Tonight CIC’s Bad Review will perform as part of Looptopia at the Chase Auditorium at 9pm. The show is Free.
Bad Review takes the worst Review from Today’s Chicago Reader and we Improvise the show we feel the critic would have rather seen.
Well, we’ve been hearing about Looptopia for awhile. A big overnight festival held in the Loop, blah blah. We didn’t think too much about it. We pretty much dismiss the Loop after 5 p.m. and give it up for lost on the weekends. Looptopia is obviously working hard to change all that. It’s going on this Friday through early Saturday morning and since we’re going to be down there, we decided to check out the schedule. Holy crap. This thing looks like a Loop Lollapalooza. So, we decided to tell you what we’re interested in. Take some of our suggestions or go to Looptopia yourself!!
Theater:
Chemically Imbalanced is an improv group that will take the worst theatrical review and do the show the way they think the critic would have rather seen the show. They’ll be in the Chase Tower Auditorium from 9:00 – 9:45 p.m.
Theater aficionados will also be able to choose from a plethora of activities, including a performance by the improv troupe Chemically Imbalanced ( Chase Tower Auditorium, 9-9:45 p.m. )
As part of the city’s Looptopia event, CIC brings back Bad Review. The ensemble selects a disparaging theater review from the latest Reader and performs an hour-long improvisation of “the show we feel the critic would have rather seen.” The cast occasionally lapses into easy pop references, but the sarcasm is thick and zany. Director Angela McMahon crafts a truly professional improv production, with efficient blackouts, precise lighting, timely and clever musical touches, and a perky pace. (RH) Fri 5/11, 9 PM, Chase Auditorium, Chase Tower, 10 S. Dearborn
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TONIGHTS REVIEW WILL BE:
TENT MEETING If the clan in this play had been Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, or Buddhist, no theater would have touched it. But since its leader is an amen-snorting Arkansas preacher as cruelly abusive as his two children are passive and dim-witted, playgoers can enjoy a guilt-free chortle at the droll antics of these stereotypical rubes. What undoes Larry Larson, Levi Lee, and Rebecca Wackler’s 1983 script is not its cartoon sensibility, however, but its eleventh-hour attempt to impose spiritual issues on caricatures ham-handed enough to have been lifted from an Al Capp comic strip. Director Chris Arnold snatches a few empathetic moments from the hee-haws but can’t truly rescue a sermon gone grotesquely astray. –Mary Shen Barnidge