Chicago Tribune - Highly Recommended
"...As Bruce clearly understands, much can be accomplished with “The Little Foxes” in a tiny theater. Such a venue allows the actors to dial back scale and theatricality, and focus on truth. To his credit, Bruce doesn’t stint from the play’s less savory aspects—the racist language is all there, and the two black actors playing the servants (Nelson and Bryson Engelen) offer two very rich performances that seem at once to accept the social milieu and to comment thereupon. It’s very sophisticated work."
Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended
"...The revival of this 1939 Hellman classic, now in a Shattered Globe Theatre production, is rip-roaringly good, with director Brandon Bruce doing a splendid job of orchestrating one of those matchless Chicago casts in a tour de force of ensemble playing. The show veritably drips with unbridled greed, familial rage, moral corruption, racism, sexism and pure human cruelty."
Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended
"...It’s that mixture of horrified revulsion and amused fascination that makes Hellman’s 1939 drama The Little Foxes such a durable and compelling work. This isn’t only a classic work of theater, it’s ripping good entertainment—suspenseful, sharp-witted, thought-provoking, sometimes harrowing, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. And it’s a fabulous vehicle for good ensemble acting, as Shattered Globe Theatre’s fine revival makes abundantly clear."
Examiner - Highly Recommended
"...With the pieces in place for a scorched earth, winner-take-all match of wits and wherewithal, the Hubbards have at it smiles on their faces and knives in their voices. It’s deliciously wicked fun."
Chicago Free Press - Highly Recommended
"...Written in 1939, the play’s a feast for a talented ensemble. By and large, the Shattered Globe ensemble crackles in this intimate space. Although the grand staircase is missed (anyone familiar with the classic film adaptation by William Wyler, starring a flawless Bette Davis, surely remembers exactly why that staircase is key to the plot), Melania Lancy’s smart set design clicks in every other aspect. The stage’s tight confines serve the actors well, allowing their faces to register evidence of each new twist without overplaying a thing."
Centerstage - Highly Recommended
"...In short, Hellman lets her audience have their cake and eat it, too. An audience member can watch nasty people rip each other to shreds, but also see wicked behavior given its comeuppance. Few things are more richly satisfying."
Edge - Recommended
"...The Shattered Globe cast, headed by Linda Reiter as Regina, Kevin Kenneally as Benjamin, Don Bender as Oscar and Ted Hoerl as Regina’s Husband Horace have a ball being nasty all over Melania Lancys wonderful period set design. This play gives them the opportunity to access their true inner meanies."
Time Out Chicago - Somewhat Recommended
"...Bruce’s revival is caught in a no man’s land between social satire and Southern Gothic drama (Melania Lancy’s well-appointed drawing room leans toward the realism of the former, while Mike Durst’s distracting, moodily shifting lights suggest the latter). The supporting cast offers points of light, among them Eileen Niccolai as Oscar’s self-medicating wife and Carolyn Nelson, who brings more gravity to the tut-tutting family maid than Hellman provides. Linda Reiter, who found such nuance in another Southern mother in Shattered Globe’s season-opening Glass Menagerie, pushes only animatronic chilliness in Regina. These Foxes engage us intellectually, but they don’t bring much humanity to the inhuman."
ChicagoCritic - Highly Recommended
"...Shattered Globe Theatre—one of Chicago’s finest Equity theatres continues to mount outstanding dramas. Their production of Lillian Hellman’s morality tale of greed, The Little Foxes now showing in a superb production, under the smart direction by Brandon Bruce, is a triumph of ensemble acting. Rarely will you witness ten actors at the top of their craft in one production."
