Thursday, September 4, 2014
Which graduate of our public school system hasn’t read the CliffsNotes for Melville’s “Moby Dick,” along with Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet” and “Beowulf?” With “The …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 03:00PMWednesday, September 3, 2014
I missed “reasons to be pretty” when Profiles Theatre debuted it Chicago back in 2011. What many consider to be playwright Neil LaBute’s best work, the show presents the fallout from a…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 09:20AMTuesday, July 8, 2014
RECOMMENDED A few days ago, a friend and I were joking about the plot of Lerner and Loewe’s “Brigadoon” when he quipped, “What a silly story,” then, quickly rea…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:30AMMonday, June 23, 2014
By Dennis Polkow Director and choreographer Rachel Rockwell seems to be the lady with the golden touch, the one with an uncanny talent for taking old classic shows that you thought you knew …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMSaturday, June 14, 2014
RECOMMENDED Those of an age to recall the 1971 version of the John-Michael Tebelak/Stephen Schwartz musical “Godspell” are in for some surprises while enjoying the 2012 revised version o…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:00PMWednesday, April 16, 2014
RECOMMENDED Images from the early days of mass airline travel, the “Mad Men” years, depict the life of a flight attendant (then called stewardesses) as one of high-flying youth a…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 02:52PMMonday, April 14, 2014
RECOMMENDED Late in the second act of playwright Mona Mansour’s marvelous “The Way West,” a pizza-delivery guy gets into a tussle over declined credit cards with the play&#…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 05:30PMTuesday, March 18, 2014
RECOMMENDED Playwright David Ives has made his reputation with smart translation-adaptations of classic French works, most recently his retooling of Moliere’s “The Misanthrope…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00PMThursday, February 20, 2014
RECOMMENDED At its best, theater uses its characters and their stories as vessels for big ideas, for provocations that make audiences think about new concepts, or to consider old notions in …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:00PMThursday, February 13, 2014
RECOMMENDED Opening a Stephen Sondheim show, even one of his most popular, two days before Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Gary Griffin—the city’s unquestioned master of stellar …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:00AMTuesday, February 11, 2014
RECOMMENDED Walking out of the theater, I overheard a woman telling her companion, “even when I’m already feeling good when I get here, I leave feeling better.” That sums u…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMMonday, February 10, 2014
RECOMMENDED Two scientists—two women from two different generations—are talking about the evolution of human female anatomy and the conversation veers into the subject of love. The older…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMSaturday, January 18, 2014
RECOMMENDED That the most famous image emanating from a Norwegian mind, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” is an existential wail seems appropriate for a land where darkness weig…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:09PMThursday, December 19, 2013
Top 5 Plays of 2013 Simpatico, A Red Orchid Theatre Head of Passes, Steppenwolf Smokefall, Goodman Theatre Measure for Measure, Goodman Theatre Hank Williams: Lost Highway, American Blues Th…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:30AMFriday, October 18, 2013
RECOMMENDED I kept thinking about the story of my parents’ oft-discussed first meeting—at a dance hall in Fargo, North Dakota sometime at the dawn of the JFK era—as I watched one o…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 03:10PMWednesday, October 9, 2013
Sometimes Chicago Shakespeare produces bold reinventions of classics. Other times it brings in world-theater innovators as one of the most globally minded cultural entities in Chicago. And t…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:47AMSaturday, September 28, 2013
RECOMMENDED Director Chuck Smith has taken Cheryl L West’s play about three generations of African-American porters working on a luxury Pullman train bound from Chicago to New Orleans …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 09:51PMRECOMMENDED Pre-curtain and offstage, singing guitarists make music, setting the tone for a play that opens on a pastoral setting of two nineteenth-century Spanish peasants, two sisters on o…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:59PMTuesday, September 24, 2013
RECOMMENDED It’s probably a foreign notion to younger audiences that just a generation or so ago the idea of a television food celebrity was as alien as a six-eyed martian. That such n…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 04:25PMTuesday, September 17, 2013
RECOMMENDED Has any American been so universally idolized in the last century as Martin Luther King, Jr? On April 3, 1968, five years after “I Have A Dream” and almost a dozen ye…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 09:59AMFriday, July 26, 2013
RECOMMENDED Though it’s best known as an outdoor Shakespeare venue of growing national renown, American Players Theatre runs a fair bit of work of more recent vintage as well. One of i…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:00PMTuesday, July 2, 2013
By Brian Hieggelke The Untitled Michael Shannon Profile, Pre-Production Notes When he gets the email from A Red Orchid Theatre’s publicist that Michael Shannon is available to do a cov…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:30AMSunday, May 19, 2013
RECOMMENDED Though its setting is seventeenth-century French aristocracy (it premiered in 1666, near the beginning of Louis XIV’s reign), Molière’s “Misanthrope” is …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:05PMMonday, March 18, 2013
RECOMMENDED As the curtain rises on a nun in rapturous reflection, with the pulsing sounds of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” scoring a sprawling, bawdy set of dirty…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00PMRECOMMENDED “Proof,” David Auburn’s 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the inspiring yet conflicted relationship between a University of Chicago mathematician and his daughter, is …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 12:44PMThursday, December 20, 2012
RECOMMENDED Growing up next to the only Mormon church in Joliet, I was remarkably ignorant of what the faith represented, knowing only that they were not “true Christians” accord…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:04PMTop 5 Dance Productions of 2012 “Epic French Masterpieces,” Paris Opera Ballet “Winter Fire,” Joffrey Ballet “Spring Series,” Hubbard Street Dance “…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 05:00AMMonday, December 17, 2012
RECOMMENDED How far will an outside producer go in dropping crucial elements in transposing an outside production to Chicago? How much will be lost in making the transition, particularly whe…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:00AMMonday, December 10, 2012
RECOMMENDED Although Engelbert Humperdinck’s fairy-tale opera “Hansel and Gretel” has been a beloved Christmas staple around the world for well over a century, it’s been a relati…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:15AMRECOMMENDED It is no easy task to take the rhyming, whimsical world of Dr. Seuss and bring it to life. Boris Karloff and Chuck Jones did it wonderfully well in the 1966 animated version of �…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:30AMFriday, December 7, 2012
By Dennis Polkow If Chicago actor James Vincent Meredith looks familiar, he has been a fixture on Chicago stages for years. But even those who have not caught his distinctive performances ac…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 05:00AM 
