Friday, February 20, 2015
Before dawn on a frigid Thursday morning, as President Barack Obama came to Chicago to declare the site of the Pullman Palace Car Co. a national monument, I caught the train they call the Ci…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AMThursday, February 19, 2015
Back in 2010, Chicago's Signal Ensemble Theatre staged "Aftermath," a fabulous little show about the Rolling Stones penned by Ronan Marra. "Aftermath" was all about the demise of the influen…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AMBack in 2010, Chicago's Signal Ensemble Theatre staged "Aftermath," a fabulous little show about the Rolling Stones penned by Ronan Marra. "Aftermath" was all about the demise of the influen…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AMTuesday, February 17, 2015
For anyone with a modicum of self-awareness — and that only describes a subset of parents applying to private or highly selective public schools — the act of filling out a school applica…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:31PMSunday, February 15, 2015
The theater is a funny place. It's not hard to believe a mother is having quite a profound conversation with the fetus inside her womb — writ large and standing before her. But an over-act…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:58PMAlthough its setting is 18th century Versailles and its central character is the wife of Louis XVI and the erstwhile queen of France, you could chop the noggin off the Steppenwolf Theatre's …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:44PMSaturday, February 14, 2015
Ascending the stage at the Grammy Awards last weekend, the British crooner Sam Smith observed that before he made his winning hit, "Stay With Me," he'd been doing everything possible to try …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:10AMFriday, February 13, 2015
Early in “First Date,” the savvily titled but thoroughly predictable Broadway musical from 2013, one of the primo datees, the cute-but-snarky Casey, she of the red dress and the wrist ta…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:21PMThursday, February 12, 2015
NEW YORK — Some three years after its genesis in Chicago and with its huge, original cast intact, director Robert Falls' five-hour epic production of "The Iceman Cometh" is improbably rebo…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:00PM"Husbands come and go," observes Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, dryly, sitting in the dark. "But girlfriends are forever."
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:38PM"Husbands come and go," observes Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, dryly, sitting in the dark. "But girlfriends are forever."
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:38PMWednesday, February 11, 2015
A healthy theater scene needs a lively avant-garde. That might strike you as a curious statement: Chicago theater is a famously edgy and intense collection of institutions. Celebrities appea…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:54PMCharming and unpretentious as he can be in person, Stephen Sondheim (or, as they like to say in the musical theater, God) is acutely aware of his place in history. And when it comes to contr…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:21PMDisney's "The Lion King" is returning to Chicago. The hit family musical, a perennial best-seller, will return in its Broadway touring production for a seven-week engagement, beginning Dec…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:14AMDisney's "The Lion King" is returning to Chicago. The hit family musical, a perennial best-seller, will return in a North American touring production for a seven-week engagement, beginning…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:14AMTuesday, February 10, 2015
Zeljko Djukic, the capable founding artistic director of the avant-garde Chicago company known as TUTA Theatre Chicago, has been off on a Fulbright Scholarship. He has been missed. But he's …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:29PMZeljko Djukic, the capable founding artistic director of the avant-garde Chicago company known as TUTA Theatre Chicago, has been off on a Fulbright Scholarship. He has been missed. But he's …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:29PMNoah Haidle’s play “Smokefall,” which had two highly successful runs at the Goodman Theatre starring Mike Nussbaum, is to have a New York production at the MCC Theater early in 2016, i…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:56PMMonday, February 9, 2015
For anyone who saw the first national tour of the musical "The Addams Family," the amusements currently to be had alongside Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday and Pugsley at the Mercury Theater will…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:49PMChicago is getting another pre-Broadway tryout: “Gotta Dance,” a new musical based on a 2008 Dori Berinstein documentary about the New Jersey Nets’ hip-hop dance team made up of senior…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:12AMSaturday, February 7, 2015
Present reality means wind chill and snowpacks. Fortuitously, life is always a celebration with composer Jerry Herman on your arm. For that most helplessly optimistic of the Broadway songsmi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:30AMFriday, February 6, 2015
In a book called "Seducing the Subconscious," Robert Heath, an advertising executive who moved into academia, makes the argument that emotional engagement is everything. No surprise there. I…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AMThursday, February 5, 2015
Kelli Strickland, the executive director of the Raven Theatre Company on Chicago’s North Side for the past two years, has left that post to become the new executive director of the Chicago…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:00PMSo here's one way to know the recession is over: Lots of shows about the agony of life's choices. I'm overly inclined to wander down the road not traveled and second-guess myself — a habit…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:32AMTuesday, February 3, 2015
Of all the American playwrights, the late Horton Foote was the closest this country ever had to Anton Chekhov. Although Foote's reputation during his lifetime was never equal to that of Arth…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00PMRuss Tutterow, founding artistic director of Chicago Dramatists, is stepping down after 30 years, the Chicago organization said Tuesday morning. He is to be replaced, on an interim basis, by…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:45AMSunday, February 1, 2015
I'll say this for Bruce Graham's "White Guy On the Bus," now premiering at the Northlight Theatre: It is a play with guts. This writer has previously been inclined toward sentimentality, as …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:41PMSaturday, January 31, 2015
The Jan. 15 announcement of the 2015 Academy Award nominations was greeted with widespread dismay at the omission of Ava DuVernay, the director of "Selma," and David Oyelowo, the movie's sta…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AMThursday, January 29, 2015
To interview actor Brian Dennehy in Chicago is to be told that Chicago is a great town, to be regaled with memories of O'Rourke's tavern, the hedonistic pleasures of Gibson's Steakhouse, the…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:08PMWednesday, January 28, 2015
When I first started reviewing Chicago theater — some years ago now — the commercial suburban theaters that ringed the city seemed like aberrations and relics of a former era. Places lik…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:55PMThere are dramatic plays — a few thousand years of them have unfurled to date — and there are story plays. The two categories overlap in that all great drama tells a story, of course, an…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AM 
