Sunday, September 21, 2014
Sheldon Patinkin, a crucial figure in the development of improvisational comedy in Chicago and a mentor to numerous generations of American and Canadian comedians and aspiring theatrical dir…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:42AMSaturday, September 20, 2014
I'm not generally a fan of watching solo performance pieces performed by others but I make an exception for the actor Usman Ally who, crossing racial lines, disappears inside his characters …
SOURCE: my.chicagotribune.com at 08:31AMFriday, September 19, 2014
The Museum of Contemporary Art is going all out for David Bowie — some 400 objects, a gala, a Tumblr blog, a sponsorship from Louis Vuitton. This is understandable; the exhibit, organized …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:11PMIn 2013, after years of denials, the cyclist Lance Armstrong confessed to Oprah Winfrey that he had taken performance-enhancing drugs. Some four years previously, Armstrong had given an inte…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:10PMThursday, September 18, 2014
Any biographer entering a crowded field — and the life and work of the great playwright Tennessee Williams is hardly virgin territory, given the confessional diaries, the innumerable extan…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:45AMBarbara Gaines' raw and visceral Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of "King Lear" begins, poorly, with the titular monarch, he who hath ever but slenderly known himself, fast-forwarding…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:12AMWednesday, September 17, 2014
Sir Isaac Newton, the 17th-century British philosopher and mathematician, said a lot of things. But it's a pretty fair bet that, even in his wild and crazy youth, the formulator of laws of m…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:56PMTuesday, September 16, 2014
The best thrillers — and, believe me, playwright Caitlin Parrish's grippingly intimate new play "The Downpour" is as tense and disturbing an experience as any thriller you might find at th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:32PMMonday, September 15, 2014
When Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats" first opened in London in 1981, long before the kitty takeover of social media, I recall my teenage self marveling over a line in the newspaper advertisemen…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:22PMSunday, September 14, 2014
This past weekend, two works by the same author opened at two leading Chicago-area theater companies, Writers Theatre in Glencoe and Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago. This would not be so unu…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:34PMThursday, September 11, 2014
NEW YORK — In its home base of Chicago, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company's studiolike production of Kenneth Lonergan's closely observed and emotionally potent “This Is Our Youth” was an…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:30PMThis weekend the new season of Chicago theater gets underway in earnest. If there is an unintended theme of the fall, I'd say it is that Chicago theater finds itself collectively engaged wit…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:58PMFor the first time on such scale in the Midwest, theaters all over Chicago, the suburbs and in Milwaukee will dim their marquee lights prior to showtime.
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:15PMWednesday, September 10, 2014
Theatre at the Center said Wednesday that the actor George Andrew Wolff will take over the role of the taxi driver in their current production, "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." T…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:53PMTuesday, September 9, 2014
At one point in "Since I Suppose," the new theater piece from the remarkable Australian company, One Step at a Time Like This, you find yourself alone in Daley Plaza, most likely in the midd…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:21PMSome in the audience at the Drury Lane Theatre Thursday night thought they were going to see "Something's Afoot," the musical spoof of Agatha Christie. An easy mistake to make. In fact, the …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:20PMSunday, September 7, 2014
Bernie Yvon was a song-and-dance man of the old school. Since he also was a disarmingly sophisticated actor — one need only have seen his Max last year in "Cabaret" or watched his younger …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:53PMTo be an actress with red hair — and Molly Glynn was so gifted — is to constantly find your name attached to adjectives like "fiery" or "feisty" after even the most minor display of inde…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:27PMFor many in the Chicago theater, the day of incomprehensible tragedy Saturday began with an 8:33 a.m. Facebook post from a popular actor, Joe Foust. "I couldn't save her, I couldn't save her…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:26PMSaturday, September 6, 2014
The close-knit Chicago theater community suffered almost an unbearable loss Saturday when two of its stars, the actors Bernie Yvon and Molly Glynn, were struck down in the prime of their car…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:47PMFriday, September 5, 2014
Few longtime observers consider 2013-14 a vintage year for Broadway. So weak was the overall slate that most of the new offerings were outsold by longer-lived shows from previous seasons.
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:49PMSummer exits, if it ever entered. Winter remains the newly terrifying villain in the wings. And the fall theater season is upon us. With a relatively quiet season for touring shows, the focu…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:45AMTo play King Lear is to confront the possibility of being unloved and ill-used in your dementia-ridden old age. To play Ebenezer Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol" is to stare into your own grav…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:43AMRoy Leonard, a courtly, erudite New Englander who became one of Chicago radio's biggest and most durable stars, a celebrity interviewer of national stature, and a trusted and thus highly inf…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:17AMThursday, September 4, 2014
Not long ago, the venerable Shattered Globe Theatre Company was, like the endangered gray whale, staring extinction in the face. So to sit at Theatre Wit and watch this long-struggling but h…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:38AMWednesday, September 3, 2014
Opening nights in Chicago usually have their share of actors in the audience — some supporting friends, others just seeing the art they love. Nonetheless, the opening of Ron Keaton's "Chur…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:09PMThe Steppenwolf Theatre Company production of "Airline Highway" by Lisa D'Amour is to move to Broadway after its Chicago engagement. Joe Mantello directs both in Chicago and New York.
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:50AMTuesday, September 2, 2014
To be a haunted pub, you're really supposed to be an old pub. London's Viaduct Tavern, known for its poltergeist activity, has been a tavern since 1875. New York's waterfront Bridge Cafe, wh…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:00PMSunday, August 31, 2014
THEATER REVIEW: "Reasons to be Happy" from Profiles Theatre ★½ Although more of a comedy and less raw, Neil LaBute's "Reasons to be Happy" is almost as good as "Reasons to be Pretty."…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:32PMIN PERFORMANCE: iO grand opening "Armando Diaz Experience" The occasion for the celebrity infusion was the opening weekend of the new digs for the hopefully immortal iO, longtime resident of…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:13PMFriday, August 29, 2014
"Be a great artist," a mentor tells a young Jewish painter who likes to draw Jesus Christ. "It is the only justification for all the pain you are about to cause."
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:03PM 
