SPRING CLEANING: A ROUNDUP OF CHICAGO THEATER AMID THE LAST TWO MONTHS OF WINTER
T.S. Eliot is known for his reservations about spring. Yet the author of the line "April is the cruelest month" wrote a friend in April 1911 to tell her about how beautiful the season was. "Paris has burst out, during my absence," Eliot wrote, "and it is such a revelation that I feel I ought to make it known. At London, one pretended that it was spring, and tried to coax the spring, and talk of the beautiful weather; but one continued to hibernate amongst the bricks ... But here!" Chicago has been more like Eliot's London than his Paris recently, but spring is almost here, so it’s time to clean out my notebook of winter stage observations from the last seven weeks of Chicago theater. After a somewhat sparse fall season for Chicago theater, with few productions that I personally found exciting, the winter has been productive. These nine shows, ranging from opera to musical theater to straight plays to one Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, show a little o...