or shred guitar, and all of whom know how to mine the emotional ups and downs of Coleman’s story for maximum effect. At the center of it all are Andy Ricci’s Vitaly—he’s just a poor boy but needs no sympathy—and Caroline Kidwell’s Svetlana. She’s the rebellious daughter of a Communist Party official, the Soviet equivalent of a poor little rich girl. As performers, Ricci and Kidwell are riveting, and their story—which shows the lie behind the claims that the USSR was a classless society—is, in the end, utterly devastating.

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For the uninitiated like I was, just entering the Chicago Magic Lounge on a chilly Wednesday evening was a thrill. Via a secret door, the faux-laundromat entry gives way to a luxe theater both steeped in history with posters of illusionists past and very much alive with a small army of close-up magicians working the room. Rebecca Spectre and Benjamin Barnes capably entertained my guest and I during cocktail hour, warming us up for artist in residence Harrison Lampert’s “maelstrom of insanity” (his apt words). 

MixtapeThrough 3/29: Wed 7 PM, Chicago Magic Lounge, 5050 N. Clark, 312-366-4500, chicagomagiclounge.com, $40-$45

Harrison Lampert is awkward in the vein of some of my favorite cringe comedians (Nathan Fielder, Norm Macdonald) but likeably so, growing on you as you root for his bumbling tricks to pay off. And then realize they’re really a way into some uniquely absurd comedy. If he does one thing he commits to a bit, like his flat “thanks” after every round of applause and using the time it takes to pull out a ridiculously long handkerchief to have a breakdown about the monotony of his childhood chicken dinners. After a string of well-executed, more traditional tricks involving cards, disappearing eggs, linked rings, etc., he goes off script in an improv interlude. Prior to the show, audience members are asked to write phrases on scraps of paper, and he pulls them out of a fishbowl to create his own “mad libs” origin story as a magician. His quick thinking was fun to watch, as was the window into the predictably strange minds of all of us watching magic on a Wednesday.

Read More

In Witold Gombrowicz’s fictional kingdom of Burgundia, the royal court is bored. One day Prince Phillip (Keith Surney) and his consort, Simon (Gus Thomas) happen upon Ivona (Laura Nelson), a cowering and often mute peasant girl. Having nothing better to do and looking to outrage his family and friends, the prince announces that Ivona will be his bride. He gets a lot more than he bargained for.

While rarely speaking, Ivona has an ironclad will and an unerring instinct to do the opposite of what is expected of her. She bewitches and confounds King Ignatius (Bill Gordon) and Queen Margaret (Manuela Rentea) while enraging the Lord Chamberlain (Kevin Webb) and Isobel (Cat Evans). Each has ambitions and schemes which Ivona upends by her arrival. She’s a chaos agent they all want to snuff out for individual motives, but every plot is a threat to all the others. It’s a mess and that’s the point.

Princess Ivona Through 2/18: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland, trapdoortheatre.com, $25 (two for one Thu)

The stage design by J. Michael Griggs is minimal even by Trap Door’s spartan standards: some semitransparent white drapery and a couple of clothing trunks—one long enough to hold a small body. There’s also a picture frame that functions as a mirror one minute, a camera the next. The nonspace in which these privileged little monsters frolic is mostly furnished by their fantasies and desires that seem to mutate and transform whichever way the winds blow. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Rachel Sypniewski’s costumes reminded me of Dr. Seuss and Edward Gorey by turns. They’re as loud as the set is quiet. Lord Chamberlain’s habit of shedding gloves only to find a different colored set underneath is a visual summation of the self-delusion and fickleness of everyone in this royal court. By the time he peels the last pair to expose his hands, he’s both horrified and surprised by their appearance. Neither the chamberlain nor anyone else knows or wants to know who they truly are. Ivona might know but is silenced before she can say.

Burgundia feels like a very familiar kingdom in Jenny Beacraft’s staging. A place where loud hollow pronouncements reign and there’s little patience for inwardness or doubt. A country addicted to self-promotion, and one that will backstab anyone who pushes back on the official narrative. 

Ever been to a place like that?

Read More