Sunday, April 2, 2017
When your British farce is so old-school that you'd swear the whole pox of a post-colonial schoolhouse crumbled at least two generations ago, you need a title that helps justify why the pick…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMA man — older, African-American, sad — walks into this industrial space. He goes straight to the washroom. A woman — a bit younger, African-American, Sox cap — walks into this sausag…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00PMFriday, March 31, 2017
David Schwimmer is as cagey as any celebrity. But he has learned to trust his mother-in-law. Which is why the Lookingglass Theatre of Chicago is staging the American premiere of "Beyond Cari…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:53AMWednesday, March 29, 2017
Last time I drove by Soldier Field, and stared at the white tent being raised for the horse extravaganza "Odysseo" on the south parking lot of the stadium, my thoughts immediately went to th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00AMSunday, March 26, 2017
NEW YORK — The white working-class voters who, conventional wisdom has it, put President Donald J. Trump into office are a dinner-party obsession among progressives. There are two prevaili…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMAccording to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last week, one-third of Americans say they would struggle to raise $2,000 in the event that they were hit with an emergency. That indication…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:14PMFriday, March 24, 2017
The Oscar-nominated "Manchester by the Sea" made the point that some things happen from which people cannot really recover. In the case of that film's central character, a Massachusetts jani…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMThursday, March 23, 2017
"This production is meant to be felt," said Will Davis, the new artistic director of the American Theater Company, in a lengthy explanatory curtain speech before Wednesday night's opening of…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:29PMThe Goodman Theatre will open its 2017-18 season with the director Ivo Van Hove's intensely radical West End and Broadway adaptation of Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge," the Goodman …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:00PMAt one point in "Destiny of Desire," the very fun, very self-aware new show by Karen Zacarias at the Goodman Theatre that offers up a live version of a telenovela, it is said from the stage …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMWednesday, March 22, 2017
I've never seen a show quite like "Circus 1903." Note that the title is not "Cirque 1903." This is not some dreamy, ethereal proscenium entertainment, designed to capitalize on the perennial…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:41PMTuesday, March 21, 2017
Are the words "truth" and "reconciliation" inherently oppositional? You might well argue so, when the truth involves the recounting of unspeakable suffering on the part of ordinary citizens …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:15PMWhat most often stands in the way of excellence in theater? It's not usually a lack of talent or creativity — if you're having a real career in the merciless performing arts, those qualiti…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:47PMMonday, March 20, 2017
What is the most popular form of entertainment on the planet? No, it's not the broadcasts of the National Football League or even the World Cup. It's not even Robert Falls' famous production…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMEven when uncovering facts that might change the world, great investigative journalists rarely self-dramatize. And if they do, it's likely long after the story is filed, usually accompanied …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:58PMThis week Broadway has a true rarity: Two sisters from Evanston appearing in leading roles in two separate Broadway musicals. But it's only through Sunday. At the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, Je…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:49AMSunday, March 19, 2017
Next time you're accused of being selfish, try this Stoppardian rejoinder: Darwin really doesn't do sentimental. Or try putting it another way: We're all hard-wired to be out for ourselves. …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:17PMFriday, March 17, 2017
The arrival on Thursday night of the spring program of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago at the Harris Theatre is — by titular definition — a signal of the end of winter. But in these here pa…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:05PMThursday, March 16, 2017
Anyone who has cleaned out a deceased parent's stuff will tell you that the worst part of the process is listening to a dealer denigrate the prized possessions of one that you have so deeply…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMThe closest thing in the nascent administration of Donald J. Trump to a minister of culture is probably Ivanka Trump, who could be seen in a Broadway theater seat Wednesday night, accompanyi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:40PMEven in this, its final season crisscrossing America, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus is a very big show. But it's still a fraction of the size it was in, say, 1903. That year,…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:38AMWednesday, March 15, 2017
Seafood joints usually carry a steak. Pizza Hut offers a tossed salad. This is all to avoid the veto. "The Naked Magicians," now at the Broadway Playhouse at Water Tower Place, have learned …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:34PMTuesday, March 14, 2017
For a vicarious experience of Frank Loesser's "The Most Happy Fella" at Theo Ubique Theatre, imagine coming inside from the slate-gray skies of a chilly night in an inevitable Chicago March,…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:06PMWhen a phenomenally talented Broadway composer dies young — the likes of Roger Miller ("Big River") or Jonathan Larson ("Rent") — you're left wondering what else they would have done for…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:42AMMonday, March 13, 2017
The coattails of "Hamilton" stretch from sea to shining sea. And along with all the actors, authors, journalists, place-holders and concessions sellers, the riders thereupon now include the …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:52PMFans of Andrew Lloyd Webber will be delighted with the new Broadway in Chicago season — not only is the British composer's current Broadway hit "School of Rock" coming to Chicago as part o…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:11AMSunday, March 12, 2017
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, 38 planes, many of them jumbo jets, were pulled from the sunny skies of the darkest day in modern American history and dropped without warning upon Gander, …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMThursday, March 9, 2017
Surely, no star in the history of Broadway has made a more inauspicious entrance than Sally Field's first appearance as poor Amanda Wingfield in director Sam Gold's starkly unforgiving, most…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMThere are some fascinating similarities emerging between Chance the Rapper and Lin-Manuel Miranda. For starters, both of these artists — one from Chicago, one from New York — clearly kno…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:25PMWednesday, March 8, 2017
Hedwig Robinson — that self-styled "slip of a girl-boy from communist East Berlin" — has fit Chicago into her "tight, little agenda" and, as the Village Voice once improbably wrote of Br…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:31PMAt one point in our conversation Tuesday night, Tim Hopper started talking about failing a show. This is unusual for an actor; most people only talk about their successes. But Hopper, for wh…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:12PM 
