THE BEAST DOESN’T CHANGE WHEN KISSED: A HAPPY ENDING Fairy tales may seem ready for ditching into the dustbin of abandoned narrative, taking all their happily ever afters, glittering princ…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:10PMALICE IN ANDERSONVILLELAND Fall down the rabbit hole of the thoughtfully absurd Alice by Noelle Krimm, directed by Bilal Dardai. This performance—a reprise of the popular 2004 staging—sh…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:36PMSTOREFRONT SHENANIGANS Have you ever heard of Bad Settlement Theatre Company? Well, don’t worry about it if you haven’t. Up until the opening of House Theatre’s production of Season on…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:46PMTHIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A CITY As artist, poet, and actor Tony Fitzpatrick prepares to leave Chicago for New Orleans, he presents his theater piece, The Midnight City: a personal convers…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:33AMA JEWEL OF THEIR SOULS The Gift Theatre’s production of Othello – their first Shakespeare, and my first exposure to this company – is a gift indeed. The doubly minimal set, combined wi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:37AMBUILD-A-BEAR NARRATIVE In this year’s Spring Spectacle, Redmoon provides some characters, some comedy, some cruelty, their trademark whimsy, and ornate production values, but the chronolog…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:14AMNUDITY IS AS NUDITY DOES For the sake of argument (“arguendo”), let us consider g-strings as tools of oppression, and pasties as violations of our First Amendment rights. This was the pe…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:12AMWHEN PLAYTIME IS OVER Somewhere between “Once Upon a Time” and “Happily Ever After” there is a very adult world of tests, losses, disappointments, and grief. Despite this, we assert …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:45AMWAY BETTER THAN A PARTRIDGE IN A PEAR TREE Redmoon’s seasonal performances are not events or even experiences, but passages to a fleeting world of contemporary fable, complete with masks, …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:08PMTO KNOW, KNOW, KNOW HER… Singer, comedienne and anti-glam diva Sandra Bernhard thrives on delightfully toying with her adoring throngs. I remember the first time I saw her on the David Let…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:27PMA CHORUS FELINE A prolific author and auteur, Rainer Werner Fassbinder exulted in display of the seamy and hypocritical side of the post-war German bourgeoisie. He directed forty films, wrot…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:25PMTHE SPECIFIC ENIGMA OF A BUNNY A play is generally defined as “a staged representation of a story – see: DRAMA.” A circle ensues, because drama is explained to be “a piece of writing…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:52AMHAND IN HAND TO HELL’S ANGELS Deceit and destruction reign in Wayward Productions’ hell-bent for leather staging of Richard III, which has been reimagined as biker gang mayhem in a …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:17PMTHE HORROR OF SELF-DENIAL FUELS INVENTIVE STAGING Chicago Opera Theater has teamed up with Long Beach Opera in California to produce a delightfully disturbing presentation of Philip Glass’…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:23PMTHEATER FOR SOCIAL CHANGE With fifty-two murders to date in 2013 as I write this review – over a murder a day – the death toll in Chicago seems as ubiquitous as it is tragic. Collaboract…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:37PMFEARFUL SYMMETRY In Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, inspired by an actual 2003 event involving occupying soldiers in Iraq, a slain tiger takes center stage and discusses fr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:36PMPIÑATA FULL OF DARKNESS Don’t be concerned if you don’t receive an invitation to Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party – the Steppenwolf’s revival production is still an event not to…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:58AMA SPECTACULAR AND FASCINATING JOURNEY IN WHICH THINGS ARE NOT AS THEY SEEM Cameras have evolved from room-sized camera obscuras, to the box-like contraption of the nineteenth century, to the…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:19PMWHEN THE DECONSTRUCTION OF COMEDY BUILDS LAUGHTER Jeff Garlin, comedian and star performer in HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, appears in his one-man show Closer Than I Appear at the Steppenwol…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:51PMMEMORIES MAY BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH Freshly Fallen Snow, by Chicago Dramatists’ resident playwright M. E. H. Lewis, builds its plot upon a recent scientific advancement: the possibi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:57AM“SINCERE EFFORT” BY A NOSE IN THE FIFTH Sam Shepard’s Geography of a Horse Dreamer offers the lyric combination of the rough and ridiculous we expect of Shepard, with eponymous…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:00AMA HEALTHY DEBATE George Bernard Shaw observed that, “The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:03PM