Valentine Victorious presented by The House Theatre Of Chicago at The Viaduct

Chicago Tribune - Recommended

"...the House has found a key that few can copy. This Saturday morning-style gunslinger relies on meta-dramatics for its hip, postmodern veneer. Talk about a security blanket. Whenever you resist its sloppiness, the sheer exuberance of the performances and the audacious originality of the material still grab you by the scruff of the neck. "Valentine" went on for well over 2 1/2 hours. I never once noticed the time."

Chicago Sun Times - Recommended

"...As in the earlier installments, "Valentine Victorious" is endlessly ingenious in its staging (credit director Dennis Watkins and choreographer Tommy Rapley). It also is exuberant and imaginative in its musical scoring."

Chicago Reader - Recommended

"...Valentine Victorious is longer than it needs to be, and neither its pseudoscience nor its pseudoplot makes much pseudosense. But Dennis Watkins's staging for the House Theatre of Chicago is full of generous fun, bright energy, good music--and great, cheap coups de theatre: a nuclear explosion, for instance, realized by means of green umbrellas. Writer-star Nathan Allen cavorts like a kid before his bedroom mirror."

Time Out Chicago - Recommended

"...At its best, director Watkins' Valentine Victorious, which takes its setting and style from '30s pulp and Frank Miller comics, is undeniably thrilling theater, including an inspired bit of visual storytelling in which a visit to Graceland Cemetery is illustrated with handheld comic-book panels. But such highlights come at the price of the lugubrious and obsessively derivative story."

ChicagoCritic - Highly Recommended

"...We celebrate Valentine’s victory over evil with the souring anthem that got the rafters rattling with “Never Fear, Valentine is Here.” An emotional ending to a magnificent original trilogy from a special theatre troupe. This is Chicago innovative theatre at its zenith."

Chicago Stage and Screen - Recommended

"...It's all pure pop fantasy, with a campy "noir" flavor, billows of smoke and ripples of eerie sound effects. And the opening night audience devoured it as if it were manna from on high. It isn't every day Chicagoans can witness a major new entertainment phenomenon develop. That is what the House Theatre is, and if you want to look back years later and say you saw them when, don't miss this wild ride."