Chicago Reader
- Highly Recommended
"...Hawkins has stripped things down so that the show becomes a kind of communal happening. He's also updated the cultural references: the cast occasionally breaks into Reagan-era power ballads, perhaps to underscore the play's resonance with the AIDS crisis. The result is an exhilarating, hilariously unsettling meditation on the orgiastic response to mass human die-off."
Windy City Times
- Highly Recommended
"...By turns serious or bizarre, Red Noses most definitely is a comedy—a sprawling pageant with several dozen characters. If well done, the verbal wit and physical comedy should be laugh-out-loud funny, and so they are in director Matt Hawkins's production. Scenically it's nothing special—some tricks with paint and body fluids are the chief visual devices—but with 23 actors in a small space, the focus must be on people and not scenery."
Chicago Free Press
- Highly Recommended
"...What a treat to watch this tight 23-person cast at complete ease with their challenging material, riffing off each other even as the tone constantly shifts from silly to dark to inspirational. Milking knowingly bad jokes, harmonizing striking covers of ‘80s pop-rock, evangelizing about the meaning of life in the face of imminent death — they do it all, with winning results. Fertilizing their onstage craft is Hawkins’ ace production team, providing (in particular) the sharp color scheme in the set and props, and fabulously motley costumes. The resulting enthusiastic tide carries the audience along with its ebullient artists. It’s rare indeed to find a show packed with gallows humor that doesn’t trivialize death, yet leaves everyone smiling."
Copley News Service
- Highly Recommended
"...Every member of the ensembles carries his or her acting weight, several performers doubling and tripling in roles. They blend seamlessly into a coherent production that skips from Monty Python to Martin and Lewis to tragedy. What could have been silly and self indulgent in less disciplined hands turns out to be invigorating, funny, and ultimately moving."
Centerstage
- Somewhat Recommended
"...Billed as a black comedy, Strawdog's revival of Peter Barnes' 1985 production is in fact consistently rosy. Especially during the ebullient first act, Flote's followers' collective happiness feels unearned. Still, the talented cast's obvious enthusiasm and the production's undeniable goodheartedness make it hard not to laugh along with the ragtag troupe. These traits prove a liability, however, in the more somber second act, when human nature threatens to prove blacker than the Black Death. Laughter wins out all too easily, and the Red Noses' unshaken faith in slapstick, God and sing-a-longs reaps its just reward: one last groaner of a punch-line."
Time Out Chicago
- Highly Recommended
"...Hawkins’s 18-actor production makes great use of both the Strawdog ensemble and vets of the House, Factory, Hypocrites and other storefront stalwarts; it’s possibly the canniest assemblage of Off Loop talent since last year’s Hypocrites Our Town. Punctuated by cheekily co-opted renditions of ’80s tunes by the likes of Billy Joel and the Outfield (credit arranger Mike Przygoda and the self-accompanying cast) and featuring Aly Reneé Graves’s astute modern-dress costumes, Red Noses is a major achievement for Hawkins. He skillfully enhances Barnes’s theological themes and tangible-disease schema (“sickly yellow” has never been so literal as in this production’s visual metaphor) with an exhilarating pop-cult playfulness that his performers wholly embrace."
