Wednesday, March 8, 2017
At 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 03:12PMTuesday, March 7, 2017
Victory Gardens Theater will stage the first made-in-Chicago production of the Tony award-winning musical "Fun Home" as part of its 43rd season of shows, the Lincoln Park company announced…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:02PMMonday, March 6, 2017
Having never had a year when I didn't go to school and subsequently paid the price, the premise for the latest show for the ages 6-11 set at the Chicago Children's Theatre struck me as devou…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:35PMSaturday, March 4, 2017
A bevy of politically invested Broadway celebrities—including Chita Rivera, Melissa Manchester, Ana Gasteyer, Christine Pedi, Sharon Gless, Alice Ripley and many others—are to appear Mar…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:21PMFriday, March 3, 2017
Plays about parenting are rare at Chicago storefronts — plays about parenting teenagers rarer yet. But the new work, "The Snare," by a young writer named Samantha Beach, actually is a show…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:58PMThursday, March 2, 2017
Theresa Rebeck's excellent play "The Scene," which I first saw in an excellent production at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2006 and you now can see at Writers Theatre in a misguided an…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:51PMThe Chicago production of "Hamilton" has announced its new Aaron Burr — the well-known Broadway actor Daniel Breaker. Breaker will take over the pivotal role of the antagonist in the hit m…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:03PMHedwig Robinson, a transgender German singer, made her first appearance in 1994 at a drag-punk New York club known as Squeezebox. The famous Soho venue — mostly a gay club, but open to all…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00PMWednesday, March 1, 2017
If you know the word "tesseract" — a four-dimensional hypercube — then there's a good chance you were brought up on Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time," a proto-Potter science fictio…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:54PMThe Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member John Mahoney will return to his company in the fall to star alongside Francis Guinan in the Chicago premiere of "The Rembrandt," directed by Hallie G…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:59AMTuesday, February 28, 2017
In 1985, a comic strip by farseeing cartoonist Alison Bechdel ("Fun Home") featured two women — one white, one African-American — discussing moviegoing. One of the characters says she on…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:11PMMonday, February 27, 2017
It was an accountant's bad handoff that created the jaw-dropping chaos of the final moments of the Academy Awards on Sunday, a moment when you could see, laid bare, all of America's fissures…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:15PM"Gotta Dance," the musical about the real-life NBA half-time stunt involving a company of senior hip-hop dancers, is not going directly to Broadway after its 2015 Chicago tryout. Now retitle…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:53PMChicago's Steppenwolf Theater has added a new ensemble member: the Chicago-based actor Namir Smallwood is the latest to be given the prestigious nod. Originally from Newark, New Jersey, Sma…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:57AMFriday, February 24, 2017
In 1957, a prominent syndicated political columnist named Joseph W. Alsop Jr. — a powerful journalist who spent his life hobnobbing with, and successfully influencing, the political elite …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:17PMThe Broadway director Liesl Tommy will direct the summer world premiere of "Pass Over" by Antoinette Nwandu, Steppenwolf Theatre announced Friday. Tommy is the Tony Award-nominated director …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:51AMThursday, February 23, 2017
In Ang Lee's unforgettable movie "Brokeback Mountain," a young actor named Jake Gyllenhaal played a cowboy who falls in love with another cowboy not out of any desire the men could define, b…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMIf the predictions of much political speechifying hold true, the words Amazon, Netflix, Google and Facebook won't be heard anywhere near as often as the name of President Donald Trump at the…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:03PMMost playwrights reach the point in their career when they want to write something that people actually are going to want to come and see. By "people," I don't mean the theater insiders so i…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMWednesday, February 22, 2017
Annie Baker's terrific translation of "Uncle Vanya" begins like this. Marina, an old nurse who does not move much, pours a cup of tea. "You should eat something," she says to Mikhail Lvovich…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:32PMTuesday, February 21, 2017
Before he died in 2014, the fine young-adult novelist Walter Dean Myers wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times; the essay was a reaction to a University of Wisconsin study that found t…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:08PMSunday, February 19, 2017
Gwendolyn Brooks. Carol Moseley Braun. Mavis Staples. Michelle Obama. All, we are told, have been gussied up at the oldest black-owned beauty shop in Chicago, the life's work of two women fr…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:09PMFriday, February 17, 2017
"Mamma Mia!," the much-loved and now ubiquitous ABBA musical, is one of the few West End and Broadway shows that you could say work better in the round. That's the takeaway, at least, from d…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:15PMCircus people in America have not had not enjoyed these past four months. The bad news began in November when the Big Apple Circus, a beloved and mission-centered American circus known for i…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMThursday, February 16, 2017
What is the hardest of all the plays by William Shakespeare to produce today? You'd probably wager the deep-thought tragic masterpieces, or the problematic dramas like "Othello," "The Mercha…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:09PMThe Steppenwolf Theatre Company will have the world premiere next fall of a new play by Tracy Letts, which will then move to Broadway. The new, ensemble-driven play "The Minutes" was penned …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:54PMWednesday, February 15, 2017
At one point in "Bootycandy," the scathingly funny and wildly eclectic satire by Robert O'Hara about growing up gay and black in the Buckeye State — or somewhere like that — we are taken…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:00PM"Gloria" and "Straight White Men" represent something new and interesting in the ever-morphing theatrical interchange between Chicago and New York — two productions that originated at off-…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:00PMTuesday, February 14, 2017
Many Chicagoans of color report feeling uneasy around Chicago police officers. That is a fact, supported by ample data. There's also hard evidence that white Chicagoans do not fully understa…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:43PMMonday, February 13, 2017
In Chicago and New York, "Sweeney Todd — the Demon Barber of Fleet Street" generally has devolved into a close shave. The reasons are partly canonical. Ghosts of past productions now loom …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:55PMSunday, February 12, 2017
Consider, dear reader, this paradoxical truth from the restless mind of the auteur artist Young Jean Lee, currently accessible in Chicago through the Steppenwolf Theatre Company: "There is n…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:53PM 
