Wednesday, April 25, 2018
So, Teller, what are you doing working on the Scottish play at Chicago Shakespeare Theater? “I can’t think of anything more suspenseful than the murder of Duncan” says the famously tac…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMMonday, April 23, 2018
“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” they sing in “Hamilton.” Well, if you have control over the combination of your biography and all your hit songs, the answer is perfectly…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMGrant James Varjas’ “33 to Nothing” is set, in real time, at that most depressing of moments for any ensemble of artists: When some in their number finally have had enough. Varjas’ p…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:35PMThe Griffin Theatre Company’s passionate production of “Ragtime” will go head-to-head with Theo Ubique’s vocally adroit “Sweeney Todd” at the Non-Equity Jeff Awards, with these t…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:00AMSunday, April 22, 2018
“Harry, there’s never a perfect answer in this messy, emotional world,” says the deceased Dumbledore, his portrait talking from the stage. “Perfection is beyond the reach of humankin…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:00PMFriday, April 20, 2018
If we all want retail to continue to be a part of our urban aesthetic landscape, we had better start buying things in shops. On Thursday, the Tribune reported that Carson’s, a department s…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMThursday, April 19, 2018
At the posh Lincoln Center, the young Cockney woman that professor Henry Higgins finds in Covent Garden is not the usual chipper and cheerily comprehensible flower girl you find in Alan Jay …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMWednesday, April 18, 2018
In 2013, the entrepreneurial pianist and actor Hershey Felder received a letter from Russian authorities. Felder, who has many fans in Chicago, is well known for his solo shows focused on th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:10PM“Jesus Christ Superstar,” which is close to half a century old and the only show ever to contain such a gloriously ridiculous lyric as “Hosanna Hey Sanna Sanna Sanna Ho" is having a he…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMTuesday, April 17, 2018
Playwright Boo Killebrew's “Lettie” begins with a woman staring at her half-sister, who just got out of jail. “This wasn’t supposed to happen for two or three years,” the woman say…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:00PMMonday, April 16, 2018
Can you combine the post-colonial atrocities, the internal corruption, the ceaseless profiteering that still afflicts Africa, the mother continent of humanity, with the rubric of a knockdown…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:40PMTracy Letts' "The Minutes," a play about an incendiary council meeting in a small American city, was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in drama. The designation was announced Monday aft…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:50PMThrough no fault of its own, Philip Dawkins’ “The Burn” has not turned out to be well-timed. Set in a Chicago public high school and focused on a well-meaning teacher (Erik Hellman) an…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:12AMSunday, April 15, 2018
If you are playing Nellie Forbush in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” which opened Thursday night at the Drury Lane Theatre under the open-hearted direction of …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:15PMThursday, April 12, 2018
God is in “Carousel.” So is human love and sexual desire, but let’s leave that aside for a moment. In 1945, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II created the greatest musical ever w…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMWednesday, April 11, 2018
In its marketing materials, director Kenny Leon’s complicated new Broadway revival of “Children of a Lesser God,” which opened Wednesday night at Studio 54, justly describes itself as …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMHarmony France, the artistic director of the feisty Firebrand Theatre, is a fountain of fabulous ideas. Her latest? Take the flop Broadway show known as “9 to 5 the Musical” and stage it…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:30PMElaine May — the iconic actress, comedian, writer and director who first emerged in Chicago in the 1950s alongside her partner Mike Nichols — is to return to Broadway next season. May, 8…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:00AMA former Tribune colleague of mine sent me a note with a question this week. He’d been with his wife to see the Steep Theatre production of Simon Stephens’ “Birdland,” a fantastic sh…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMMonday, April 9, 2018
Over the years, Second City has thrown some material into its revues that is just not funny at all. I’ve always loved the awkward silence that then descends on the room — the way the par…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:25PMSunday, April 8, 2018
“Sometimes I feel like an iPhone without a case,” muses one of the teens in the new Broadway musical “Mean Girls,” written by Tina Fey and set among the cliques and geeks of what now…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMFriday, April 6, 2018
They’re nocturnal creatures. Their natural habitat is posh hotels — although, like me, you might have glimpsed the odd one preening through a casino or scurrying in their sunglasses thro…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:50PMThursday, April 5, 2018
Does intelligence make a white person any less inherently racist? How about a white neurologist who actually does research into his own racism? Those questions — which are interesting ones…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:40PMTaking a cue from the hit musical "Hamilton," the Chicago Cubs are offering the team's first-ever lottery for the upcoming baseball season at Wrigley Field: 60 seats in the terrace reserved …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:50PMWednesday, April 4, 2018
It’s New Year’s Eve, 1944. Three days earlier, this newspaper had published a review by Claudia Cassidy admonishing each and every Chicagoan not to miss a play called “The Glass Menage…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:35PMRainn Wilson, best known for playing the mercurial character of Dwight Schrute on “The Office” (U.S. version on NBC) and intern Arthur Martin on HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” is playing …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:30PMTuesday, April 3, 2018
Remy Bumppo is hanging in there. This midsize Chicago theater — its budget hovers around $1 million — is in the riskiest sector of the Chicago theater, as we all learned with the loss of…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:30PMThursday, March 29, 2018
Should children be taught of the imminence of their own death in much the same way that they are taught their ABCs? Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” — now on Broadway in an extraord…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMIn 1967, actress Katharine Houghton was cast by director Stanley Kramer in the role of Joanna in a movie called “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” She was to play the scion of a newspaper…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:30PMWednesday, March 28, 2018
As the movie “Pretty Woman” made a star of a young Julia Roberts, so “Pretty Woman The Musical,” likely will do the same for the sensational 27-year-old Manx actress Samantha Barks. …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:20PMTuesday, March 27, 2018
Act 1 of the new musical at the Broadway Playhouse, “A Taste of Things to Come,” is set in a Winnetka kitchen in 1957, amid women bonding over (and singing about) pregnancy, cooking, thw…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:00PM 
