This is what theater needs to be in our time: a mirror not just to nature but also to the media landscape that surrounds us. Invictus has crafted a memorable production of an important and i…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMAs an illusionist, Jon Tai performs a truly impressive feat that makes the audience gasp; as a storyteller, though, the amicable and unassuming Tai comes off as less than magical.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThe play never hits a high gear dramatically and ends on an anticlimax. But I still found “Wells and Welles” enjoyable, for the simple reason that, over the play’s single act, we do ge…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFor a smallish storefront theater like Invictus to do so well by a play as expansive and demanding as “Three Sisters” is no mean feat, and I wish the show a long and happy run.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMNew York playwright Jay Stull manages to craft an ingeniously twisty, provocative meditation on artificial intelligence that takes the form of a play within a play within a darkly mysterious…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMPerformative intensity is a good thing, but it’s not enough to carry a play. We see this clearly in “Turret,” a show with too much heat and not enough light.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMUnder-plotted, more static than flowing, anticlimactic and sometimes over the top, “The Thanksgiving Play” is not a polished work of theater. But it is a powerful provocation, a real boo…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMVeteran director Chuck Smith, our foremost August Wilson interpreter, has crafted an emotionally highly charged, exuberant, well-paced production. But even with Smith’s steady hand on the …
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMIzzard’s dazzling performance holds up a mirror not just to nature, but to ourselves.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMWith its engaging characters, pointed and fast-paced dialogue, unpredictable but logical storyline and luminous poetic flourishes, “Love Song” is a show that will charm the pants off eve…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AM“End Days” reminds us that the overtones of strangeness, precariousness and disequilibrium that define reality these days began exactly at the moment when the American public lost its se…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMIt’s solid, gripping writing, delivered with crystalline sincerity, and it hits like a sledge hammer.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThe Joffrey Ballet’s current—and spectacular—evening of dance is a modern-day rhapsody in blue, exploring with skill and sensitivity the range of moods and meanings associated with tha…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMIts message about the need to stand and fight against a rigged system is as relevant as ever. The work itself, though, has not aged well.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AM"This is one of the finest productions of a Brecht play I’ve seen in Chicago, or anywhere else for that matter."
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThe theme of budget-busting inflation is all too relevant right now in the United States. That said, it’s no easy task updating and transposing Fo’s almost fifty-year-old tale of the ins…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMVisually scintillating, musically varied and appealing, animated by the shamanic, shape-shifting energy of its griot/narrator, “AmericanMYTH: Crossroads” has a hell of a lot going for it…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMGwydion Theatre, a company making its local debut, has chosen its first Chicago play well and executed even better.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AM“The Nacirema Society” could have been an edifying experience for viewers, as well as an entertaining one. That road hasn’t been taken, and the result is a comedy whose laughs lack dee…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMore ominous and socially observant than a typical melodrama, Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” is hard to categorize. It’s its own thing—call it a classic American Millerdr…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMHarold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land”—the Nobel Prize-winning writer’s 1975 play, masterfully revived at Steppenwolf—is a rich and strange theater experience.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThe personal good intentions and grandiose philosophizing offered here might distract us, but they won’t do much to save us.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThe play is a real-time portrayal of an audition, that lonely, scary ordeal for actors.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMEli is a TV writer who has become sick of writing fictional stories about fantasy heroes, and instead decides to speak only hard, personal truths designed to free himself and others from the…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThe minimum-wage workplace as depicted in this world premiere drama is a nightmare of tedious toil, endless surveillance and absolute disrespect.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThe five lead dancers skillfully meld precise, athletic movement—in a contemporary ballet mode—with expressive theatricality.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThe plot concerns two couples–one lesbian, the other heterosexual–who wish to have a baby in a society where childbearing is treated as a highly regulated privilege, available only to li…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThere’s nothing “nice” about “Threepenny,” a no-holds-barred assault on every aspect of bourgeois existence, from religion to marriage and family to the military to law and order.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMBritish writer Simon Stephens’ 2015 two-hander references physicist Werner Heisenberg’s 1927 discovery that it is impossible for an observer to precisely discern both the position and ve…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMIn Nilo Cruz’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 2003 play, cigars symbolize all kinds of things, from capitalist commodity to an older, slower lifestyle to religious burnt offering, like smoke throug…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMJoffrey Ballet’s magnificent revival, an adaptation of Tolstoy’s vast novel of illicit love among the nobility of Czarist Russia, captures the book’s tragic, inexorable power.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AM