The year in lame

Turn of the Century (Goodman Theatre)
This genuine fiasco—Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice’s child-minded, Broadway-bound jukebox musical, produced inexplicably on the Goodman stage—gave Jeff Daniels something to put on his résumé after Dumb and Dumber: Dumbest.

Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story on Stage (Broadway in Chicago)
With no original music to speak of, a zillion film projections re-creating the atmosphere of the ’87 movie and a script that hardly deviated from the memorized-by-millions screenplay, the only thing dirty about The Classic Story was that it sullied the best Broadway in Chicago season (Sweeney Todd, The Drowsy Chaperone, Avenue Q) in recent memory.

Eurydice (Victory Gardens)
Victory Gardens deserved the acclaim it got this year for premiering Joel Drake Johnson’s sharp, bitter family drama Four Places. But what did we do to deserve this dryly staged, 80-minute phony-mythology play that not one person can explain?

Better Late (Northlight Theatre)
Comedy titan Larry Gelbart and Dirty Sexy Money’s Craig Wright cowrote this cheap, warmed-over situation comedy specifically to showcase Chicago stage royalty John Mahoney, Mike Nussbaum and Linda Kimbrough. We can only assume they also wrote the wildly misleading title.

Carter’s Way (Steppenwolf Theatre)
Like a regular bad play, but with bad live jazz.

NEXT> 5 fabulous touring shows that made Chicago stops