Tony Award-winning Broadway legend Donna McKechnie, the primary performing muse to late director-choreographer Michael Bennett in such musicals as A Chorus Line, Company and Promises, Promises, is the headlining star for Pride Films and Plays’ annual benefit Simply Sensational: Legends. The event features McKenchnie and other performers in addition to a raffle for fabulous door prizes. Pride Films and Plays’ benefit Simply Sensational: Legends starring Donna McKechnie is at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 20, at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont Ave. General admission tickets are $75, while VIP tickets (including 6 p.m. pre-show cabaret and appetizers at Cooper’s, 1232 W. Belmont Ave.) are $100. Tickets to a post-show champagne and chocolates reception with McKechnie are an additional $25. For more information, visit www.pridefilmsandplays.com.
CRITICS’ PICKS
At Home at the Zoo, City Lit Theater, through Oct. 26. Intensely-crafted performances lend coherence to Edward Albee’s 1959 snapshot of an urban duel, enhanced (if not clarified) by his 2004 prologue. MSB
The Clean House, Bluebird Arts at Athenaeum Theatre, through Oct. 26. “Life is a joke, so you might as well die laughing” is the moral of Sarah Ruhl’s magic-realism parable, rendered with plenty of soul-cleansing comedy in this debut production. MSB
Don Giovanni, Lyric Opera of Chicago, through Oct. 29. The famous serial seducer becomes a coke-snorting and sadistic modernizing menace in Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls’ new production that updates Mozart’s masterpiece to 1920s rural Spain. The Lyric’s first non-traditional staging of Don Giovanni is a dramatically compelling kick off to the company’s 60th anniversary season. SCM
Season on the Line, The House Theatre of Chicago, through Oct. 26. Capt. Ahab is a meglomaniac theater director and Moby Dick is a white-suited critic in Shaun Pfautsch’s highly creative transposition from Melville novel to showbiz valentine. It’s great fun yet remarkably faithful in structure to the great American original. JA
—By Abarbanel, Barnidge
and Morgan