In a cramped apartment on Chicago’s South Side, the Youngers are about to receive a windfall from an insurance payout, and a couple members of the family have different ideas about how best to spend it. Based on Lorraine Hansberry’s remarkable landmark drama, A Raisin in the Sun, this Tony award-winning musical adaptation preserves all of the emotional beats of the play, with songs that add breadth to the lives of its characters, while only occasionally interrupting the momentum of the plot. But this is a quibble with the musical, and not the production. Under the direction of The Black Rep’s founder, Ron Himes, Raisin soars and dips through the aspirations and hardships of a working-class family living in the 1950s, when a piece of the American Dream glinted just inside the fringes of what seemed possible.
