To be an actress is to be cursed with people asking you which role you would most like to play. This common experience is not to be confused with people offering you the chance actually to p…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMMost anyone who ever has been a teaching artist in an under-resourced urban school will tell you much the same thing. On rough days, the job feels like an exercise in impotence, given how th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:25PMIt’s fall showtime! Before we offer up our seasonal deluge of made-in-Chicago attractions, let’s take a look at what is headed our way from Broadway — or, at least, is making that clai…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMRahm Emanuel was elected mayor of Chicago on Feb, 22, 2011. Four days later, he showed up at a neighborhood theater. His appearance made national headlines; the attendant publicity helped ma…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:55PMThey’ve impressed us at TimeLine. Knocked us out at Victory Gardens. Made us chortle at Second City. Blown us away at the Lookingglass. They’re a diverse crew but they all are into truth…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:10PMFifty years ago, the political activist and anarchist Abbie Hoffman, a co-founder of the Yippies, was arrested at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Along with other members…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMA neglected play from the 1980s that truly is much richer than I, for one, had ever realized, Barbara Lebow’s “A Shayna Maidel” is, on its face, the single-set story of the reconciliat…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:30PMAfter a whopping 15 years in “The Lion King” — yes, you read that right — the song-and-dance man Kenny Ingram is back in town, playing Big Daddy Brubeck in “Sweet Charity” at the…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMIn a turnaround from recent history, Chicago’s Goodman Theatre dominated the 2018 Equity Joseph Jefferson Award nominations, with multiple nods for its widely acclaimed productions of Suza…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00AMHow did my parents arrive at the moment of my birth? Some of us seek and find the answer to that question as small children. The rest of us, especially if our folks’ trajectories through l…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMA one-man laugh factory known for one-liners delivered through the romantic gauze of memory, and one of the last human connections to the golden age of American comedy, the playwright Neil S…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:30PMIn October, Elaine May will appear on Broadway in a revival of Kenneth Lonergan's "The Waverly Gallery," a play about an elderly gallery owner in Greenwich Village. The 86-year-old May — h…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:40PMIf you have stared at the roof of a Chicago taxicab over the last few days, you may have been surprised by what you saw: An actual advertisement for the Chicago production of "Hamilton." Unt…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMIn 1966, Mike Nichols wrote an article in Life magazine. "We had a theater in Chicago in a former Chinese restaurant," he wrote. "One day, a young girl wandered in — because she lived on t…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:15PMRestaurant criticism is different from other forms of cultural reviewing. For one thing, we all have to eat every day. For another, we have an inevitably intimate relationship with anything …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMSamantha Barks, the truly formidable young star of “Pretty Woman: The Musical,” achieves something close to a miracle at the Nederlander Theatre. With the help of her savvy director, Jer…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMFifteen years after opening on Broadway, and four years after it first played at the Mercury Theater on the Southport Corridor, “Avenue Q” is a long-running hit all over again in Chicago…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMThe last time I saw a bona fide warm-up comedy act at a musical was back in the 1990s at the Royal Palm Dinner Theatre in Palm Beach, Fla. (“Are you ready for ‘La Cage Aux Folles'? Did y…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMA former Weather Girl is to headline the cast of “WaistWatchers the Musical," which is coming to Chicago's Royal George Theatre this September for an open run. Martha Wash — one half of …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:40PMEven in this golden age of the unfathomable and illogical tweet, it seemed bizarre. With deft abbreviation skills, a bit of snark and a pragmatic disregard of punctuation, former Arkansas Go…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMThe Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member Amy Morton will direct a Broadway revival of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Only there’s a difference. All of the characters will be wom…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:15PMDavid Cromer is returning to the Broadway stage. The Chicago-honed, Tony Award-winning director will be part of the cast of Kenneth Lonergan's dark comedy "The Waverly Gallery," slated to op…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:48AMThe Pride Films and Plays production of “Holding the Man,” the stage adaptation of a famed 1995 memoir by Timothy Conigrave, is a low-budget affair with barely a set, let alone sophistic…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:50AMBenjamin Rauhala, a young musical director in New York, was flying home from Disney World in 2015 when he had a three-word idea: Broadway princess party. Especially if you have a budding one…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00PMAfter a 14-year run and 22 full productions, Chicago's Polarity Ensemble Theatre is calling it quits. In a statement Monday evening, the off-Loop theater company cited increased production c…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00PM“Can We Trust Facebook and Twitter?” asked a click-baity headline in The Wall Street Journal this week. No, is the obvious answer, given all the evidence of nefarious Russian interferenc…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:25PMAs tens of thousands of jubilant Chicagoans partook of the bacchanal known as Lolapalooza, a few tens of we diehard melancholics shuffled into the Den Theatre in Wicker Park on Thursday for …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:50PMIn its greatest moments, the Chicago theater has invented entirely new forms of creative expression. In 1955, for example, David Shepherd created a comedy-cabaret group called the Compass Pl…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMYou might recall Christine Ebersole was once on “Saturday Night Live” (same cast as Eddie Murphy and Tim Kazurinsky). You might now know that she got the gig after smoking the right join…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:45AMAbout an hour into director Scott Weinstein's production of “Murder For Two” at the Marriott Theatre on Sunday afternoon, an actor’s microphone went out. If you’ve read the title, it…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:35PMBack in 1997, I watched a guy named Rick Stone appear in a Black Ensemble Theater tribute to Otis Redding. A few weeks later, I went back to see another show there. Stone was taking my ticke…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:45PM
