Friday, August 4, 2017
Thomas Middleton, whose co-authored 1622 play “The Changeling” was the most compelling and timely show I saw at the Stratford Festival of Canada this summer, wrote about lusty sex, crude…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMThursday, August 3, 2017
When the news of the great Sam Shepard's death was released Monday, my first thought was that here came the natural bookend for the “in yer face” era, which increasingly is out of favor …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMWednesday, August 2, 2017
Three Chicago actors will appear in the Broadway premiere of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the record-breaking two-part addition to J.K. Rowling’s world of wizards. Alex Weisman…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:30AMTuesday, August 1, 2017
Mariann Mayberry, a self-effacing but essential Chicago actress whose work embodied the city's ensemble ethos and whose emotional intensity on stage seared many a Chicago heart, died follo…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:33AMMonday, July 31, 2017
Sam Shepard, the bard of America’s flat highways, wide-open spaces and wounding, dysfunctional families, has died at the age of 73 in his home in Kentucky from complications from Lou Gehri…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:55PMFriday, July 28, 2017
The previews accompanying last Sunday's Music Box Theatre screening of Christopher Nolan's heart-pounding "Dunkirk" — proudly shown on 70 mm film — all seemed to be rising to the same dr…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMThursday, July 27, 2017
George Gershwin's 1928 symphonic tone poem, "An American in Paris," was written on commission. Modernist and experimental, rather than obviously lush or romantic, it was intended to convey t…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:52PMWednesday, July 26, 2017
I picked up my voicemail earlier this week and found the kind of message that makes doing this job feel like a privilege. "I am below the poverty line," the older gentleman on the recording …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:36PMChicago Shakespeare Theater has a proud history of producing family-oriented summer shows that go far beyond what you would expect at a pleasure pier. On Navy Pier in 2010, "The Emperor's Ne…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:49PMTuesday, July 25, 2017
"An American in Paris," which arrives in Chicago this week for a two-week stand of its national tour, was a critical (and a modest financial) success on Broadway in 2015. But the much-antici…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:41PMIn the Chicago of 1860, when there barely was a Chicago, McVicker's Theater had what this newspaper called "a rousing hit" with a production of "The Octoroon," a spectacular melodrama by an …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:55PMSunday, July 23, 2017
A quarter-century ago, a sensual Russian aerialist named Vladimir Kekhaial turned up the heat of a Chicago summer by flying around a tent, his undulating, glistening muscles hardly confined …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:21PMFriday, July 21, 2017
The little theater under the "L" is set up like a voyeuristic European cabaret: little tables, shaded lamps, intimate fabrics, dark corners into which an amorous couple might try to disappea…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:31PMUnder the Obama administration in 2015, the Department of Education toughened up a set of rules known as the Gainful Employment Regulations. The rules were designed to protect students from …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00AMThursday, July 20, 2017
For the first time in its history, the Cirque du Soleil has a touring production under its signature grand chapiteau that doesn't dwell in an abstract conceit. "Luzia," which opens in Chicag…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:41AMTuesday, July 18, 2017
One of the longest-running double acts in Chicago theater history is coming to a close: artistic directors and co-founders Michael Menendian and JoAnn Montemurro are "retiring" from Chicago'…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00PMMonday, July 17, 2017
When the poetic playwright Dael Orlandersmith premiered "Beauty's Daughter" in Midtown Manhattan in 1995, few had heard her name. This was before "Monster," "The Gimmick" or "Yellowman," a f…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:24PMSunday, July 16, 2017
"A parrot, a shark and a cheeseburger walk into Wrigley Field" may sound like the beginning of a bad bar joke, but in reality it refers to just a few of the Parrothead characters who made th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:13PMFriday, July 14, 2017
In 2008, a playwright from the Yale School of Drama named Alexander Woo was charged with writing the fifth episode of a new HBO series. The series was "True Blood" and this was to be a gothi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMWednesday, July 12, 2017
At the end of the Saturday night performance of his solo show "How to Be a Rock Critic," a work based on the writings of the great Lester Bangs, the actor Erik Jensen, sweaty from his exploi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:55PMMonday, July 10, 2017
In his 1976 Creem magazine review of Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" a review with the headline "The Greatest Album Ever Made," the late rock critic Lester Bangs justifies his enthusiasm by…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:32PMSunday, July 9, 2017
The Steppenwolf Theatre Company may not have invented the incendiary play wherein some downstate, post-nuclear American family explodes its rotten guts all over the stage as you stare back i…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00PMThursday, July 6, 2017
After more than 25 years as an innovative, percussive, quirky and cobalt enterprise, the performance company known as Blue Man Group is selling itself to Cirque du Soleil, the Montreal-based…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:24PMWednesday, July 5, 2017
In 2005, I wrote a profile in this newspaper of Libby Adler Mages, a diminutive, charming and ever-curious Chicagoan and one of the most successful commercial producers in the history of Chi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:53PMMonday, July 3, 2017
Ever since its New York opening in 1977, D.L. Colburn's "The Gin Game" has attracted extraordinary actors. First, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy made the play their own. In the 1990s, Charles…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:51PMFriday, June 30, 2017
In 2003, the National Endowment for the Arts put out a genuinely surprising report: Audiences — those attending jazz, classical music, opera, dance and theater performances — were in ser…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMThursday, June 29, 2017
If you want to understand how much one performance, by one inestimably excellent artist, can mean to a work of musical theater, let me suggest a trip to "The Bridges of Madison County" at th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:18PMWednesday, June 28, 2017
Just in case you have not been paying attention: Issues about who has the right to talk about what, and with whom, are pretty hot right now. Especially when speakers dare to wander beyond th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:07PMTuesday, June 27, 2017
If there is a practicing alcoholic or addict in your family when you're a kid, you're better off when the boozer is your uncle rather than your dad or mom. If it's your drunk uncle, he can b…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:17PMMonday, June 26, 2017
The Belgian singer-songwriter known as Jacques Brel does not get nearly enough credit for his influence on the popular music of the latter half of the 20th century and beyond. I'd argue that…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:11PMSunday, June 25, 2017
Are you a pirate two hundred years too late? Got a Caribbean soul you can barely control? When you see a salt shaker, do you worry it will get lost? If you answered yes to any or all of the …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AM 
