Concerts

If it hasn’t been made clear by projects like Bodies Bodies Bodies, Euphoria, and even Eighth Grade, then Missing is here to drive the point home: kids these days love to use the Internet. In this new thriller, a SoCal teenager (Storm Reid) is forced to turn to the ’net when her mom (Nia Long) takes off on a trip to Colombia with her boyfriend and never comes back. 

Bored, broke, and understandably worried, young June starts scouring the web for clues, using what she knows to break into her mom’s phone, investigate the fishy boyfriend’s random online accounts, and even hire a cheap (but sympathetic!), Colombian Taskrabbit to investigate her mom’s whereabouts. As viewers, we know all this because, like Unfriended and Searching before it, Missing is stylized to look like we’re seeing everything from the other side of June’s laptop screen. 

That means you get to watch as Google searches and video calls play out in real time, and when June has to step away from her laptop to actually get in on the action, you’re asked to peer through phone cameras, surveillance footage, and even a conveniently-discovered smartwatch. It can feel a hair gimmicky at times, especially if you’re the kind of person who just wants June to actually call the FBI and stop running her own investigation on Twitter, but it’s fun enough to watch. As with any good thriller, there are copious twists and turns along the way as bits of evidence trickle in, and when the big, not-so-shocking reveal does come near the end of the film, it brings along an appropriate amount of spine-tingling dread. 

Overall, Missing is just about as fun as a couple of hours flicking through Instagram or knocking out levels in Candy Crush. Unfortunately, it’s also just about as ephemeral, leaving little impression beyond mild enjoyment. PG-13, 111 min.

Wide release in theaters

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Jafar Panahi is compelled to document the world around him. Despite a 20-year filmmaking ban imposed by the Iranian government, the director continued to release complex, daringly reflective films that investigate Iranian society, government oppression, and himself. Panahi managed to release five feature films, including Taxi Tehran (2015)and 3 Faces (2018)—gaining international recognition at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals. However, this July, Iranian officials detained Panahi, condemning him to a six-year prison sentence for anti-government propaganda, but not before he secretly directed an incisive commentary that implicates both filmmaking and the filmmaker. 

No Bears introduces us to two Iranian exiles, Bakhtiar (Bakhtiyar Panjeei) and Zara (Mina Kavani) as they discuss their plans to find asylum in Europe. Anxiety intensifies as the couple faces separation when Bakhtiar encourages Zara to flee Turkey first with her stolen passport. But almost immediately, the film folds on itself, panning out to reveal that Panahi, playing a version of himself, is directing a film documenting the couple’s real experience. Panahi loses Internet, propelling us into the director’s immediate setting: a remote town near the Iran-Turkey border. Despite the generosity of his host Ghanbar (Vahid Mobasheri) and his remote setting, Panahi becomes embroiled in controversy incited by a photograph of a young couple, played by Darya Alei and Amir Davari, that locals believe he captured. He denies the accusation, but a boiling tension is fueled by a romantic rival that intends to marry the girl. Panahi is entangled by two complex love stories that escalate into devastating conflict due to the director’s compulsive documentation. And this is No Bears’s most heart-stirring retrospective. 

Panahi’s latest film interrogates the limits of art, placing cinema and documentation under a critical eye. The director recognizes cinema as a source of possibility but dares to weigh the severe, occasionally ruinous consequences of creating. No Bears reveals the creases and shortcomings of cinema that hide behind a compulsive endeavor to create, positioning Panahi himself at the core of these dilemmas. This bold decision makes No Bears Panahi’s most honest film, among an impressive filmography. 106 min.

Gene Siskel Film Center

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Plane is officially billed as a thriller, but given the gleefully swaggering machismo parade of action-hero/buddy-movie cliches it traffics in, it almost feels like a satire. You can practically hear the pitch meeting: “Die Hard meets Captain Phillips meets Rambo but with a plane.” That’s pretty much what you get in director Jean-François Richet’s production for Lionsgate, screenplay by Charles Cumming and J.P. Davis, story by Davis. Lack of originality isn’t a dealbreaker. I was thoroughly entertained, watching pilot Brodie Torrance (a literally gritty Gerard Butler) morph from well-coiffed, buttoned-up family man to grimy dude in a ripped, bloody muscle shirt unleashing his inner Iron John with guns of both flesh and steel. Furthermore, local hero Joey Slotnik is extremely hilarious and equally despiseable as the kind of passenger who, were you to encounter him in real life, would force you to weigh your own capacity for inciting violence in small spaces. Also: Tony Goldwyn plays a shadowy, impeccably dressed, high-level government operative-type named Scarsdale, and who doesn’t want to see that? Finally, the supporting leads here—Yoson An as copilot Samuel Dele and Mike Colter as Gaspare, a convicted criminal with a mysterious past and unguessable motives—make stock roles memorable. Gaspare is all still water running deep; Dele wears his heart on his sleeve. You’ll be rooting for them both. 

What ultimately ruins the movie is the lazy one-dimensionality of its villains. We know three things about the hyper-violent “pirates” (I don’t have a copy of the script, but I could swear I heard the word “separatist” used) led by Datu Junmar (Evan Dane Taylor) in attacking the passengers: First, they speak English with some form of accent. Second, they are quick to terrorize and kill people. Third, we are in some undisclosed “war-torn” nation, to quote the press materials. Stereotype and cliche remain alive and well on the big screen. R, 107 min.

Wide release in theaters

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Exquisite Corpse is a surrealist game in which multiple artists contribute to a work without seeing what any of the others are doing, creating poetry or visual art collages. The exercise is supposed to create work that challenges the usual notions of unity and identity by emphasizing disjunction, unexpected leaps, and odd connections.

The Seven Faces of Jane applies this technique to film, with mixed results. The very loose frame is that Jane (Gillian Jacobs) has dropped her daughter Molly off at camp. She drives away, and her journey of indeterminate length takes her through a range of vignettes. She sees the ghost of a friend who has just died (“Guardian” by Ryan Heffington). She picks up a free-living hippie hitchhiker (“The Lonesome Road” by Xan Cassavetes). Etc.

Some of these vignettes pay lip service to the idea of multiple selves, as in Julian Acosta’s “Rose,” where Jane muses “everyone struggles to find a version of themselves that they like.” The problem is that most of the segments are too tied to a bland realism and narrative cliche to create the collective sense of unease and/or delightful disorientation that the surrealists prize. “Rose” itself is a familiar story about two strangers who make an unexpected connection and Learn Life Lessons. Then there are not one, but two predictable short films about ambivalent encounters with old flames: Boma Iluma’s “Tayo” and Ken Jeong’s “The One Who Got Away.” 

There are a couple of exceptions. In Gia Coppola’s “Jane 2,” Jane stumbles into the life of Jane, a coffee-shop waitress who looks just like her. By the end, even the viewer isn’t sure which Jane is which. And in Alex Takács’s very Lynchian “The Audition,” Jane auditions for a part as someone very like Jane, losing her car and maybe herself in the process. These segments at least try to engage with Exquisite Corpse’s surreal roots. For the most part, though, despite its adventurous structure, The Seven Faces of Jane shows us features we’ve seen before. 93 min.

Wide release on VOD

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In a world . . . where Norse mythology meets prog rock on a set seemingly built by precocious middle-schoolers, brothers Jorik and Jarl battle one another and several deities (best known to modern audiences via the Marvel Universe) to wear the crown of their kingdom. Songs are sung, seas traversed, swords crossed, and evil vanquished; the people rejoice and peace rules the land.

ValhallaThrough 2/5: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, The Edge Off Broadway, 1133 W. Catalpa, theplagiarists.org, pay what you can (suggested donation $15)

If this calls to mind a game of Dungeons & Dragons soundtracked by Yes or Magma, you’re on the right track. Adapted by Bryan Haney and Kate Nawrocki from a concept album by Haney’s band, Cirkut Mob, and directed by Nawrocki, the overall effect is spirited cosplay meets high school musical. Lacking the budget for the million-dollar effects the production aspires to, designer Nina D’Angier-Castillo’s shadow puppets evoke a child’s world of make-believe where a toy Viking ship can crash convincingly in a pretend sea that is just a long piece of cloth waved to and fro by a playground friend. The spell breaks when grown-ups belt tunes with on-the-nose lyrics about good and evil and the like. The live band, led by Elizabeth Bagby, backs these groaners skillfully, but not unlike the 70s dinosaur rock they are an obvious and loving tribute to, it’s best to ignore the lyric sheet.

I kept imagining how much more affecting this would all be if it were performed by actual children rather than adults pretending but there’s no faulting the effort or desire of anyone involved, no matter their age. 

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If you were concerned that Chicago’s storefront theaters lost their mojo during the pandemic, get thee to Terry McCabe’s gripping production of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. It’s a meta-accomplishment: not a false note in this version of a play that’s entirely about false notes. Pinter’s breakthrough piece (albeit a flop at the time), encompasses all the themes for which he later became known: the mindlessness and dishonesty of most of what passes for communication; the universal capacity, and appetite, for savagery; how no one is innocent but anyone might be a victim; how most efforts at heroism—or even simple humanity—end with a whimper.

The Birthday Party Through 2/26: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 2/13 and 2/20 7:30 PM; City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-293-3682, citylit.org, $34 ($29 seniors, $12 students and military)

McCabe has cast the show flawlessly, anchored by perfect-pitch Elaine Carlson as Meg, whose comic cluelessness devolves into hideously willful blindness, and by James Sparling as Goldberg, who looks and sounds exactly like Patrick Stewart at his most posh while simultaneously nailing every stereotype of the East End London Jew getting what he wants at others’ expense. The entire six-person ensemble is strong, and there’s a particular pleasure in watching 6-foot-6-inch Will Casey as the henchman McCann looming over David Fink, a foot shorter, as the titular guest of honor and designated victim Stanley.

I’ve often felt that I don’t understand what Pinter is on about: menace, sure, and the comedy of cruelty, but to what end? I can offer this production no higher praise than to say, now I get it.  Highly recommended, as in Do. Not. Miss.

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Like many of the American musical theater greats, Cabaret is one of those shows that can suffer from style-creep,wherein an unwritten but generally agreed-upon aesthetic tradition grows into self-parody. For John Kander and Fred Ebb’s legendary pre-WWII Berlin-set romantic drama (based on the 1951 play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten and the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood), that usually translates to a Kit Kat Club that’s more of a strung-out haunted house than a cheeky flesh fair anyone would actually want to rain deutsche marks on. Not so in Porchlight’s nachtclub, a sparkling, inviting, exuberant pansexual party (led by Emcee Josh Walker) that puts a hearty emphasis on the “willkommen.”

Cabaret Through 3/5: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Thu 2/2 1:30 PM; open caption Sat 1/28 and Sat 2/4 3:30 PM; Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn, 773-777-9884, porchlightmusictheatre.org, $45-$77

Establishing that contrast is essential in order for any of the second-act gut punches to land, and in that respect, director Michael Weber, associate director/choreographer Brenda Didier, and music director Linda Madonia leave bruises and draw blood. I found my eyes welling up with spectacle tears long before the first emotional blow, and I suspect that has to do with just how masterfully pieced together these musical theater elements are, from the crystalline vocals to the bombastic ensemble-wide numbers to the intimate conversations between (ahem) “roommates.”

Gilbert Domally, who brings a radical softness to the character inspired by Isherwood, makes for a heart-melting partner with Sally (Erica Stephan, giving a performance for the ages). Even Angela Weber Miller’s and Patrick Chan’s Anhalter Bahnhof-inspired set and lighting design has a sense of gravity and impermanence to it, as if to ask: if brick, studded steel, and heavy cathedral wooden buttresses won’t survive the looming tsunami of inhumanity, what chance do we have?

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Redtwist’s rolling world premiere of The Great Khan with the National New Play Network couldn’t be better timed. When Florida’s Department of Education had just rejected an Advanced Placement course in African American studies. When Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders just signed an executive order banning critical theory in public schools, making Arkansas the 18th state to limit how racism and sexism are taught. And when Missouri lawmakers just proposed three similar bills, which will also allow parents to monitor school curricula. 

A rebellious production about the effects of racism and sexism on Black teens, written by Michael Gene Sullivan and directed by Jamal Howard, this intimate play calls on viewers to confront “history” through the eyes of high schoolers, who aren’t afraid to ask the tough questions. 

The Great Khan Through 2/26: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3:30 PM, Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-728-7529, redtwisttheatre.org, $40

After fighting off a group of boys who were assaulting his friend Ant (Monique Marshaun), Jayden (Simon Gebremedhin) and his protective mother, Crystal (LaTorious Givens) move to a new neighborhood. At his predominantly white school, Jayden strikes a deal with his history teacher, Mr. Adams (Bryan Breau): he’ll do his Genghis Khan report if Mr. Adams can name 20 Black Americans who aren’t athletes or entertainers. Traumatized by the world, Jayden grows fascinated with the Mongolian emperor’s vengeful spirit. But when Khan (Steffen Diem Garcia) visits Jayden, he reveals the story written about him is only part of the truth. 

It’s a multiplex piece that demands adults grow up. With Jayden’s class partner Gao Ming (Josie Mi) as our narrator, we start to question how we enable these whitewashed tales and are inspired to find our own answers. If anything, you’ll realize that history is a great con. 

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Christina Anderson’s luminous and wise the ripple, the wave that carried me home (now at the Goodman in a coproduction with Berkeley Rep, where it played in fall 2022) unfolds in mesmerizing capillary waves of memory, selective and otherwise. (“This country is built on selective memory,” one character observes while watching the Rodney King trial in 1992, and it’s impossible to argue with that, given the escalated police violence 30 years later.)

the ripple, the wave that carried me home Through 2/12: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Tue 1/31 7:30 PM, Sun 2/5 7:30 PM, and Thu 2/9 2 PM; touch tour and audio description Sat 2/5 2 PM (touch tour 12:30 PM), ASL interpretation Sat 2/11 2 PM, Spanish subtitles Sat 2/11 8 PM, open captions Sun 2/12 2 PM; Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $15-$40

Janice (Christiana Clark) is a native of fictional Beacon, Kansas, where her late father Edwin, a civil rights activist who focused on desegregating the town’s public pools, is about to have a pool named in his honor. Janice has several reasons for not wanting to travel from Ohio to Kansas for the ceremony, no matter how much Brianna Buckley’s Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman, a volunteer with a Black community group in Beacon, implores her. Those reasons spool out as Anderson’s play takes us through nearly 40 years of history. It begins when Janice’s mother Helen (Aneisa Hicks), from the “thinking class” Black people of Beacon, and Edwin (Ronald L. Conner), a “necessity” Black man, (as in “working for the bare necessities”) meet and begin courting in the mid-50s; moves through Janice’s own adolescence as a budding swimmer; and concludes in the midst of the King riots. 

Edwin and Helen’s joint activism kicks into high gear with the “Beacon Three”—a group of white and Black boys who, unable to find a pool where they can swim together, drown in a garbage-filled lake. Yet that activism hits differently for Helen than it does for Edwin in sometimes horrifying ways, which has repercussions for their daughter.

Directed by Jackson Gay, Anderson’s play lets us see the characters and their causes with complexity (intraracial class differences, as well as gendered abuse, come into focus), along with sorrow and horror at the repeating cycles of white abuse. A recurring line, “Is this your first time in America? Let me show you around,” hits with both humor and heartache at the unwillingness of white Americans to confront racism. Yet by the end, there is also a hard-won pride and hope washing over the women in the story.

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In a world . . . where Norse mythology meets prog rock on a set seemingly built by precocious middle-schoolers, brothers Jorik and Jarl battle one another and several deities (best known to modern audiences via the Marvel Universe) to wear the crown of their kingdom. Songs are sung, seas traversed, swords crossed, and evil vanquished; the people rejoice and peace rules the land.

ValhallaThrough 2/5: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, The Edge Off Broadway, 1133 W. Catalpa, theplagiarists.org, pay what you can (suggested donation $15)

If this calls to mind a game of Dungeons & Dragons soundtracked by Yes or Magma, you’re on the right track. Adapted by Bryan Haney and Kate Nawrocki from a concept album by Haney’s band, Cirkut Mob, and directed by Nawrocki, the overall effect is spirited cosplay meets high school musical. Lacking the budget for the million-dollar effects the production aspires to, designer Nina D’Angier-Castillo’s shadow puppets evoke a child’s world of make-believe where a toy Viking ship can crash convincingly in a pretend sea that is just a long piece of cloth waved to and fro by a playground friend. The spell breaks when grown-ups belt tunes with on-the-nose lyrics about good and evil and the like. The live band, led by Elizabeth Bagby, backs these groaners skillfully, but not unlike the 70s dinosaur rock they are an obvious and loving tribute to, it’s best to ignore the lyric sheet.

I kept imagining how much more affecting this would all be if it were performed by actual children rather than adults pretending but there’s no faulting the effort or desire of anyone involved, no matter their age. 

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