Today is Sunday, December 22, 2024 Broadway Baby Birthdays: Ralph Fiennes Andrew Lippa
PROMETHEUS SETS THE STAGE AFIRE Imagination sometimes seems abstract. It’s a term you can’t always savor — until you see it blossom before you. It’s in full force in City Lit’…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:56PMYOUR FLIES ARE OPEN The running joke behind this unauthorized musical based on a 1954 novel and a 1963 film is how it hides its homage: To avoid copyright infringement, we never hear “Flie…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:18PMNOT A TENNESSEE WALTZ The strangest thing about Suddenly Last Summer is that the main character is never seen. But, talked about for 90 minutes by two dangerously partisan women, he’s fu…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:22PMA LOT OF BLOOD WILL OUT Blood will have blood. It also sells tickets. And the theater’s thirstiest sanguinary spectacle remains the unspeakable Scottish tragedy. The darkest doings the Bar…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:54PMA ROTTEN KIND OF GUN CONTROL It’s an inhuman term, “collateral damage.” Usually it’s reserved for supposedly dispensable victims, necessary sacrifices for a nobler cause. But…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:25PMA PLAY THAT POOPS ON ITSELF The animal realm (we won’t say kingdom) fairly teems with same-sex survival. In all, over 1,500 species experiment with alternative lifestyles: Sapphic seagull…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:23PMA GLOBAL FLASHPOINT BECOMES A THEATRICAL FLASHFLOOD Until the Flood lasts only 70 minutes. But its concentrated running time delivers a devastating drama. A ton of truth-telling now on tour…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:51PM“KICK ME” CHARACTERS Born to be bad, Nicky Silver is an acerbic gay playwright who has employed his outsider status to skewer the American family (Pterodactyls), relationships (The Food …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:16PMJOFFREY STEPS OUT OF A DREAM, OR DELUSIONS OF A SCANDINAVIAN SOLSTICE First, a necessary clarification for A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The title and the setting could easily confuse lovers…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:34PMREVOLVING FATES — AIN’T IT GRAND? Like the chandelier in Phantom of the Opera or the helicopter in Miss Saigon, a revolving door is the all-purpose metaphor for Berlin’s pre…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:01PMCHRISTMAS CAN BE CRUEL More than most, life’s victims need their storytellers. William Inge (1913-1973) wrote his characters from the inside out — theirs and his. A heart surgeon wit…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:16PMDOUBLE VISION, OR LOST IN THE LAFFS Can a forced farce make a theater audience howl with laughter, never realizing until the very end that the joke is on them? That’s almost a rhetorical …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:07PMMY FAIR SIGNORA, OR DONIZETTI, SOUP TO NUTS He didn’t just write Lucia di Lammermoor, Don Pasquale, L’Elisir d’Amore, Poliuto, The Daughter of the Regiment, Maria Stuarda, Robert Deve…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:11PMA CON IS NEVER “EX” The nickname Lettie comes from the Greek term “Letitia” or “joy.” That’s one of many bleak ironies that stalk the anti-heroine of Boo Killebrew’s surv…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:06PMSCATTERSHOT SATIRE AIMS AT MOVING TARGETS It’s easy to think that humor is subjective — until an entire audience’s spontaneous guffaw undermines any such abstraction. Often enough,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:18PMSWEET BIRD OF TRUTH The Gentleman Caller was the original name for a breakthrough “memory play” that, opening at Chicago’s Civic Theatre in late 1944, made Tom “Tennessee” William…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:56PMPRETTY UNLIKELY WOMAN When worlds collide: A celluloid fantasy about an L.A. call girl suddenly thrust into affluence, the much-loved 1990 film Pretty Woman starred a suave, salt-and-peppe…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:31PMA VICTIM’S IMPACT STATEMENT Critics always worry about giving away too much — in spoilers and such. And, yes, at first that fear seemed real with hang by U.K. playwright debbie tuc…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:26AMCERRUDO’S SPRING FLING It’s now dance history but, performed last weekend at the Auditorium Theatre, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s annual Spring Series, An Evening of Alejandro Cerrud…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:37PMDANCE DELIRIUM As jukebox musicals go, On Your Feet! really earns its exclamation point. No question, the music alone, which won 26 Grammy Awards, would justify this 2015 tribute to the fl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:50AMCAGE-MATCH COMBAT: IBSEN VS. TRUMP Right now, the biggest prize fight in Chicago is at Randolph and Dearborn. More polemically urgent than psychologically penetrating, a new treatment of Hen…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:05PMDIFFICULT TO PICTURE The Picture of Dorian Gray is its author’s self-portrait — perversely paradoxical, sardonically aesthetic, and (necessarily) obsessed with concealment. First pu…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:55PMWHO NOSE BEST? Edmond Rostand’s timeless love story celebrates the one-sided love between the famous 17th-century swordsman and poet — disfigured with a humongous schnoz — and …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:57PMUNLOCKING WHAT WAS NEVER HIDDEN At least Time Is On Our Side is more sex-affirmative and upbeat than Significant Other, About Face Theatre’s last offering. A Midwest premiere devotedly …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:21PMRIDICULOUS REVENGE It’s so well-intentioned that the results are doubly deplorable. Lookingglass Theatre Company’s Plantation!, a world premiere by ensemble member Kevin Douglas stag…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:55PMLITERAL LEAPS INTO THE FUTURE It’s all over — but this review of record is as much a promissory note as a remembrance. Worth noting as much as seeing, Winning Works, the Joffrey Bal…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:47AMA ROYAL CATFIGHT GETS A ROYAL PRODUCTION Coulda, woulda, shoulda: It’s the greatest confrontation between rival monarchs that never happened — the 1586 face-off between the “Virgin…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:06PMJOHNNY BE BAD: A CHUCK ROAST Once more it’s homage time on Clark Street. The latest musical reclamation from Black Ensemble Theater, L. Maceo Ferris’s Hail, Hail Chuck: A Tribute to Chu…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:40PMMESSING UP MURDER The cops may be blue, the victims black, but in Six Corners the predominant color is gray. Marinating in moral relativism, this independent installment in Chicago playwri…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:17PMAN EVERGREEN PARABLE OF RESISTANCE It’s a two-act tonic, this Madwoman of Chaillot. Life, Jean Giraudoux knew, is never safe from our constant “fever of destruction.” When decency get…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:50PMIN CYBER SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM On the Internet or just IRL, there’s joy in striking back — turning the tables and trolling the bullies. But what’s rotten one way is no b…
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