Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Steppenwolf Theatre Company will join with the National Theatre of Great Britain to stage a major world premiere by the oft-controversial author Bruce Norris, Steppenwolf announced Wednesday…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00PMIke Holter has written a major, seven-play series about the strife and humanity to be found in his home city of Chicago. You may have even seen some of them. You just likely didn’t have th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMTuesday, February 27, 2018
A house has been built inside the Windy City Playhouse on Irving Park Road. I speak not of a conventional setting nor the usual stage facsimile of a house. As you walk into the theater for t…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:40PMSunday, February 25, 2018
Are cops a force for good? In his three compelling mystery plays about the Chicago Police Department — “A Steady Rain” in 2008, “The Detective’s Wife” in 2011 and, here in 2018, …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:15AMFriday, February 23, 2018
First you walk into the laundromat. Someone hits the spin-cyle button, a panel gives way and then you head into the room for the magic. A very nice 1930s-style, 120-seat salon. Replete with …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:00PM“Diet Coke Ginger Lime,” says the red-headed guy on the low-rent couch, taking a swig on his beverage of choice as he stares into a camera that feels not unlike the one in your cracked s…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AMWednesday, February 21, 2018
At the end of last year, 20 Chicago theater companies received a seasonal surprise: quiet $10,000 checks from the newly formed Bayless Family Foundation. The only significant condition? A wi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:45PMThe Wolves are players on a fictional, under-17 girls soccer team, the scourge of their suburban league. But the play by Sarah DeLappe that created them isn’t so much a work about the worl…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:35PMSometime in the mid-1980s, writer Keith Huff found himself at what is now the Brown Line station near Lawrence and Western avenues. As he was walking up the stairs to the platform, he heard …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMFriday, February 16, 2018
The American playwright Antoinette Nwandu made such extraordinary progress between "Breach," which is the kind of predictably self-questioning play most writers get out of their systems in s…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:35PMMost shows save their full-throated power ballads for late in the night. But at “Love Never Dies,” the sequel to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s mega-smash “The Phantom of Opera,” the lush s…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:25PMThursday, February 15, 2018
The NBC police drama “Chicago P.D.” was “slammed,” the Tribune reported in a Wednesday headline, for filming too close to the Thompson Center in Chicago’s Loop, where Chicago polic…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:35PM“There is no present or future,” says the character James Tyrone in “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” “only the past happening over and over again — now. You can’t get away from it…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:35PMWednesday, February 14, 2018
Remember those old commercials for Milwaukee’s General Mitchell International Airport? “Forty-five minutes from the Lake Forest Oasis” was the tagline, trying to tempt residents of Chi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMTuesday, February 13, 2018
"The Sting," the musical, has found its Henry Gondorff. Harry Connick Jr. will play the role made famous by Paul Newman. The crooner will star in the upcoming musical version of the Chicago-…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:30PMFrom the moment he first met her behind a potted plant in 1975, Alan Zweibel loved Gilda Radner. Despite the unwieldy and inaccurate subtitle, “A Sort of Love Story,” the play “Bunny B…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:10PMMonday, February 12, 2018
Kelly Felthous, who plays Sally Bowles in the Paramount Theatre production of "Cabaret" did not get a lick of applause Saturday at the end of the show's famous title number, despite this bei…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:35PMFriday, February 9, 2018
“You Got Older,” a play by Clare Barron about losing someone you love to cancer, was slated to open at the Steppenwolf Theatre last Monday, on the evening that news came of the death of …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:20AMThursday, February 8, 2018
When Claudia Cassidy, this newspaper’s chief arts critic for the mid-section of the 20th century, and arguably the most powerful female employee of the paper’s Colonel McCormick era, die…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00PMHershey Felder, the writer-actor-pianist whose biographies of composers have a broad following in Chicago, is returning to town. But he's not coming to his usual haunt, the Royal George Thea…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:30AMWanna see “Love Never Dies,” Andrew Lloyd Webber’s throbbing sequel to “The Phantom of the Opera”? It opens Wednesday, you know. Right here at the Cadillac Palace Theatre in Chicag…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMTuesday, February 6, 2018
In May of last year, the venerable actor Stacy Keach suffered a mild heart attack while he was on stage opening night starring in "Pamplona" at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. Keach made a gallan…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00PMMonday, February 5, 2018
The actor John Mahoney, a longtime Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member and a performer known to millions for his work on the NBC sitcom "Frasier," died Sunday at the age of 77. Mahoney had b…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:05PMNo American playwright has risen faster than Dominique Morisseau: She’s now among the most produced names at regional theaters and she’s on her way to Broadway with “Ain’t Too Proud,…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:55PMThe ascendant Paramount Theatre in Aurora now plans to muscle in on the big Chicago business of new, pre-Broadway musicals. In 2019, the nonprofit theater west of Chicago will join with the …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:00AMFriday, February 2, 2018
In the final moments of “Ragtime,” the beautifully scored 1998 musical from Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, there is a vision of how America could be: unified in diversity, learning fr…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:30PMAfter more than 33 years and an eye-popping 13,000 reviews, the long-standing Chicago theater critic Hedy Weiss has parted company with the Chicago Sun-Times. The paper told staffers that Fr…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00PMThese are the worst of times for awards shows. The ratings for the Grammy Awards last weekend were off a staggering 24 percent from the previous year. The Oscars, which are about to highligh…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:25AMThursday, February 1, 2018
Not since “War Horse,” now five years ago, has a Broadway production of a contemporary drama gone out on the road and played a big Chicago venue. People respond more readily to musicals;…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:30PMWork by African-American artists has figured prominently in three bold, strong shows, all of them at long-established but smaller Chicago theater companies, none of them in any way predictab…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMWednesday, January 31, 2018
I met an out-of-town friend for a drink after the Porchlight Music Theatre production of “Merrily We Roll Along” on Tuesday night. “Where would you like to go?” he asked, meeting me …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:05PM 
