Saturday, July 10, 2021
GREAT MUSIC. GREAT THEATER. THE WORKS. Music Theater Works will present Mamma Mia! at the North Shore Center For The Performing Arts in Skokie, their new residence, from August 19, 2021 to A…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:51AMThursday, November 5, 2020
THIS YEAR MORE THAN EVER, THE PROJECT(S) MUST BE SEEN It’s a continuing crisis seen from the inside out, fleshed out with warmth and truth. In The Project(s), the late, great American Thea…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:45PMThursday, June 25, 2020
JUST AS MAGICAL REMOTELY Is stuff magical only because it can’t be explained? Perhaps it’s more than just the absence of logic, probability, or reason. There’s a presence too: Magic ev…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:46PMFriday, March 6, 2020
SINGING AGAINST HATE If it takes a village, the Black Ensemble Theater creates one nightly. Actually, it’s a “healing circle” that’s literally at center stage and figuratively at the…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:54PMTuesday, February 25, 2020
PUPS ‘N’ STUFF MAKES A DOGGONE DRAMA “Love me, love my dog. [Then I’ll love you…}” That’s the operating assumption between Dex & Abby, a cross-species comedy/love play. At …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:39PMThursday, February 20, 2020
POSTHUMOUS EMANCIPATION The painful premise behind Kill Move Paradise is that there’s no justice on this side of the grave. So author James Ijames goes to the other side. He creates a kind…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:00PMMonday, February 17, 2020
APPROXIMATING AN ATROCITY It’s an evil not to be exorcised. As the excellent HBO documentary My Name Is Sandra Bland showed, a tragedy resonates — Bland was found hanged in a prison cell…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:55PMFriday, February 14, 2020
DISCO’S ONCE AND FUTURE DIVA As the song says, “Dim All The Lights” — or set them to scorching splendor. Anyway, the giant mirror ball is back, scintillating and scattering flecks of…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:30PMFriday, February 7, 2020
EMMA PLOTS, THIS TIME IN SONG Nobody knew better than Jane Austen how love could get lost in the social maze of Regency England, where social distinctions quickly become psychological barrie…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:48PMWednesday, February 5, 2020
STILL STEPPING This Irish extravaganza is celebrating its 25th anniversary, a quarter century of Celtic thunder as thousands of feet have pounded countless floorboards. What Stomp offered …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:14PMSunday, February 2, 2020
I DON’T FEEL YOUR PAIN Lately a chronic lack of empathy—sensitivity to the feelings of others–threatens to become a liability as great as any budget deficit. Compassion has never fel…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:55PMSaturday, February 1, 2020
SOPHISTICATED SWING FROM KING ELLINGTON Some shows are just pure pleasure, delivering unpretentious delight with no plot to process or points to proclaim. Much like Ain’t Misbehavin’, …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:53PMThursday, January 23, 2020
A TREE GROWS IN THE ANTILLES In 1990, eight years before he wrote Ragtime, Stephen Flaherty composed an eclectically exotic score for this one-act fairy tale. It’s the forthright story of…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:39PMMonday, January 20, 2020
LONELY HUBRIS “I want it all.” “The sky’s [not] the limit.” “You only live once.” “You can’t take it with you.”: We’re fascinated by all the pride that precedes a fall.…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:00PMSaturday, January 18, 2020
ROCKING THE BOAT When we enter the theater, we see two women in a small fishing boat. It’s surrounded by huge buckets depicting the shallows of an inlet in the Alabama delta. Overhead nett…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:57PMMonday, January 13, 2020
A LIGHTHOUSE SPILLS ITS SECRETS Isolation forces intimacy on its inhabitants, if only by its process of elimination. It can also foster secrets: Scattered souls protect their privacy by keep…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:06PMSaturday, December 21, 2019
DANCING AROUND ADOLESCENCE It happened with You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, that peculiar, often cloying, problem of adult actors playing unfledged kids. There’s an unavoidable condes…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:30PMMonday, December 16, 2019
ASHES TO THEATER It’s the spectacle that keeps on giving: No longer sprawling the width of the Neo Futurarium’s stretched-out stage or concentrated in Theater Wit’s proscenium hall, Th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:29PMWednesday, December 11, 2019
LET THEM SING AND WE’RE HAPPY Given the daylight deprivation that comes with December, music works like light to dispel the darkness. This musical couldn’t be brighter: White Christma…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:01PMTuesday, December 10, 2019
A GOLD RUSH NATIVITY You could call it a second coming of Christmas from our Golden West. Delivered with the grit and gusto of 19th century raconteur Bret Harte, The Christmas Foundling i…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:24AMSunday, December 8, 2019
A MELLOW YULE Back in the day velvet-toned Nat King Cole practically owned Christmas. His TV specials characterized by what his recreator Evan Tyrone Martin calls “bold simplicity.” His …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:39PMSaturday, December 7, 2019
A WELL-MEANING YULE CONFECTION THAT’S A BIT DIFFICULT TO SWALLOW For dogged seekers of sentimentality for whom The Gift of the Magi or It’s A Wonderful Life are insufficient tinsel t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:58PMWednesday, December 4, 2019
ODDBALL OUTCASTS It pays homage to the goofy compassion exhibited by claymation holiday specials, especially the iconic classic where the inhabitants of the Island of Misfit Toys are rescued…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:43PMFriday, November 29, 2019
CHRISTMAS AS A CIRCUS There’s a beloved poem behind these multiple circus acts in one act: Clement Moore was never that fond of his famous 1837 poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas (better kno…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:54PMSunday, November 24, 2019
REAPPRAISING A CASH COW Consider this a kind of conditional mea culpa: In past reviews of Goodman Theatre’s A Christmas Carol, I’ve faulted the production’s trivialization of Charles …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:00PMWednesday, November 20, 2019
THE PLOT THIN-ENS Can lightning strike thrice? Over two decades later, it’s happened again — a third collaboration between author/director Eric Simonson and the world-famous, nine-member…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:40PMMonday, November 18, 2019
DÉJÀ VU MEETS GROUNDHOG DAY “Birth was the death of him”: Terse to the point of cruelty, Samuel Beckett devours the human experience in six words, repeatedly juxtaposing graves with cr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:57PMSaturday, November 16, 2019
CHICAGO OPERA THEATER UPS THE ANTE AND PUSHES THE LIMITS The bad news: Everest and Aleko, Chicago Opera Theater’s engrossing double bill at Millennium Park’s Harris Theatre, closes t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:02PMFriday, November 15, 2019
AN EDWARDIAN WAKE-UP CALL You can’t keep a good play down. Produced under the pseudonym of K.G. Sowerby, the Edwardian drama Rutherford and Son was a huge hit in 1912 — until the playw…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:22PMFriday, November 8, 2019
PICKED, PECKED, AND PACKED Some solo shows can be valued simply for their superb simulations of someone else’s story. Others succeed because we pay extra special attention when the chronic…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:07PMThursday, November 7, 2019
HE’S BACK ON DUTY It’s now become a holiday classic, Mary Zimmerman’s gorgeous The Steadfast Tin Soldier at Lookingglass Theatre. It was glorious last year. It’s lost no luster since…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:10PM 
