Barbara Gaines is a great leader, no doubt about it. She took a little Lincoln Avenue storefront theater—not even a storefront, really, but a rooftop-patio-over-a-bar theater—and built it into a big-name, big-budget, high-prestige cultural institution with a well-earned reputation for connecting Chicago to the international theater community through its World’s Stages program, which I dearly love and sincerely respect. I think about what she’s achieved every time I walk into her wood-paneled temple to the Bard on Navy Pier, Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
If it’s true that auteurs get the best results from the weakest Shakespeare, then Gaines had a great opportunity with Henry VIII. A joint effort between the Bard and his much younger colleague John Fletcher, the play appears to have no real point other than to valorize Queen Elizabeth I, who’d been dead ten years by the time it premiered. Though her much-married daddy dominates the narrative and she appears only as a very small child in the final scene, everything in the play tends toward (a) legitimizing and (b) glorifying Elizabeth’s reign—because, after all, the circumstances that made her a monarch were awfully messy.
Well, there are a couple of really nice pageants.
Through 6/16: Tue and Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM
Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E Grand, Navy Pier 312-595-5600
chicagoshakes.com
$58-$78
