Wednesday, October 4, 2017
“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which knocked me for six in London, is about to make profound and lasting changes to the commercial theater industry on this side of the Atlantic. Ev…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:30PMThere is so much complexity and beauty to Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play “Choir Boy,” a gorgeous evocation of history, hope and pain, that you find yourself aching for a more complex, fl…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:40PMDawn King — the author of a disturbingly dystopian dramatic parable that I've not been able to shake from my mind since Monday night — is one of the hottest new names in British playwrit…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:30PMMonday, October 2, 2017
The ABC sitcom “Bewitched," which ran from 1964 to 1972, was, at first glance, formulaic. The setup was yet another version of the stranger-in-a-strange-land structure that long has been a…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:00PMSunday, October 1, 2017
Chicago’s hospitable Windy City Playhouse on Irving Park Road was founded in 2015 on a populist ideal: Create an affordable, fully professional neighborhood theater, program it with comedy…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00PMFriday, September 29, 2017
Funeral homes in Chicago, which are not much fun, are sometimes located right next to senior living facilities. Noting such a juxtaposition the other day, my son suggested that there would n…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:55PMThursday, September 28, 2017
The Lyric Opera’s new partnership with the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago is, at its core, an acknowledgment that it is no longer viable for even a world-class institution like the Lyric to sus…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:50PMThere is nothing more absurd in the world than familial battles to control the power of overwhelming love which one can see most especially in the brilliant work of CATHERINE COMBS, ANDRUS …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:48PMDirector Barbara Gaines' all-female Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of William Shakespeare's notorious comedy "The Taming of the Shrew" contains references to the Chicago Cubs, a McCo…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:00AM“The Cher Show” — a fully authorized, bluntly titled, biographically oriented, Broadway-bound musical celebrating the life, works and times of the iconoclastic cultural phenomenon with…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:50AMWednesday, September 27, 2017
A few days ago, transgender actress Alexandra Billings told The Daily Beast that not only would the second episode of the fourth season of the Amazon comedy-drama series “Transparent” fe…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:25PMTuesday, September 26, 2017
“A New Brain,” the musical by William Finn, is a show about a young composer who has been diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation in his brain stem. Hospital beds, surgeries, drips …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:30PMChicago’s next pre-Broadway tryout: “Pretty Woman: The Musical,” a new show based on the 27-year-old Julia Roberts-and-Richard Gere romantic comedy about a Sunset Boulevard prostitute …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, September 25, 2017
Start late. Kennedy jammed (on a Sunday at noon?), was stupid to take Kennedy. Exit North Avenue, semi-legally, then return to expressway. Exit Racine. Forgot Racine does does not cross trac…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:50PMSunday, September 24, 2017
The gentle art of drag — a warm and inclusive form of live entertainment that I've loved and consumed my whole life — is an art of precision. Drag queens are a diverse crew, of course, a…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:05PMFriday, September 22, 2017
“Follow a dancer,” said Glenn Edgerton. I’ve done that before — once for 2,000 miles, but that’s a story for another day. I’ve always found it to be good advice for life. Or mere…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00PMAfter a massive loss by the struggling Chicago Bears — such as the 29-7 drubbing last Sunday by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — the “Bears Coaches Show” on WBBM Newsradio turns into "Grou…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMThursday, September 21, 2017
Citing the loss of revenue due to the impending end of its multi-year contract with Norwegian Cruise Lines, Second City laid off at least four full-time staffers Thursday. This has been a ch…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:20PMA quiz for you: Which Chicago venue is the host of the following A-list attractions in October? One week of tapings of "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah." Stephanie Miller's "Sexy Liberal Res…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMWednesday, September 20, 2017
Regardless of what an amphibian may or may not perceive, I know this: An expansive and beautiful new theater in Chicago is a glorious thing that boggles the eyes. The Yard, which hosted its …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:20PMTuesday, September 19, 2017
“A play is rarely given a second chance,” Arthur Miller once wrote. He who was right about so many perils of the human condition was wrong about that. To wit: Director Ivo van Hove’s d…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:20PMMonday, September 18, 2017
I’ve always found the guards in museums at least as interesting as the exhibits. How intriguing are those silent sentinels of the gallery, as sphinxlike as Secret Service agents but charge…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:35PMDid a 16-year-old housemaid named Grace Marks kill her lecherous employer and his housekeeper in 1843? Or was the impoverished Irish immigrant to Canada merely the stablehand’s unwitting a…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:30PMSunday, September 17, 2017
When Chance the Rapper asks the question “Is you is or is you ain’t got gas money?” in his song “All Night,” he nods to the legacy of the great songwriter and bandleader Louis Jord…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:00PMFriday, September 15, 2017
A vista of the pressures faced by Disney Theatrical Productions fills the lobby of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts: Hundreds of bubbly children and unabashed adults dressed as Elsa…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00AMThursday, September 14, 2017
A vibrant city with global aspirations — certainly, any city capable of landing the second headquarters built by Amazon — needs frequent access to cultural work and artists from all over…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:30AMTuesday, September 12, 2017
Scott Morehead, an actor and writer who was a cast member in the Second City e.t.c. revue "A Red Line Runs Through It," has filed a complaint against the storied comedy theater in Chicago al…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:35PMBonnie and Clyde didn’t get much respect when they tried to shoot up Broadway in December 2011. It was a crowded month: “The Visit” was opening, Kelli O’Hara was starring in “She L…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:00AMMonday, September 11, 2017
As a loved one dies, funny things can happen. Anyone who has paid a vigil at a bedside can verify the veracity of the central premise of Halley Feiffer’s boldly titled black comedy, “A F…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:40PMSunday, September 10, 2017
Not long from now, seniors in retirement homes will be head-banging to Whitesnake. A change in the menu in the dining room will risk a spontaneous chorus of "We're Not Gonna Take It," twisti…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:50PMFriday, September 8, 2017
If you dislike the threat of audience participation — and I am not sure I have ever met any adult who feels otherwise, when sober — then what I am about to describe might well sound like…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:30PM 
