Monday, February 23, 2015
I try to accentuate the positive in even my most negative reviews, but seeing as how playwright Marc Camoletti is long dead and likely buried far from Newcity’s target readership, I’m go…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 02:00PMFriday, February 20, 2015
By Raymond Rehayem “It’s really close, I mean it’s about thirty minutes. Some people think it’s Muncie and that’s way far away compared to Munster which is just right n…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:36AMWednesday, January 7, 2015
By Raymond Rehayem “Go Fuck Yourself” is surely the most provocatively titled of the five Beau O’Reilly one-acts featured in the 26th Annual Rhinoceros Theater Festival. O’Reilly got…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:57AMWednesday, December 24, 2014
By Raymond Rehayem I am even less qualified to build a stage, rig lighting, or put up drywall than I am to put on some pasties and do burlesque. Actually I might look strangely alluring in …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:09AMTuesday, December 9, 2014
By Raymond Rehayem Lisa D’Amour is a playwright and an interdisciplinary artist. “It’s just a little bizarre that it’s kind of two different fields,” she notes when we discuss the …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:00AMSunday, November 23, 2014
I love Jesus. Could even say I’ve got a complex. Can’t really blame my Catholic school, they didn’t teach a damn thing about the scriptures. And admittedly a harsh history …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 09:00PMTuesday, November 11, 2014
At the husband’s urging, a comfortably affluent couple (Robert Hardaway and Anji White) decide to rough it a bit for their holiday, and travel off the beaten path to strive for more …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:30AMThursday, October 30, 2014
by Raymond Rehayem Some folks wanna rock. Some folks wanna white Christmas. Dee Snider wants to spread rocking yuletide cheer. “Dee Snider’s Rock & Roll Christmas Tale” debuts …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:22AMWednesday, October 29, 2014
RECOMMENDED The indiscriminate momentum of violence drives the action and the banality of its coarse adherents provides the comedy in “The Lieutenant of Inishmore.” The humor in …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 06:00PMMonday, October 27, 2014
I am loathe to call any art masturbatory. What art isn’t, really? So in a wholly unforgivable act of self-satisfaction, I hereby deem Christopher Chen’s script for “The Hundred Flowers…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:00AMWednesday, October 22, 2014
RECOMMENDED Disclosure, before the sharks circle: I like to be amused. I’m generally not amused by art about art, whether it concerns its own making or whether it ruminates on or examines …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:30AMTuesday, October 7, 2014
RECOMMENDED In the first act of “The Crytpogram” the comedic potential of David Mamet’s easily recognized, clipped, stylized, supposedly conversational dialogue sometimes pops up from …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 06:00PMMonday, September 29, 2014
RECOMMENDED “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” provide wonderful delight to readers across generations and endless inspiration to artists across disciplines. Right now (this is…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 12:00PMSaturday, September 27, 2014
RECOMMENDED In the couple of years since I saw “The World of Extreme Happiness” as part of Goodman’s New Stages festival, the humor has become a little sharper, the production has …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 05:00PMRECOMMENDED Oh this was barely bearable until everyone lost their bearings at the end. Strong finish, I mean—pushes all my misgivings about the show so far to the fore that it transcends t…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 12:00PMSunday, September 14, 2014
One and one and one is indeed three, but peppering a production with such notable equations doesn’t add up to much when the play being staged is less engaging than this failed math pun I�…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00AMThursday, August 28, 2014
RECOMMENDED I once lived next door to an aspiring young arsonist. On either side of the house I shared with a different kind of flame, two homes were gutted with fire before the kid was caug…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00AMMonday, August 25, 2014
By Raymond Rehayem Look, up on the Northwest Side, it’s the Fifth Annual ChicagoFringe Festival. What was once the very outskirt of the Blue Line is now an emergent theater hood per festiv…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:40AMMonday, August 11, 2014
By Raymond Rehayem Nope, Mary-Arrchie artistic director Richard Cotovsky doesn’t spend three days non-stop in character as the late political prankster for whom his long-running theater fe…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:50PMMonday, July 28, 2014
By Raymond Rehayem “We’re telling the real story… we see this stuff. We’re telling the grown-ups what’s really happening, the adults don’t really know. That’s b…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:00AMRECOMMENDED Samuel Beckett was a genius, one of the great talents of the 20th Century like Ernie Kovacs or Thelonious Monk. So when a theater company does a fine job staging some Beckett, wh…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00AMWednesday, July 16, 2014
RECOMMENDED It’s been thirty years since Ena Lamont Stewart’s “Men Should Weep” was last produced in the USA and I’d wager a rampant run of stateside revivals is unlikely. It’s s…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 12:00PMMonday, July 14, 2014
By Raymond Rehayem When a sex comedy by a highly lauded playwright hits the Chicago stage, I get the call from Newcity to devise the sort of feature you just started reading. Seems this pape…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:00AMSunday, July 13, 2014
Lacking the spark to start even the most readily extinguishable blaze, “A Small Fire” is monochromatically akin to a handful of ash. The direction from Joanie Shultz is sharp, the sound …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 03:00PMTuesday, June 24, 2014
A not terribly interesting play about terribly important issues, “Death And The Maiden”—as seen in the current production at Victory Gardens—is most notable for a star turn c…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:30AMSaturday, June 21, 2014
RECOMMENDED The living space created for Steppenwolf’s intimate upstairs staging of this Kenneth Lonergan play is so cozy and lived-in that while heading toward my seat I was tempted to in…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 12:00PMWednesday, June 18, 2014
I’ll take the plunge and just say it: everyone’s got a sinking feeling in this play about military wives of submariners. There’s an encounter group full of them who meet at a submarine…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00AMWednesday, June 11, 2014
RECOMMENDED You might think being a rock troll, a vampire, a werewolf, or a hunch-backed “Igor” would disqualify hopeful enlistees from military service. But in the fictional land of Bor…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:00AMWednesday, June 4, 2014
You’re invited to silently witness a drug tourist spiritual quest. The drug: Ayahuasca. The travelers: local comedy duo Ray BradGary. The duo, comprised of Brad Einstein and Gary Pascal, h…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00PMMonday, June 2, 2014
RECOMMENDED The players are paired: single mom and blind date, teen daughter and her best boy buddy she wishes were more, and a comfortable middle-class husband and wife hoping to become ado…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:00PMSaturday, May 31, 2014
RECOMMENDED TVs are ugly and cold and the stage is full of them – the tube type to be specific, positioned where a VJ would want them and rigged as needed. The title treatment on the p…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 06:00PM 
