Ask Your Doctor: A Pharmaceutical Musical It took eight people to write book, lyrics, and music for this Annoyance musical? Maybe too much input diluted the output. The premise is golden: pharmaceutical giant Mendacium pedals a designer pill with such restorative powers that people who take it need only two hours of sleep per night. Supermodel drug reps, tyrannized by glammed-out sibling managers Gabriel and Gabrielle, devolve into amoral profit machines until conscience-stricken ingenue saleswoman Morgan sabotages everything. But the ragged, underdeveloped opening number sets the low standard for the ensuing two acts, turning a potent setup into a diffuse narrative peppered with melodically tenuous songs. As an addict sales rep Lily, Eleni Sauvageu delivers the evening’s most grounded, emotionally interesting performance. It’s a shame her character barely matters. —Justin Hayford
The Day That Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Nearly Killed Me: My Rally to Restore Sanity Well, “nearly killed me” is an exaggeration. At no point during Angie McMahon’s 40-minute comic monologue does it look like she’s about to bite the dust. But the fact that McMahon frames her saga in life-or-death terms tells you something about how she found herself, almost single-handedly, organizing a Chicago satellite of Jon Stewart’s 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity. This is a tale of pure, uncut enthusiasm running up against the realities of city permits, porta-potties, potty mouths, and 5,000 Jon Stewart fans with minds of their own. McMahon should provide more context; as things stand, it’s simply a given that we (a) know all about the rally and (b) share her zeal for it. She should also remember to project past the first row. Her energy is fun to behold, though. In her manic phase, she reminds me of Snoopy doing his victory-is-mine dance. —Tony Adler
Ten Dollar House Down-low star-crossed lovers are a perennial theme at Pride Films & Plays, and this nonfiction 1930s historical drama by Rick Kinnebrew and Martha Meyer is no different. Risking ill repute and financial ruin, a London transplant saves an ancestral rock cottage in a dying Wisconsin town from bank demolition with a $10 payment. In Michael D. Graham’s production, the investment and renovation is presented as an excuse for Bob Neal to woo Edgar Hellum, a fellow artist and handyman hiding his own taboo proclivities. The source material is a genuinely inspiring story about gay trailblazers opting to create a refined paradise where they damn well pleased, even if the show itself gets caught in the perfunctory trappings of biographical storytelling. —Dan Jakes
