Two grand pianos enhanced “Into the Woods.” Writers Theatre surrounded its audience with harmonies. Director John Tiffany came to town to make sure his touring “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” was stellar. Michael Shannon returned to the Chicago stage. The Royal Shakespeare Company enchanted on their Chicago return. Laurie Metcalf came back. Prestidigitation thrived all over town. Paramount Theatre built an entire Sun Studios replica for its immersive “Million Dollar Quartet.” And Steppenwolf Theatre returned to form; four of our Top 10 shows of the year were staged within its walls.
Here’s our annual celebration of the best Chicago shows of the year, in order, with an additional 10 (in alphabetical order) that almost made our list. As in the past, we’ve limited the list to productions that originated in the Chicago area.
1. “Purpose” by Steppenwolf Theatre Company: This world premiere from Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was far from finished when rehearsal began and still in rewrites on opening night. Yet it still managed to be a thrilling night of Chicago-style theater and the most on-brand Steppenwolf production since Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County.” I’m told that the spring Broadway staging will likely move further away from specific references to the family of Jesse Jackson Jr., but in Chicago, everyone knew which family Jacobs-Jenkins was dissecting with a surgeon’s precision. The show had a phenomenal ensemble cast, led by the superb Harry Lennix playing a patriarch facing the rebellion of a younger generation, and created by a writer who understands what it is to feel both the sting of decay and the pressure of lofty expectation.
2. “Obliteration” by Gift Theatre Company: One of two shows on this list that premiered in Steppenwolf’s 1700 studio space, Andrew Hinderaker’s “Obliteration” was a killer throwback to the edgy Chicago storefront theater of yore, a heart-pounding risk-taker of a world premiere that proved a spectacular vehicle for two of the greatest Chicago actors, Michael Patrick Thornton and Cyd Blakewell. Tickets were hard to get, but if you snagged one you saw a new play about the world of stand-up comedy that was determined to blur the boundaries between fictional storytelling and personal revelation. Few in the audience, shocked to the core, knew where the dividing line was, assuming there was one at all. Hinderaker is a big deal in the TV showrunner world these days but he saves his best stuff for the city that discovered him.
3. “Fiddler on the Roof” by Drury Lane Theatre: It’s axiomatic in the American theater that “Fiddler on the Roof” always sells tickets, whatever the time or place. So productions are ubiquitous; I visit the village of Anatevka at least once a year. But this simple yet beautiful Drury Lane staging from director Elizabeth Margolius was wholly uncommon, not least because it paid such loving attention to the emotional trajectory of the musical. This is a show about change and resilience, of course, but also about our mutual vulnerability. At Drury Lane, every moment was gorgeously crafted and performed with love. Margolius homed in on the core themes of this classic: how you bend without breaking, how you change without denying your own truth, how you know when to go along to get along, and how you know when it is crucial that you stand your ground.
4. “Little Bear Ridge Road” by Steppenwolf Theatre Company: This 95-minute play from Samuel D. Hunter appeared to be of modest ambition, in that its setting was merely described as “a couch in a void.” Yet “Little Bear Ridge Road” was really about the pain we all carry after we miss opportunities and make mistakes and fail to tell those we love about just how much we need them. That might sound sentimental, but director Joe Mantello’s production came with Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock, powerful and (especially in Metcalf’s case) justly beloved performers who have an implicit understanding of how Americans in so-called flyover country, like Hunter’s native Idaho, think and feel. The show awaits, and so richly deserves, a Broadway premiere.
5. “The Band’s Visit” by Writers Theatre: For her revealing new staging of this melancholy musical at Writers Theatre, the gifted director Zi Alikhan discovered that the Glencoe theater adapted easily to surround sound. She positioned her actors accordingly and filled the theater with David Yazbek’s haunting music, and with actors fully committed to telling Itamar Moses’s story of a Egyptian band lost in a small Israeli town, struggling for human connections. It was tough to follow director David Cromer’s superb original production, but thanks in no small part to the lead performer, Sophie Madorsky, this new staging brought much to the work I’d not felt before.
6. “Falsettos” by Court Theatre in association with TimeLine Theatre: William Finn’s beautiful chamber musical made history in the early 1990s by exploring the joys and perils of a blended family that strives to hold it together, even though one of its members has come out as gay and left his wife for a male lover. Given that era, relationship issues eventually have to make way to a more existential collective fight against AIDS. This revival from director Nick Bowling had a beautiful central performance for Stephen Schellhardt and an ensemble cast who made many in their audience each night cry, especially those who were remembering those they had lost from that era. Beautifully sung and exquisitely acted, this “Falsettos” also captured one of the great truths about marriages and parenting and even health struggles: a sense of humor is among our greatest weapons.
7. “Happy Days are Here (Again)” by Steep Theatre Company: Being a small Chicago theater company certainly brings stressful challenges, but as Steep Theatre has proven many times over, it also comes with great creative freedom. Steep’s production at Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theatre of “Happy Days are Here (Again),” a tough-to-watch story about sexual abuse and survival in a Catholic school in the 1980s, is precisely what such theater companies should be doing. The play came from Omer Abbas Salem, one of the theater’s own ensemble members, and the young ensemble cast acted the bejesus out of the play, which cannot have been easy, especially given the themes of trauma and loss.
8. “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Paramount Theatre: A superb production that all too few people saw, co-directors Jim Corti and Elizabeth Swanson’s production of the classic Tennessee Williams drama about the brutality of life, especially for the fragile, was the first major staging of this play in the Chicago area since 2010, when Cromer’s superb Writers Theatre production scared away other directors for what turned out to be years. But this new production was beautiful in its own way — exquisitely cast, meticulously directed and filled with an unstinting commitment to honesty and truth. Corti understood that, for Williams, the standard sweaty sensuality was not what mattered. Here, sex was an act both of destruction and survival.
9. “Into the Woods” by Kokandy Productions: Derek Van Barham’s hit production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” was staged around two grand pianos, with two pianists who became part of the storytelling. This is a remarkable composition that rarely fills to win over an audience, but this show in the storied Chopin Theatre basement still was unusually resonant even by Sondheim standards, falling as it did somewhere between a chamber presentation and a full-blown, highly immersive staging. Thanks to a number of stellar performances, I found it to be potent, charming and beautiful.
10. “Primary Trust” by Goodman Theatre: A quiet but moving play set modestly inside its central character’s head, the Chicago premiere of Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play made for a sweet and unconventional portrait of an ordinary, yet extraordinary, neuroatypical life. Here was an observational drama that constantly subverted its audience’s expectations as it probed (among many other matters of the heart) how difficult it can be to recover from the loss of your parents. Director Malkia Stampley’s beautifully forged Goodman production benefitted enormously from a beautiful central performance by Namir Smallwood, playing a young man named Kenneth who lives in upstate New York, works in a second-hand bookstore and spends evenings sipping Mai Tais in a Tiki bar where at least they know his name.
Honorable mentions: “44: The unOFFICIAL, unSANCTIONED Obama Musical” produced by Eli Bauman; “Blue” by Lyric Opera of Chicago; “Champion” by Lyric Opera of Chicago; “English” by Goodman Theatre; “Every Brilliant Thing” by Writers Theatre; “Frozen” by Paramount Theatre; “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” by Goodman Theatre; The Magic Lounge presents Siegfried Tieber; “Million Dollar Quartet” by Paramount Theatre; “Turret” by A Red Orchid Theatre.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
