The best things to do in Chicago this week

Having retired cofounder Robert Joffrey's production of The Nutcracker after nearly 30 years, the Joffrey Ballet debuted a brand-new version in 2016, set in Chicago against the backdrop of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Featuring stunning new choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, the latest iteration of the classic Christmas will still have you humming “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” for days after you leave the theater.

Chicago-based playwright Isaac Gomez makes his Steppenwolf debut with this tale of the women who live, work and too often disappear from the American-owned factories in Juarez, Mexico, along the U.S. border. Sandra Marquez directs an all-female, primarily Latinx cast featuring newly minted Steppenwolf ensemble member Karen Rodriguez.

Looking back, it’s not surprising that composer David Yazbeck was able to make Tootsie into a great stage musical. After all, he’d already done it before with The Full Monty. This intimate production from the storefront musical maestros at Theo Ubique is the first in their new cabaret-style space on the Evanston side of Howard Avenue.

Have you ever watched the movie Showgirls and thought it could use some holiday cheer? Good news, folks: Hell in a Handbag Productions has you covered. With a book by Derek Van Barham and music from Scott Lamberty, Jeff Thomson and David Cerda, Snowgirls is a Christmas-themed musical parody that exposes what really goes on at the North Pole.

Three stories—one from 1951, another from 1981 and a third from the distant future—intersect in this new play from writer J. Nicole Brooks. The result is a mashup of afrofuturism, astronaut Carl Sagan and the true story of Henrietta Lacks.

The animating principle behind The Play That Goes Wrong, the scrappy British meta-comedy turned transatlantic hit, is that bad drama—if bad enough—can function as good comedy. Presented as a performance of the fictional whodunit The Murder at Haversham Manor by the amateur Cornley University Drama Society, the play takes Murphy’s Law to an exponential degree. Everything goes wrong, then wronger, then wrongest.

Does Die Hard count as a Christmas movie? No matter which side of the argument you fall on, you’ll laugh your ass off at Yippee Ki-Yay Merry Christmas: A Die Hard Musical Parody. After four years at the now-defunct MCL Chicago, the adventures of Bruce McClane and his nemesis Hans Olo are returning in a new, expanded form at Wicker Park’s the Den Theatre.

Strawdog Theatre premieres a new adaptation of Eric Kimmel’s classic holiday children’s book. With a script by Mike Daily and original music and lyrics by composer Jacob Combs, the delightful Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins promises something special this season: a fun, family-oriented show that doesn’t involve Christmas.

In this original holiday fantasy from Otherworld Theatre, a young girl named Cora battles to save her grandfather from the Time’s immensely powerful hunter, the Winter Wolf. Written by Joseph Zettelmaier and directed by Lauren N. Fields at Otherworld’s Alchemist’s Lab in Lakeview, The Winter Wolf gives fantasy and sci-fi fans a holiday show of their own.

Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Steadfast Tin Soldier is a spectacle that draws heavily from the British tradition of Christmas pantomimes. There is practically no spoken dialogue; instead, the action is set to a score composed by Andre Pluess and Amanda Dehnert for piano, violin, cello and woodwinds. As its story unfolds in a brisk 60 minutes, the show reveals a knack for inventive variations within its basic pattern: Execute charmingly whimsical contrivance, rinse, repeat.

A cycle of seven plays sounds like something epic in scope: a grand and sweeping project that might span generations or continents. But Ike Holter’s Chicago cycle does the opposite of that. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and Holter’s series tells the story of one (fictional) neighborhood in particular: Rightlynd, a big-hearted, hardscrabble stretch of blocks where locals don’t take too kindly to the notion of brunch. Rightlynd is also the name of Holter’s triumphant new play, in which he adds a bold, profane and electrifying chapter to his saga.

What’s the best way for a playwright to deal with a sensitive social issue—to engage while remaining engaging, to preach without being preachy? It’s a tricky line to walk, and the way to failure is paved with agitprop, dinner-party philosophizing and well-meaning dramatic inertia. In his thrilling new play, Plainclothes, set in the cramped loss-prevention office of a Macy’s-esque Miracle Mile department store, playwright Spenser Davis makes the case for a kind of a washroom-sink realism. Energetic, funny and packed with emotion, the play features millennial characters who self-consciously wrestle with institutional racism in ways that feel genuine.

Shakespeare’s classic rom-com centers around Viola, a shipwrecked twin who disguises herself as a dude and ends up in a complicated love triangle. Gender is bent, curmudgeons get their comeuppance and the food of love will surely play on in this production from Writers Theatre Artistic Director Michael Halberstam.