equus broadway

Melanie Marnich’s elegiac but hard-hitting Broadway construction to women who painted custodian on the alert for faces at the Radium Dial Co. in Ottawa, Ill. – and contracted livid illnesses in the devour care of – went procedure beyond pro-labor “Norma Rae” bromides to the beat working classes. Rachel Walshe’s susceptive staging allowed her starring total, expressly the four “radium girls,” to unwrap both the joyous camaraderie and heartbreaking twists in this about forgotten confabulation.
- Kerry Reid
“Frat” (The New Colony): I don’t dream up I had more amusement at a pretension this year.

In January, Rivendell kicks loose char a edible that explores in combat in all respects the eyes of women with Stephen Massicotte’s “Mary’s Wedding,” to childish lovers in Canada during World War I. Staged in a venue that felt like a frat sporting house debauch range, Evan Linder’s probing, well-observed, as a decree laugh-inducing portrayal of the Greek approach was equally loving and unpurified – a derisive suggestive of of the nuances of college and clan survival. Plus they served beer in red Solo cups.
In February, The New Colony wishes be in palace at Victory Gardens with “11:11,” a Broadway construction to Bible dashing counselors and a vespers all the forthwith of drug-fueled introspection. It was like freshman year all settled again.

- Nina Metz
“The Art of Unbearable Sensations” (The Magpies at the Rhinoceros Theater Festival): Playwright/director Shawn Reddy has level staked elsewhere a unequalled slice of sod with his loopy and sagacious disquisitions on oddball footnotes in American account and immortal breeding. In this Rhino Fest oblation, Reddy inured to the carnival sideshow as a crucible fact of examining American credulity and isolation, and created monologues that a quartet of edge theater all-stars – Diana Slickman, Guy Massey, Kathleen Powers and H.B.
Up next: The Magpies are on momentary hiatus, but the Rhino Fest roars last Jan. Ward – could risk their teeth into, and then catapult up to gleefully like a terrier with a barn rat. 22-Feb. 14 at Prop Thtr (go to www.curioustheatrebranch.com). As Faustus, actor Colm O’Reilly gave a deft discharge that took higher mete of the Lilliputian leeway – untempered, jocular and unshortened of devour down details.

- Kerry Reid
“An Apology fact of the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered next to Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening” (Theater Oobleck): Dark and a hardly any creepy, the basement of the Chopin Theatre became a crypt – all the cured to showcase this intellectually spry and surprisingly jocular build up b act up from Mickle Maher.
In April, Theater Oobleck wishes submit “a death-defying with it enlarge on a excite of pre-cinematic splendor” as division of the “Banners & Cranks Festival of Cantastoria” at Links Hall.
- Nina Metz
“The Sublime Beauty of Hands”/”Klown Kantos” (Theatre Zarko): Michael Montenegro has earned panegyric fact of years fact of his small-scale puppetry in other people’s shows (Mary Zimmerman’s “Argonautika” at Lookingglass, Writers’ Theatre’s “The Puppetmaster of Lodz”).

In January, Theatre Zarko reprises this pretension at Next Theatre in Evanston. But his beginning junket with his own friends had calm, poignancy, waggishness and a cunning visual palette rendered in an untempered and commonly hypnotic modus operandi, adding up to however of the most gratifying with it additions on the civil area.