There have been several intriguing plays about siblings dealing with loss onstage this year, including Leah Nanako Winkler’s The Brightest Thing in the World at About Face Theatre and the …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:07PMA one-person take on Hamlet starring a famous comedian sounds like a recipe for self-indulgence. (Or the opening premise for a deliberately off-kilter affair, as in the ridiculous and sublim…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:46AMIt’s tempting to say that Neil Simon’s 1963 romantic comedy Barefoot in the Park hasn’t aged well. But even when it premiered on Broadway with Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley as ne…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:43AMChicago Children’s Theatre’s (CCT) first production, back in 2006, was the Tony Award-nominated A Year With Frog and Toad, created by brothers Robert (music) and Willie Reale (book and l…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:09AMHershey Felder first played Frédéric Chopin at the now-closed Royal George Theatre in 2005—one of several solo shows about great composers that Felder has created over the years (he’s …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:42PMBritish playwright Simon Stephens has been produced here so often, he’s practically an honorary Chicagoan. So it’s perhaps puzzling that his adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, The…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:44AMAll the ingredients for a whimsical look at unlikely love are in place in Nick Robideau’s Inanimate, now in its local premiere at Theater Wit under Jeremy Wechsler’s direction. But like …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:13AMThe early moments of Leah Nanako Winkler’s The Brightest Thing in the World, now in a heartfelt midwest premiere with About Face Theatre under Keira Fromm’s direction, reminded me a bit …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:11PMAs her name suggests, Cloudia has been obsessed with clouds her entire life. In particular, she’s always wanted to see a legendary Cloud Man for herself. So she moves into a cabin on Cloud…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:15PMThe same day I saw Aurora Real de Asua’s Wipeout at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, I read an essay by onetime Reader staffer Heather Kenny about women finding midlife empowerment in outdoor s…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:55AMRonnie Marmo has been extremely candid about his struggles with addiction, especially in the context of playing Lenny Bruce, as he has for several years in his show I’m Not a Comedian . . …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:03AMChicago Danztheatre Ensemble’s Meditations on Being is a sampler platter of eight pieces that in some way “reflects on what one remembers.” Not all the work on display here necessarily…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:59AMDeborah Zoe Laufer’s 2007 dramedy, End Days, has intermittent moments of charm woven into a premise that is trying way too hard for profundity and whimsy. (When a show begins with someone …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:48AMCharles Smith writes historical plays with lively consciences that provide ample opportunities for his characters to debate. But first and foremost, he writes plays about people who are nego…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:01PMRonán Noone’s 2019 solo play, The Smuggler, now in a local premiere with Jackalope Theatre Company, seems to carry the DNA of early Conor McPherson plays in its bones. In particular, Noon…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:34AMWendy Kesselman’s 1997 adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank did some things that original adapters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett didn’t back in 1955 (slightly more than ten years …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:28PMI spent a semester studying in London in the winter of 1985, and one of the first concerts I attended was a benefit at Brixton Academy for the striking coal miners, featuring Aztec Camera an…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:01PMScheduled long before the current conflagration in the Middle East, Writers Theatre’s lovely, intimate staging of The Band’s Visit, the multiple Tony Award–winning musical, which premi…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:09PMConor McPherson’s Girl From the North Country draws on some of the same narrative tropes that the Irish playwright has used in the past in plays like The Weir and The Seafarer. A group of …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:05AMGwydion Theatre Company is a relatively new addition to the Chicago storefront scene (they moved here from Los Angeles last year), but their current revival of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:38PMThe night before seeing Edward Hall’s stylish, arresting—but not totally convincing—production of Richard III at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, I finally caught up with Danai Gurira’s …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:17PMBack in college, when I mentioned I was writing a paper on Antigone as presented in both the Sophoclean original and in Jean Anouilh’s 1944 French Resistance–era update, a dorm friend ro…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:29PMAnna Ouyang Moench is having a moment on Chicago stages right now; her play In Quietness, about women at an evangelical Homemaking House, is playing at A Red Orchid Theatre. Now Gift Theatre…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:28PMDav Pilkey’s popular series of kids’ books about a crime-fighting superhero mutant dog form the basis for this touring TheaterWorks USA musical production, which has settled in at the St…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:27PMThe 6th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival swept through Chicago as vigorously as the cold front that accompanied much of it, and puppets dominated venues all around Chicago for t…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:34PMThe deepfake AI-generated images of Taylor Swift swirling around the Internet inevitably came to mind on opening night of Goodman’s Highway Patrol—if only to make me think that, all thin…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:46AMWhat if you took Winnie and Willie from Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and ran them through a blender with a Neil Simon midlife urban comedy, like The Prisoner of Second Avenue, tossing in a …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:43AMSeventeen blows in seven seconds. That’s what it took to end Benny Paret’s life, and forever change Emile Griffith’s. The two men met for the third and final time in the ring on Marc…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:14PMI’ve been seeing Beau O’Reilly’s plays for over 30 years. But somehow it never occurred to me until taking in the current revival of O’Reilly’s 2003 play, Hit Me Like a Flower, how…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:39AMGregory Stewart’s tribute to Nat King Cole doesn’t break the predictable mold of biographical concerts/plays, but in the cozy environment of the Venus Cabaret space at Mercury Theater Ch…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:45AMAs small miracles go, American Blues Theater opening their lovely new two-theater venue on North Lincoln just in time for their annual presentation of It’s a Wonderful Life: Live in Chicag…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:27AM