Sunday, 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 07:00AMFriday, June 23, 2017
A rakish, irascible, handsome, poorly behaved and thoroughly charming actor known for both his rich comedy and an oft-confounding sense of pathos, Howard Witt was the embodiment of what, in …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:35PMWhich American presidents have most loved the arts? The 45th would be a nonstarter, Donald J. Trump's foray into Broadway producing notwithstanding. (If you've not heard, the show was a come…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:52AMWednesday, June 21, 2017
In Chicago theater circles, the joke about Steve Scott, producer at the Goodman Theatre, is that he does whatever his boss, artistic director Robert Falls, does not want to do. That job desc…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:03PMSunday, June 18, 2017
The all-Equity touring version of director Bart Sher's 2015 Lincoln Center revival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's "The King and I" is a magnificent, genuinely revelatory produ…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:15PMFriday, June 16, 2017
In their fascinating analysis of the algorithm used by the authorities to predict gun violence in Chicago, the journalists and crime analysts Jeff Asher and Rob Arthur argue that people are …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:58AMThursday, June 15, 2017
So you watched the Tony Awards. Now you're wondering when you might get to see all those new shows in Chicago. I've talked to a few insiders on the matter, and here's my best analysis of the…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMWednesday, June 14, 2017
Oscar Lopez Rivera, the Puerto Rican nationalist whose prison sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama in January, told the Chicago public radio station WBEZ on Tuesday night that he …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:07PMTuesday, June 13, 2017
The 2016-17 Broadway season produced one blockbuster revival, "Hello Dolly" starring Bette Midler, an eye-popping show so singularly retro, fresh, spectacular and joyous as to render its co…
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun Subscription at 09:37PM"Dear Evan Hansen," the emotionally charged and wholly original musical about a troubled high school student whose very human travails explode over the heartless channels of social media, em…
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun Subscription at 09:37PMThe Karen Zacarias play "Native Gardens," now at Victory Gardens Theater, is one of the very few contemporary comedies about racism, sexism, ageism and cultural privilege. It's a warm-center…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:43PMMonday, June 12, 2017
To your average absurdist of the mid-20th century, the act of waiting for nothing in particular, of pointlessly passing the time, was an apt metaphor for the misery of the human condition. B…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:00PM"Dear Evan Hansen," the emotionally charged and wholly original musical about a troubled high school student whose very human travails explode over the heartless channels of social media, em…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00AMFriday, June 9, 2017
U.S. Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, a former comedy writer and performer, appears Saturday at the Tribune's Printers Row Lit Fest. We spoke by phone. The following is an edited transcript. Q:…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:57PMThursday, June 8, 2017
The 2016-17 Broadway season produced one blockbuster revival, "Hello Dolly" starring Bette Midler, an eye-popping show so singularly retro, fresh, spectacular and joyous as to render its co…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:08PM"I felt," said Stacy Keach on Thursday morning, "like this great fog had come over me. It was the most bizarre moment of my entire career." That fog was, he said, an apparent onstage heart a…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:34PMIn an emotional speech Wednesday night, Jason Palmquist, departing executive director of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, told a story about Hubbard Street's Parkinson's Project. Palmquist desc…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:33PMWednesday, June 7, 2017
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote, inarguably, most of the great American musicals of the 20th century: titles such as "Oklahoma!," "Carousel," "South Pacific" and "The King and…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:54PMTuesday, June 6, 2017
The actor Stacy Keach suffered a mild heart attack during the opening night performance of Jim McGrath's "Pamplona," Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls told the Tribune on Tuesda…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:30PMMonday, June 5, 2017
So there we all were at the Den Theatre on Sunday night, watching Denzel Tsopnang as Coalhouse Walker Jr., walk out with his hands above his head at the climax of "Ragtime," a musical about …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:34PMRachel Kraft, the longtime executive director of the ensemble-based Lookingglass Theatre, is leaving her position at the end of the calendar year, Lookingglass announced Monday. Kraft, who i…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:33PM"SpongeBob SquarePants," the musical based on the Nickelodeon cartoon series with a cult following, will open on Broadway Dec. 4, Nickelodeon announced Monday. Director Tina Landau's product…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:51AMFriday, June 2, 2017
Broken Nose Theater, a new Chicago in its first year of eligibility for the Joseph Jefferson Awards, produced the edgy, gripping show that took home the most honors Monday night during the a…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:00PMWho has the most power in a romantic relationship at any given moment? The person who wants it the most. This is a paradox d'amour: the more you love another person, the more you have to los…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:55AMIf you measure a theater by the size, scope and versatility of its physical buildings, then there can be no reasonable doubt that Chicago Shakespeare Theater has just vaulted to the summit o…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:29AMThursday, June 1, 2017
"The Confederacy," said the mayor of New Orleans in an extraordinary speech the other day, marking the removal of long-standing monuments to its cause, "was on the wrong side of history and …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:28PMIn Samuel Beckett's absurdist classic "Waiting for Godot," the iconic characters Vladimir and Estragon pass their time in the great outdoors by waiting. Sure, the guy they are expecting neve…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMWednesday, May 31, 2017
On Wednesday, the Goodman Theatre canceled the evening's scheduled performance of "Pamplona," a new play by Jim McGrath about Ernest Hemingway. The cancellation followed a fraught and worris…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:46PMTuesday, May 30, 2017
The Goodman Theatre took the extraordinary step of suspending the world premiere of "Pamplona," a new one-character play by Jim McGrath about Ernest Hemingway, after the star of the show, St…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:37PMFriday, May 26, 2017
In 1994, an American skater named Nancy Kerrigan was whacked on the thigh with a baton wielded by Shane Stant, a thug hired in part by Jeff Gillooly, the ex-husband of Kerrigan's fiercest do…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:20PMThursday, May 25, 2017
When the leading management consulting firms — the likes of McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group or Mercer — want to recruit top MBAs, their standard operating procedure is to win…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:05PM 
