Not-so-spooky theater picks for your Halloween weekend
By Kelly Kleiman

Not-so-spooky theater picks for your Halloween weekend
By Kelly KleimanKelly Kleiman

And for those of you who want to skip right to the next holiday, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas has just opened at Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire. There’s no particular hurry, though: this smartly-produced stage adaptation of the beloved holiday film runs through New Year’s Day. Tickets $40-$48.
Laura Molzahn

What performance isn’t improvised? But when choreographers leave the door wide open to improv, the results can be more dramatic than in the best-laid plans. I have high hopes for Rachel Damon’s Factor Ricochet, which she developed with her dancers over many months, exploring the many personas within each one. The resulting work—made up of choreography and “improvography”—opens tonight, Thursday, at Bucktown’s Holstein Park and runs through November 4.
Also tonight: Lucky Plush Productions opens The Better Half at the MCA. Choreographer Julia Rhoads collaborated with 500 Clown members Adrian and Leslie Danzig to create this seriocomic movement-theater riff on the 1944 noir Gaslight, with glimmerings of The Bourne Identityand Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage. Two weekends, through November 6.
Jonathan Abarbanel
As Kelly said before, this is Halloween Weekend, of course, and the truly wise will seek out the recommendations of Chicago Public Media’s Dueling Critics with regard to Halloween-themed shows, posted last Friday on this site. As for the truly unwise … .
Teatro Vista, celebrating its 22nd season, starts things rolling with Momma’s Boyz, the first of two plays by Candido Tirado the Latino-American troupe will produce this season. The troupe produces plays in English (or mostly English) exploring the urban landscape, and Momma’s Boyz is a tough-as-nails tale of three friends in The Projects who sell drugs. Twist is, it moves backwards in time to give the three a second chance with the help of hindsight that reality rarely offers. It’s running at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Avenue, through Dec. 4.
