Town and Country: A Look Back at 2008

Christopher Piatt, TimeOut Chicago

“In all of its values, Cromer’s subterranean Our Town, staged with mercurial precision in the Chopin basement, was the Chicago-est play of 2008.  Inviting the audience to re-consider Thornton Wilder’s oft-marginalized 1938 masterwork, Cromer and company slyly packaged it as Your Town…. 2008, of course, also saw Bob Falls’s notorious recent years of absentee leadership at the Goodman metastasize in public embarrassment for the city’s largest theatre company. The colossal failure of two of the projects Falls greenlighted left many Chicago theatre professionals dumbstruck—made it impossible to look the other way.  Unlike many artistic directors, Falls isn’t known for being spotted in his own company’s lobby, or, for that matter, anybody else’s. But it would be unfair not to point out that the one time I did lay eyes on Falls this year, it was at another artist’s show. He was ducking into the Chopin basement to check out Graney’s Miss Julie. Opposites, it would seem, still attract”.