With his body draped in the Puerto Rican flag, his emotions struggling to get through the song named “Hurricane” and his presence celebrated all across San Juan, “Hamilton” creator L…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:45AMWith one foot in “Harry Potter” and another in “Dear Evan Hansen,” the new tween-oriented musical faithfully based on the 2005 fantasy-adventure book by Rick Riordan has plenty to pl…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:00PMBroadway announced some stunning financial results over the holidays: “Wicked” pulled in $3.4 million in a single week; $2.6 million thawed the ice at “Frozen”; $3.7 million circled …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMThe actress Carrie Coon is joining the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble, the storied Chicago theater announced Wednesday. “I’m thrilled,” said the 37-year-old star of “The Leftovers” o…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00PMConor McPherson’s “St. Nicholas” is a play about a theater critic — an irascible, caustic, mostly detestable Dublin scribe of the old, pre-Facebook school. So it was not, perhaps, su…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMScandinavia gave us hygge, the Danish term for chilled-out spiritual contentment. But if you’re a fan of great TV shows like “The Bridge” or “The Killing,” you’ll know that drama…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00PMNo sooner are seasonal festivities over than Chicago theater opens back up for business. There are scores of winter openings. But here — in alphabetical order — are 10 shows to look forw…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMHappy New Year! Here are some of my wishes for 2019. Chicago's officially designated Year of Chicago Theatre has real and lasting impact: What does the Year of Chicago Theatre mean? In essen…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00AMThis was 2018 in Chicago theater. “Joseph” camped it up in Las Vegas, upsetting family audiences at Drury Lane. Kelly Felthous lit up suburban musical theater. E. Faye Butler finally got…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:15AMIn the 1950s, Chicago pretty much invented improv. Decades later, a wildly innovative Chicago performance group called Manual Cinema imagined another daring idea, one that would combine the …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AMMost purveyors of sleight-of-hand trickery are attracted either by the grand illusion, like David Copperfield, or close-up card sharking, like the late Ricky Jay. Jamie Allan, who bills hims…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:20AMIsaac Gomez wrote “La Ruta” for the women of Ciudad Juarez. There is work yet to do on this talented 27-year-old writer’s new drama with music, which I saw Friday night at Steppenwolf …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:40PMOn the day after the Chicago Plan Commission approved renovation plans for the Uptown Theatre, the non-profit TimeLine Theatre Company was to announce Friday it has purchased for itself a ne…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AMChicago Shakespeare Theater said Thursday that is is postponing its planned summer production of a new musical adaptation of the 1971 Disney movie, “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” and will in…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00PMThere is only one way to solve the intractable mess known as Brexit and her name is Mary Poppins. And Lin-Manuel Miranda, the un-Trumpian personification of sunny American benevolence, is th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:45PMFrom sex offenders to amoral business people and nervous autoworkers to self-involved rock stars, Chicago theater was home to some spectacularly vivid characters in 2018. Here’s our annual…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:20PMIn 2005, a crowd gathered at the University of Chicago's Reynolds Club to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the invention of improv. No less an authority than the university archivist had de…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:20PMWhat qualifies someone to be a woman of soul? It’s debatable, of course, given that soul music intertwines with jazz, gospel, disco and rhythm and blues. It’s a genre with subgenres like…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:15PMDespite the gentle, bucolic, fair-weather reverie implied by the famous title, director Joe Dowling’s truly eye-popping new production of William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s D…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:30PMEver since Gregory Peck, the Tom Hanks of his moment, starred in the film version of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1962, the small-town lawyer Atticus Finch has been a symbol of Am…
SOURCE: New York Daily News at 09:00PMWither forgiveness in a year of constant American division? That question was at the core of many of the best Chicago shows of 2018 as this theater-loving city explored questions of guilt, p…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:00PMDrive down Howard Street — the border boulevard betwixt Chicago and Evanston — and you may be surprised to see the exterior of a modestly scaled but beautifully clad theater, the all-new…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:20PMMortality was on the Broadway menu this year — most all of the best works of the calendar year shed light on the pain of the human condition, especially once we’re past the first blush o…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:15AMWho is Isaac Gomez? If you live outside of the world of nonprofit theater, you may not know. As recently as 2013, Gomez was an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. He …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:45PMGitta Jacobs, whom her son Clay Jacobs said died peacefully in her Gold Coast home Friday at the age of 85, probably served as a director of more small Chicago theaters than any other single…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00PMDuring the peak holiday weeks, the Goodman Theatre likes to have an irreverent seasonal attraction on the smaller of its two stages — something to attract a young adult audience less inter…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:20PM“Algorithm Nation or, The Static Quo” is the first opening on the legendary mainstage of Second City since the fantastic “Dream Freaks Fall from Space" debuted on that legendary platfo…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:10PMAmericans were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore in 1976. And — take a look outside your window — they’re still mad as hell and not going to take it anymore in 2018. But the…
SOURCE: New York Daily News at 10:00PMAt the top of “The Play That Goes Wrong,” the touring comedy from London and Broadway now making its debut in Chicago, an apology is issued from the stage. There has been a ticket mix-up…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:20PMThe door to the Uptown Theatre swung open. Dan Rather laughed. And the faces of REO Speedwagon all lit up like Christmas trees. The juxtaposition of personalities — the famed anchorman was…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00PMFans of Theo Ubique Theatre, the diminutive, distinguished Chicago theater that really started the now-buoyant trend of micro-musicals in Chicago, have been left nibbling cold turkey this fa…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:25PM
