Altar Boyz This toothless send-up of boy bands, Christian rock, and Catholicism (music and lyrics by Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker, book by Kevin Del Aguila, based on an idea by Marc J. Kessler and Ken Davenport) is too gentle to be called satire, too tongue-in-cheek to be taken seriously, too risque to be religious. The tunes, though, are easy on the ear, and the lyrics witty—or at least witty enough to keep an audience’s attention. That’s especially so when the show is performed, as it here, by five energetic triple threats who know how to keep the show moving (thanks surely to Sawyer Smith’s choreography) and give the show’s paper-thin characters the illusion of a depth. Courtney Crouse directs. —Jack Helbig
The Christmas Schooner Mercury Theater Chicago presents this musical valentine (book by John Reeger, music and lyrics by Julie Shannon) to a German-American triumph in commerce. When Captain Stossel receives a letter from a relation in Chicago pining for the Christmas trees of their idyllic youth back in Bremen, he hits upon the idea of chopping down the overabundant forest nearby, filling his schooner, and sailing through harsh November waters down from his home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to spread holiday joy and make a buck in the bargain. Met with overwhelming demand, the Christmas Schooner becomes a beloved yearly tradition hardly slowed even by its originator’s death by shipwreck a mere five years into the enterprise. One’s enjoyment of these proceedings will depend largely on one’s attitude toward Christmas in America and the commerce it exults. Humming carols while frolicking through the mall? This show will fill your heart with holiday cheer; the rest of us will just have to shiver out in the cold. L. Walter Stearns directed. —Dmitry Samarov
They It’s a big deal that Trap Door Theatre has revived this black-comic satire by Polish polymath Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Avant-garde in 1920 and uncompromising now, it touches on authoritarianism and art, misogyny and media as it tells the tale of Callisto Balandash, a clueless aesthete who finds himself targeted by a shadowy government agency that seems bent on purging degenerate art but turns out to be animated by more personal motives. The connections Witkiewicz draws among diverse subjects—not to mention his ability to deflate them all—is at once grim, silly, and prophetic. Trouble is, the cast under adapter-director Beata Pilch push their performances so far into heavy-handed freneticism that the production becomes difficult to watch at just 80 minutes. Carl Wisniewski’s Callisto is the worst example. On the other hand, Mary-Kate Arnold manages to give some fire to Callisto’s long-suffering lover, Spika. —Tony Adler
