Tuesday, December 4, 2012
The December holiday theater season in Chicago has usually been a tepid grab bag of plays about Scrooge, George Bailey, Santa Claus, and all forms Rudolph, naughty, nice, and red-hosed. A …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 04:46PMMonday, November 19, 2012
After a flurry of blogposts in September and October, this month has been quiet. Yep, dear avid blog readers, you know I’m back on the business travel grind and this time it’s a weekly c…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 08:37PMFriday, October 19, 2012
So many plays, so little time! Thank goodness for projects that allow me to work from home. Here’s a rundown of shows I saw the past couple of weeks:
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (Bailiwi…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 01:56PMTuesday, October 16, 2012
I had only been gone a year (having skipped the 2011 version due to continuous business travel), but the Chicago International Film Festival suddenly feels like a true film festival. Thanks …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 06:40PMWednesday, October 10, 2012
A wise old queen (drag, not royal) once told me that if you stick around long enough, you will see everything start to come back again: fashion, music, ex-boyfriends who dumped you in front …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 04:58PMMonday, October 8, 2012
For some people October is about going on long drives to see the changing of the leaves, while for others it is about spending weekends prancing around apple groves or pumpkin patches. For…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 06:49PMWednesday, October 3, 2012
When I met a cute twentysomething guy a couple of weeks ago at an event and he asked me how old I was, I quickly answered “37”. Oops, I’m not 37, but I guess I’m already at that age …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 07:46PMTuesday, October 2, 2012
I saw Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses right after it transferred to Broadway in 2002, after a much-heralded off-Broadway run that began two days after the September 11 attacks. It was one o…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 06:16PMWednesday, September 26, 2012
As you my dear readers know, despite my penchant for outsized theatricality, I am also a sucker for brainy plays (cue Tom Stoppard, Frank Galati’s adaptations of Haruki Murakami). I love…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 07:46PMMonday, September 24, 2012
As a Chicago cultural connoisseur, I really had high hopes for the International Exposition of Contemporary/Modern Art & Design, known around town with its less convoluted nickname of Ex…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 07:40PMWednesday, September 19, 2012
I know it sounds so cliché, but this year, time did fly by, like Dreamliner-speed fly by. After a blur of a difficult summer, I’ve suddenly found myself in early September and right sma…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 05:12PMMonday, August 27, 2012
I am back. Finally. It has been a beatch of a summer between 15 hour workdays for weeks on end, lingering physical wear and tear, and a distressing week-long business trip into the dark unkn…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 05:48PMTuesday, July 17, 2012
Like many other savvy theatergoers in the city, I was breathlessly anticipating Chay Yew’s first season as Artistic Director of Victory Gardens Theater, which despite being one of the best…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 06:58PMMonday, July 2, 2012
I was just telling one of my friends the other week how it seems like there have been a noticeably higher number of musical productions in Chicago this half-year. At one point several week…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 06:53PMMonday, June 25, 2012
I’m a classical music dabbler. I don’t profess to have the ability to be conversant about Mahler’s “Symphony No.5” or Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony” in the same way I am abou…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 08:44PMTuesday, June 12, 2012
Sometimes going to the theater in this arts-savvy town requires having no expectations whatsoever. Over the weekend I went to two different plays with two different mindsets and came out dis…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 10:22PMFriday, June 8, 2012
It’s a crazy world we live in people, between face-eating in Miami, Scott Walker-unrecall in Wisconsin, and beauty pageant-rigging in Donald Trump’s House of Miss USA. For my part, I n…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 06:16PMMonday, June 4, 2012
When you’ve been going to the theater in Chicago as long as I have, you learn to embrace the unexpected in a The Hypocrites production, especially one from founding Artistic Director Sean …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 10:17PMThursday, May 31, 2012
After seeing the unsurpassable duo of Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch weave once-in-a-lifetime theatrical magic in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music back…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 05:40PMTuesday, May 22, 2012
With my work travel having calmed down a bit, I have been able to get back into my regular theater routine of the past few years I’ve been writing this blog. As of today, I’ve seen 32 …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 06:34PMFriday, May 18, 2012
For years, whether in cocktail parties or at work events, whenever I mention I’m a theater buff, someone would ostensibly reply back with, “That’s great! Rent is my favorite musical of…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 05:29PMThursday, May 17, 2012
As I was tweeting about this week, there’s so much Chicago theater and so little time. Which is a great thing. But I’ve seen several shows this spring season that I really wa…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 06:31PMMonday, May 14, 2012
As I was settling into my seat at the performance of The Iceman Cometh at the Goodman Theatre, the woman sitting behind me said loudly to her companion, “I think this is the same place we …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 05:02PMThursday, May 10, 2012
In early 2009, I said that Frat, the second production of the new theater company The New Colony, was “a terrific example of youthful, raw, blistering, ferocious, hungrily-acted and direct…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 02:31PMWednesday, April 25, 2012
As a gay man who grew into adulthood in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tony Kushner’s two-part theatrical masterpiece, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, was the defini…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 11:49PMFriday, March 30, 2012
I find it a little ironic that steps away from the old Water Tower, where some people have told me they feel “so cool” coming to the theater to see a famous Chicago chef cook Mexican mol…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 03:19PMWednesday, March 28, 2012
After several months of frantic flyarounds for my day job, things have slowed down a bit and I’ve gotten to stay home in Chicago the past several weeks. What a luxury! And part of the …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 09:29PMTuesday, March 13, 2012
When I first read in the Goodman Theatre press release last year that the 2011-2012 season will include a new production of Tennessee William’s Camino Real to be adapted and directed by th…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 07:28PMFriday, March 9, 2012
If I had a dollar every time someone told me they went to see musicals because they’re “fun”, I would be as rich as Ann Romney. Casual theatergoers don’t realize that there are some …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 05:58PMMonday, March 5, 2012
When a leading Republican Party presidential contender thinks it’s ok to discriminate against gays, doesn’t think that the constitution separates the church and the state, believes state…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 04:14PMFriday, March 2, 2012
This is the second of a two-part blog post.
In my previous blog post, I wrote about The Inconvenience’s Hit the Wall. The other noteworthy new work I saw in the early weeks of 2012 was A…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 05:27PM 
