Thursday, May 11, 2023
Dory, or “Rascal,” as she is known to her family, is a six-year-old with a lively imagination, which includes her not-quite-a-monster best friend, Mary. Her older siblings, exasperated b…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:15PMJackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, but is only getting its Chicago premiere now courtesy of Definition Theatre. After seeing Tyrone Phillips’s staging at the c…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:01PMFriday, May 5, 2023
After five people (including a nine-year-old child) were murdered in a mass shooting in Texas last week, Governor Greg Abbott tweeted, “I’ve announced a $50K reward for info on the crimi…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:24PMThursday, May 4, 2023
India Nicole Burton’s Panther Women: An Army for the Liberation has already played at Cleveland Public Theatre and Indianapolis’s Phoenix Theatre as part of the National New Play Network…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:23PMThursday, April 27, 2023
Cutting Oscar Wilde’s 1895 classic comedy of manners down to a sleek 90-minute running time is a bold step, but Theatre Above the Law’s current staging, directed by Tony Lawry, manages t…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:36PMFriday, April 21, 2023
Aleshea Harris’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down, produced by Congo Square Theatre last year, provided a trenchant and sometimes anguished portrayal of how racialized violence affects Bl…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:17AMJessica Dickey’s world premiere at Remy Bumppo (directed by Marti Lyons) has some echoes of Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife: the playwright appears as a character, researching the life of…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:02AMThursday, April 13, 2023
The last great production of The Cherry Orchard I saw was at Steppenwolf, nearly 20 years ago. Tina Landau turned the company’s upstairs theater into a near-immersive experience, with Ricc…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:02AMThursday, April 6, 2023
Though it premiered in 1981 with the Negro Ensemble Company, won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and was subsequently turned into the well-received 1984 film A Soldier’s Story, Charles …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:58PMWednesday, April 5, 2023
Barbara Gaines started her tenure as artistic director for Chicago Shakespeare Theater (then called Chicago Shakespeare Workshop) in 1986 by staging Henry V on the rooftop of the Red Lion Pu…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:58AMFriday, March 17, 2023
“The shit we deal with in Baghdad, it doesn’t exist in America,” declares Sahir early in Martin Yousif Zebari’s Layalina, now in a world premiere at the Goodman under Sivan Battat’…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:11PMOn the ticketing page for Broadway in Chicago’s presentation of the touring version of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, there’s a small line at the bottom: “Please note that Tina Turner …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:50PMWednesday, March 15, 2023
I’m just going to get the obvious adjective out of the way right now: Rajiv Joseph’s Describe the Night, now in its local premiere at Steppenwolf under Austin Pendleton’s direction, is…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:24PMIn what was seen at the time as quite the upset, Avenue Q took home the Tony Award for best musical in 2004, beating out the Wicked machine and the critically acclaimed Caroline, or Change. …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:18PMFriday, March 10, 2023
When it comes to Factory Theater, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Shannon O’Neill’s play The Kelly Girls, about two sisters in Northern Ireland, would be close in tone and spirit t…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:08PMThursday, March 2, 2023
Romantic regret and stubborn optimism seem as intertwined in the national character of Ireland as a Saint Brigid’s cross, and those qualities suffuse Once, the 2012 musical adapted by Iris…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:32PMArtists Lounge Live, started by the husband-and-wife team of Michael and Angela Ingersoll, specializes in presenting tribute shows to various musical legends. (Michael Ingersoll was in the o…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:05PMThursday, February 23, 2023
Charles Dickens’s schoolmaster Mr. Gradgrind from Hard Times (he who insists, “Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts”) would feel right at home in the…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:00AMWednesday, February 22, 2023
Alex Grelle and Jesse Morgan Young’s Floor Show premiered in a brief electric run in February 2020 at the Chopin. The plan was to bring it back later that spring. But then . . . you know. …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:45PMDominick Alesia’s original musical, now in a world premiere with the Impostors under Stefan Roseen’s direction, follows a young girl, Amelia, as she searches through a country shattered …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:17PMWednesday, February 15, 2023
Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical Into the Woods premiered three years before Robert Bly’s Iron John sent men into the wilderness as part of the “mythopoetic men’s movement…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:16PMThis past fall, TimeLine offered a blistering revival of Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind, in which a Black actress in a 1950s Broadway play about lynching (penned and directed by white m…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:50PMFriday, February 10, 2023
Like theater, baseball has no set time clock by which the action must unfold. It takes as long as it takes to finish the nine innings. That can lead to longueurs, or it can raise the stakes.…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:39AMThursday, February 2, 2023
Every time I hear someone describe Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a “romance,” I die a little inside. It’s a portrait of dysfunction, abuse, codependency, and revenge. Which, s…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:07AMWednesday, February 1, 2023
Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968, out of anger that he wouldn’t produce her play/manifesto Up Your Ass. Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, out of anger a…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:40PMFriday, January 27, 2023
Christina Anderson’s luminous and wise the ripple, the wave that carried me home (now at the Goodman in a coproduction with Berkeley Rep, where it played in fall 2022) unfolds in mesmerizi…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMWednesday, December 21, 2022
First Folio Theatre planned to produce the world premiere of Heather Chrisler’s adaptation of Little Women back in spring of 2020, but COVID took that production out just as surely as scar…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:34AMWednesday, December 7, 2022
Shakespeare was queering the narrative before that term even existed. So it makes sense that Midsommer Flight’s seventh annual production of Twelfth Night at the Lincoln Park Conservatory …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:16PMWednesday, November 30, 2022
At a preshow reception introducing the Goodman’s new artistic director, Susan V. Booth, executive director Roche Schulfer talked about how the theater’s production of A Christmas Carol, …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:00PMWednesday, November 23, 2022
Theatre Above the Law’s sampler platter of four one-acts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (most of them seldom produced) offers mixed results. The opening piece, A Dollar […]
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SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:20AMThursday, November 17, 2022
Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind made its off-Broadway debut in 1955, but it never made the leap to the Great White Way (emphasis most definitely on “White”). The white producers [……
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:39AM 
