Chicago Tribune
- Recommended
"...to its immense credit, Lookingglass (Fox adapted with help from Laura Eason and Heidi Stillman) succeeds not only in bringing this meandering and complicated tale to theatrical life with considerable fullness, but it also negotiates and makes some reasoned contemporary sense of the mawkish sentimentality of Little Nell, one of those perfectly angelic Victorian girls destined only to suffer."
Chicago Sun Times
- Highly Recommended
"...Filled to bursting with larger-than-life characters bearing the most inspired, personality-defining names -- all of whom are intricately fitted into the machinations of plots as dark and twisting as the streets of Victorian London -- Dickens' novels seem made for the stage."
SouthtownStar
- Highly Recommended
"...While the majority of novelists do not translate well from the page to the stage, Charles Dickens' unforgettable characters seem to have been conjured up for theater. Every Dickens stage adaptation I have seen — from "A Christmas Carol" to "David Copperfield" to "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Hard Times," which Lookingglass Theatre staged five years ago — has been a resounding triumph."
Chicago Reader
- Somewhat Recommended
"...Dickens's 1841 serial novel is weak tea compared to Hard Times, whose 2001 staging was a triumph. Snapshots of London life--violent Punch and Judy shows, dens of iniquity--don't suit a fairy tale, but the black-and-white characters do. Long-suffering Little Nell (an uncloying Lorri Hamm) is too good to be true while the gratuitously dwarfish, melodramatic villain (a spiderlike Thomas J. Cox) is too nasty to be real and too clumsy to be threatening. Tracy Walsh's staging is delightfully comic.."
Windy City Times
- Somewhat Recommended
"...Under Walsh, the actors find the balance between truthful characterization and Dickensian expansiveness. All but Lorri Hamm ( Nell ) and Troy West ( Grandfather ) play multiple roles, none more astonishingly than Thomas J. Cox as Quilp. The script never identifies Quilp as a dwarf, but Cox plays him on bent, sprung legs, his head always lower than the others."
Time Out Chicago
- Somewhat Recommended
"...Anyone with a passing acquaintance with Lookingglass won’t be shocked to learn that its adaptation of Dickens’s novel says the most when no one says a thing. Anyone at all familiar with Dickens, however, might find that a little odd."
ChicagoCritic
- Recommended
"...No one adapts Charles Dickens’ novels as wonderful as Lookingglass Theatre company. Their version of Hard Times a couple of years ago was splendid and spectacular. Their present Dickens’ work, The Old Curiosity Shop, is a sensual triumph featuring exquisite lighting (TJ Gerckens), sets (Brian Sidney Bembridge) and costumes (Mara Blumenfeld) that propels us back to the Victorian England in the 1830’s."
Chicago Stage and Screen
- Recommended
"...The ensemble is true to the Victorian style and melodramatic conventions, with Thomas J. Cox's leering, bent-kneed and sinister Quilp threatening to chew up every inch of scenery in sight. We are so saturated with productions of "A Christmas Carol" every holiday season, it is nice to see one of Dickens' lesser known works dusted off and given a fresh stage treatment. It is an enjoyable 'Curiosity'."
