THEATER REVIEW: "Murder for Two – A Killer Musical" ★★ Through June 19 Upstairs at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Navy Pier; Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes; Tickets: $25-$30 at 312-595-5600 or www.chicagoshakes.com. With Joe Kinosian and Alan Schmuckler.

In “Murder for Two — A Killer Musical,” the campy new whodunit at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, two piano-playing actors play 14 characters. Or more precisely, the actor Alan Schmuckler plays the police officer trying to solve a country-house murder, while Joe Kinosian, who co-wrote this frenetic, 90-minute show with Kellen Blair, plays all 13 of the suspects.

“Murder for Two” partly follows the playbook of successful shows like “The 39 Steps,” wherein four actors play something like 140 characters, and partly spoofs the traditional setup (detective, isolated locale, array of suspects with ample motives) of Agatha Christie murder mysteries such as “Ten Little Indians.” Second City is currently doing something similar on Norwegian cruise ships. “Murder for Two,” which also recalls John Kander and Fred Ebb's “Curtains,” also throws an original score into the mix (music by Kinosian, lyrics by Blair).

Such tours de force can be fun for an audience (and, with only two actors, profitable for summer-stock theaters). Indeed, “Murder for Two,” which is premiering as part of CST's new-works initiative, has its amusements. You'll laugh at some of the shtick.

But director David H. Bell's production forgets a couple of crucial truths. Shows with actors playing multiple characters only really work if the actors disappear inside the roles. Kinosian doesn't disappear anywhere. He's certainly a very entertaining personality with a plethora of talents and eye-popping energy. But if he got any bigger or showier, he'd be holding back the tides of Lake Michigan.

Sir Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Sir Derek Jacobi, the illustrious English actor, are the artistic honorees at the upcoming Silver Jubilee Gala of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Both will be present June 6 on Navy Pier.

Heather Headley and Michael Cerveris are the headline performers at the event, a major fundraiser for the company. John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe are the "civic honorees." Six hundred guests are expected; Chicago Shakespeare, which is celebrating the arrival of its 25th anniversary season, says it hopes to raise a record amount of money.

 
THEATER REVIEW: "The Madness of George III" ★★★½ Through June 12 at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes; Tickets: $44-$75 at 312-595-5600 and www.chicagoshakes.com

In their youth, British royals can deliver fairytale weddings. History shows that the later years are often more problematic. Especially for kings named George. Before there was the problem in the Oscar-winning “The King's Speech” (George VI), there was the troubling little prequel of a king's apparent madness (George III). There's nothing to the name, of course, but there may well be a causal relationship between the troubles of the man and the nature of the job.

As one of playwright Alan Bennett's characters wryly and rhetorically observes in the play “The Madness of George III,” currently in a stellar Chicago Shakespeare Theater production from visiting director Penny Metropulos, “Who could flourish on such a daily diet of compliance?”

Who indeed? Not that I wouldn't mind (family, I'm talking to you) finding out.

The fact that most of us don't know, of course, surely accounts for some of our fascination with the travails of monarchs. But Bennett's exceedingly shrewd 1991 play (which was filmed in 1994 as “The Madness of King George”) doesn't just lift the veil on royal life in the late 18th century, a time of some U.K. trauma over the loss of a certain former colony, but it also probes the deeper notion of whether it's really any good for anyone to be bowed to, scraped at and generally kissed on the posterior on a daily basis.

THEATER REVIEW: "Black Watch" ★★★★ Through April 10 at the Broadway Armory at 5917 N. Broadway; $38-$45 at 312-595-5600 or chicagoshakes.com. | "Black Watch" PHOTOS

• Broadway Armory is a stage fit for "Black Watch" (posted March 24)

At the top of “Black Watch,” the lights inside the rigged-up Broadway Armory fade to expectant black. Pipes wail. Spotlights swirl. An image of the Scottish flag dances on the floor. And the kind of dramatic, Scottish-tourist-board voice you'd expect if attending the Edinburgh Tattoo or some Scottish “Riverdance” rip-off, rises to a crescendo. You're revved up for an entire kilted regiment to come marching through the armory door, bagpipes ablaze, as if this were some dreamy Celtic spectacular.

But the opening is a fake. Instead, klieg lights herald only a lone young man, dwarfed by this massive space and stared at by nearly 700 people perched in stadium-style seating alongside enough sound-and-light equipment to host Nazareth. He's a modern-day soldier, practiced in stoicism, fluent in the kind of profane banter that passes for intimacy among young British males, and well equipped with graveyard humor. He was assigned to Iraq — more specifically, like others in his regiment, to the so-called “Triangle of Death,” near Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, where ammunition was plentiful and insurgents boiled.

“All right,” is his self-conscious greeting. We sense he is being interviewed for a theater piece about what it was like to serve in Iraq. He shrugs at the thought of changing hearts. When you're in the army, he observes, “people have their minds already made up.”

This may be the National Theatre of Scotland on the history of an illustrious Scottish regiment — replete with nearly 300 years of action from Africa to Canada to Mesopotamia (the first time around). But the writer, Gregory Burke, and the director, John Tiffany, immediate signal their distance from the romantic pageant.

Their exploration of the past, present and future of the Black Watch is not told with heroic panache (although pride in tradition is part of the story). Rather, this is a clear-eyed, even-handed look at the realities of war through the eyes of the expectant sons of Dundee, Perth or Fife. It is about the rush of battle and the depression that can follow; the way grandstanding politicians invariably undermine those risking their lives; the complexity of fighting new kinds of enemies who blow themselves up. And, to its great credit, “Black Watch” also hints at the awkwardness of artistic persons around those who serve. The interviewer is played by the same fine actor, Paul Higgins, as the regimental sergeant; Higgins shows two sides of a complex Scottish coin.

 
"Black Watch" will be hosted by Chicago Shakespeare Theater in the Broadway Armory in Edgewater, shown here in a 1920 photo from the Chicago History Museum. The building was built as a skating rink in 1916 but became an armory by the end of World War I. It’s now owned by the Chicago Park District.  Check out a "Black Watch" photo gallery here.

If you have ever driven down Broadway, or stared westward from the Red Line train in the vicinity of Thorndale Avenue, or (like me) paused at the door of the genial St. Andrew's Inn after enjoying a couple of its uncommonly fine selection of beers, you've surely noticed the historic Broadway Armory at 5917 N. Broadway. But I know someone who lives pretty much across the street and had no idea what was there.

Built in 1916 as the Winter Garden Ice Skating Rink, the building become an armory by the end of World War I and was, for years thereafter, used by the Illinois National Guard for drills and training. Some of the older folks in the Edgewater neighborhood, I've been told, remember seeing tanks rolling regularly down Elmdale Avenue. The armory had huge doors and the military vehicles would just pull right in.

Since the Chicago Park District took over the space and, in 1985, turned the armory into an indoor recreation and community center, plenty of citizens have played a variety of sports inside (look hard and you can still see little patches of oil, relics of the armory days, on the wooden floor). But if you've never had that pleasure, you won't be prepared for the size of its colossal interior.

As I stood in the center of its main room early on Tuesday morning, mouth gaping, Nick Bojko, the genial fellow who supervises the Broadway Armory Park for the Park District, helpfully recited some dimensions: 52,800 square feet.

Room enough for a show.

The actor Ian McDiarmid, known for his work at the Royal Shakespeare Company and his appearances in the “Star Wars” films, will star in a new Barbara Gaines production of Shakespeare’s rarely produced “Timon of Athens” — part of the 25th anniversary season of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The show will open in April, 2012.

The subscription season on Navy Pier will also include a major revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s “Follies,” directed next fall by Gary Griffin; a new Gaines production of “Elizabeth Rex,” a contemporary play by Timothy Findley set in the time of Shakespeare; a winter take on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” created in partnership with Chicago’s Redmoon Theatre and co-directed by Jessica Thebus and Frank Maugeri; and a new production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” also directed by Griffin and opening in February.

In the World Stage series this coming summer, Chicago Shakespeare will present “One Thousand and One Nights,” a new production from British director Tim Supple that uses actors from across the Arabic-speaking world.

Family audiences headed to Navy Pier this summer will be able to see a new, puppet-filled musical version of “The Adventures of Pinocchio,” penned by the Broadway team of Neil Bartram and Brian Hill and directed by Rachel Rockwell.

THEATER REVIEW: “The Cripple of Inishmaan” ★★½ Through March 27 at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand Ave.; Tickets: $46-$56 at 312-595-5600 and chicagoshakes.com. Above, Tadhg Murphy is Billy Claven in “The Cripple of Inishmaan” by the Druid Theatre Company of Ireland.

At the top of Martin McDonagh's “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” two women stand behind the counter of their little store on the island of Inishmaan, off Ireland's west coast. It's 1934. And thanks to a one-man walking newspaper named JohnnyPateenMike (Dermot Crowley) this sour-faced duo is better stocked with idle gossip than fresh groceries.

Indeed, in the new touring production from the Druid Theatre of Galway, Ireland, Eileen (Dearbhla Molloy) and Kate (Ingrid Craigie) have a decidedly Beckettian quality as they stand — isolated, far apart, lips pursed, staring out front — and worry about their charge, poor Billy (Tadhg Murphy). They bring to mind a two-faced Winnie from Beckett's “Happy Days.” Or, since there is a little curtain that separates the front of the shop from the rear, a pair of Irish Judys stuck without a Punch.

Just a few minutes into Garry Hynes' intensely stylized production, created in partnership with the Atlantic Theatre and which opened Wednesday in a Chicago Shakespeare Theater presentation, you already see where things are going.

"Black Watch" is an internationally touring play by the National Theatre of Scotland, to be hosted by Chicago Shakespeare Theater at the Broadway Armory. It has to do with Scotland’s legendary military regiment and is based on interviews conducted by playwright Gregory Burke with former soldiers who served in Iraq.

Check out a "Black Watch" photo gallery here.

(Posted by Doug George)

 
The roof of the Skyline Stage on Navy Pier was blown off its frame during a storm Dec 12. (Tribune photo by Nancy Stone)

Its canvas roof lifted up and away by the gales off Lake Michigan on Dec. 12, the Skyline Stage is now a sad sight at the heart of Navy Pier. A few shards of canvas can be seen attached to the frames. Otherwise, a rude wind blows across those plastic seats.

A Navy Pier spokesman insisted this week that the latest plan — after much internal debate from a new board — was to repair the roof, although no dates have been set for repairs that may not be finished in time for the traditional June start of the annual summer attraction, Cirque Shanghai. The Chinese acrobats are currently on hold.

Why bother rebuilding?

This is the perfect opportunity to build the new indoor theater that Chicago Shakespeare Theater needs. My Tribune colleague Blair Kamin has made the point that whatever gets built needs to be an architectural focal point of the new Navy Pier — and hear, hear to that — but everybody seems to agree that such a venue is desirable and that the Skyline Stage footprint is the spot. And the insurance money could make an excellent down payment.

Gary Griffin ("Pacific Overtures," "The Color Purple") will direct a major Chicago revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Follies" to kick off the 2011-12 season at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

This new production of Sondheim's 1971 musical, which contains such signature musical numbers as "I'm Still Here," "Broadway Baby" and "Losing My Mind" and takes place as performers reunite in a soon-to-be-demolished theater, will be staged in the mainstage Courtyard Theatre. "Follies," likely to be one of the most anticipated shows of the year, will play Oct. 4 through Nov. 6.

There will also be a separate, Washington, D.C. revival of "Follies" at the Kennedy Center this spring, directed by Eric Schaeffer.