Chicago Tribune - Recommended
"...As the leader of a uniformly strong cast, Yando makes a most telling Hubbard and, in the other very notable performance, Judd really allow one to see and feel Horace's sickness and horror at what his wife and her family are doing. Horace is often played sentimentally. Not by Judd. There's also an apt coldness in his Horace, a man who understands what it takes to vanquish the Hubbards but whose body is failing fast. Mere weakness, in the ascendant Hubbard way of doing business."
Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended
"...A show more lip-smackingly delicious than biscuits and grits that comes smothered with a heaping side of evil. That just might be the best way to describe the Goodman Theatre revival of "The Little Foxes," Lillian Hellman's quasi-autobiographical family saga that takes an American Gothic view of the dirty underbelly of capitalism (remember, the play debuted in 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression), considers the toxic unfinished business of the Civil War, and serves up a heaping plate of greed, betrayal, corruption, sexism and racism that is countered only by a last gasp of moral accountability."
Chicago Reader - Recommended
"...But then Wishcamper's staging is full of such gestures, from hilarious or meaningful syncopations of speech to Cochran's tendency to give Steve Pickering's Oscar the occasional big-sisterly slap on the head. Dan Waller is ever so creepy as Leo Hubbard, slimy spawn of Oscar and Birdie. John Judd makes an appropriately noble ruin of Horace. Cherene Snow's Addie is, compellingly, the mother you always wanted but never got. Larry Yando is a great, nasty, delightful hoot as affable, dangerous Ben. And Cochran gives a towering performance sans kothornoi, channeling so many of the theater's thwarted women while adding a power-however brutal and distorted-that few of them are permitted."
Windy City Times - Highly Recommended
"...Wishcamper's dream-team cast is led by Shannon Cochran as a seductively calculating Regina who taunts Ben with her superior height and playfully smacks Oscar on his bald head ( echoing the latter's mistreatment of his alcoholic wife ), despite the Macchiavellian menace that veteran villains Larry Yando and Steve Pickering exude. John Judd's Horace provides our moral compass, as do Cherene Snow and Dexter Zellicoffer's wise servants and Rae Gray's remarkably mature Alexandra. One-percenters might want to exercise caution departing the theater."
Gapers Block - Highly Recommended
"...Goodman's excellent new production of The Little Foxes, directed with style by Henry Wishcamper, stars a galaxy of Chicago's finest actors and surely resonates with some of the current discussions about racism, sexism, domestic abuse and income inequality. If you have a drink with friends after the show, those topics probably will be part of your post-play discussion."
Time Out Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...Mary Beth Fisher and Rae Gray offer heartbreaking portraits of the innocents caught in the crossfire; Gray’s Alexandra, Horace and Regina’s daughter, represents the best work I’ve yet seen from a rising young actress holding her own among an ensemble full of titans. In his staging's final moment, director Henry Wishcamper gives her a kind of pyrrhic moral victory over the mother she now sees fully for the first time, leaving Cochran almost pitiable. Almost."
Stage and Cinema - Recommended
"...It’s not easy to make Hellman’s contrivances crackle: Here the sparks seem more set than spontaneous. No question, Rosenthal’s ostentatiously ornamental set, Jenny Mannis’ “belle epoque” finery, even Richard Woodbury’s manipulative score combine with a carnivorous cast to honor Hellman’s soap-operatic spitefest. But, almost three hours after its quiet opening, this Little Foxes is not a greater whole than the sum of its scenes. It’s well-made, consummately cast, and perfectly pictorial. But Regina’s crucial comeuppance (in this case a “godownance”) owes more to plot than passion."
ChicagoCritic - Highly Recommended
"...Modern writers are generally advised not to make the divide between good and evil characters too stark. But modern writers aren’t Lillian Hellman. And her 1939 play The Little Foxes depicts a time and place, 1900 in an unnamed Southern town west of Mobile, where the economic and legal structures were so brazenly unjust, a nuanced portrait of the people responsible would be disingenuous. The Goodman’s new production, under the direction of Henry Wishcamper, maximizes the loathsomeness of Hubbard family, creating a world thick with scheming and traps for our heroes. It’s a delectable evening."
Chicago Stage and Screen - Somewhat Recommended
"...Despite its plea for conscientiousness, The Little Foxes may not be direct enough in its assertion that we are all-like those who watch the locust-part of the problem. And for certain interested parties, that is probably for the best. After all, using the stage as a pulpit is highly unfashionable and a theater like the Goodman cannot afford to alienate an audience that bears a striking similarity, at least in outward appearance, to this play's entourage. Still it's a strange way to spend an afternoon or evening, alternatingly despising and pitying these fictional forbearers of entitlement and privilege at $70 a seat with a $10 drink in one hand a $500 mobile computer in the other. But I guess we come to art not just to see how the other halves live but also to see ourselves reflected. Sadly it seems, like the Hubbards themselves, The Little Foxes is well dressed and elegant but crucially lacking in soul."
Around The Town Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...From the second one enters the Albert Theatre at The Goodman, and sees the wonderful Southern home of Regina Giddens (amazingly brought to life by Shannon Cochran), one has the feeling that they have entered a time machine. It is 1900 and we are in the South, in this magnificent mansion that is owned by the Giddens/Hubbard family. We are peering in on the family that keeps finding ways to have evil beat good in their lives. This is the classical “The Little Foxes”, Lillian Hellman’s American Drama that tackles the concept of greed changing a community, for the worse as it also can with the family that believes it can beat all odds, no matter what."
Chicago Theatre Review - Highly Recommended
"...Lillian Hellman's play grips the audience from its very first scene and never lets go until the final moments. Henry Wishcamper's production about a selfish, well-to-do family who want more is intensely paced, perfectly cast, truthfully acted and gorgeous to view. This is the Goodman Theatre at its very best."
Chicagoland Theater Reviews - Highly Recommended
"...“The Little Foxes” has taken some criticism for its melodramatic moments and occasional speechifying. At the end, Regina gets a comeuppance of a sort, possibly a concession to the audience’s perceived desire to punish the wicked. But overall this is credible and involving theater at a very high level. The audience can view the show as a cautionary tale about how the despoilers and the avaricious in society can triumph over a society that refuses out of cowardice or indifference to stop them. Or the play can be taken as a rousing piece of storytelling. Either way it works at the Goodman, where play and production unite in an opulent presentation seldom offered to area playgoers."
The Fourth Walsh - Recommended
"...Hellman's THE LITTLE FOXES is iconic. And Wishcamper masterfully orchestrates the Goodman's production as a lush and wicked showcase. And except for some long-winded soliloquies (siblings would cut each other off), the ensemble interact like a genuine family. It feels like they've been together for decades. The familial tension and comedy is like a finely edited reality show. The Hubbards could be pre-television Kardashians. The family business is a business first. And blood isn't thicker than bonds."
