Today is Sunday, December 22, 2024 Opening: All In: Comedy About Love Broadway Baby Birthdays: Ralph Fiennes Andrew Lippa
SYMPATHY FOR SCUMBAGS How can two white-trash lovers—“small town nobodies,” as the press release puts it—“search for meaning at the height of the Great Depression”? Patro…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:31PMA PRETTY WOMAN GETS AN INDECENT PROPOSAL— AND IT’S A MUSICAL! Some marriages get tested before they tie the knot. That’s trenchantly the case with naïve fiancés Jack Singer and Bet…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:04PMUNDERCOOKED AND INNUTRITIOUS Yes, disruption continues to roil the stage in 2017. Old-fashioned make-believe dwindles into its opposite: dis-illusionment. The latest test case: Robert O’Ha…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:10PMTUESDAYS WITH ELIZABETH IN A NOT SO PRIVATE PALACE Peter Morgan is the proverbial fly on the wall: Commanding the realm of royal fiction and other historical speculation, this British writer…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:41AMTOO MANY SAILS AND NO RUDDER How have the mighty fallen! It’s hard to believe that, 17 years after The Weir fascinated Steppenwolf Theatre audiences, not to mention all-absorbing Chicago…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:51PMTOUGH LOVE GONE HAYWIRE Some people—hey, that could be a song title!—say Gypsy is the greatest Broadway musical ever written. And, calibrators of showbiz greatness, these folks may we…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:39PMLOVE AS A VERY MOVEABLE FEAST Love may be blind but it can certainly sing up a storm. Not to be confused with the John Cusack film about a Chicago vinyl record shop, High Fidelity: An Opera…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:28PMMURDER—A REFUSAL TO SUBMIT? You could call Machinal a nightmare under stage lights. Still potent after nearly ninety years, Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 drama can’t be dismissed as a …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:44PMSCHADENFREUDE GETS ITS SHOW We learn from fear, even if it’s the wrong lessons. Well before Mark Twain’s “Slovenly Peter,” let alone Edward Gorey, Roald Dahl or Tim Burton, there was…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:49AMWHEN LOVE SEEMED ALL A half century can wreak a ton of change, especially when it takes us from 1967’s Summer of Love to 2017’s Winter of Trump. It’s impossible to imagine two more dif…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:48PMDRIVEN DANCES FOR JOY AND JUSTICE Their “dance card” is filled to bursting. Departing from Black Ensemble Theater’s usual blast-from-the-past musical reclamations (Nicholas Brothers, J…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:27PMPARIS AS A PAS DE DEUX The opening image—a baby grand piano under the Arc de Triomphe—suggests the rest. The hopeful harbinger of a new normality, the beloved 1951 film An American in P…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:32PMMEMORIES OF MEXICO, LUZIA UNLEASHES A RAIN OF JOY The Cirque du Soleil just made a run for the border—and not the Canadian one. Ignoring the United States (a favorite activity of many now…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:22AMBLUES WITHOUT NOTES It takes a play to raise a village. Here it’s East Harlem, a killing field with 8 homeless shelters, 36 drug and alcohol treatment centers, and 37 mental health treatme…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:13PMSOMETHING SILLY; NOT QUITE ROTTEN BUT HARDLY FRESH What is it about William Shakespeare that inspires lesser authors (namely, everyone else) to try to take him down? George Bernard Shaw spen…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:14PMDOMESTIC DISRUPTION From the start, a classic curtained proscenium conceals the utter disorder that detonates on Steppenwolf Theatre’s sprawling mainstage. Hir, now in a Chicago premiere,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:59PMBIGOTRY AT THE BURLESQUE Some swan songs will never sound sweet. Take the fade-out of female impersonators in Elizabethan drama. Or the final white thespian to wear blackface. Or—well, wit…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:48PMHAPPY DAY’S JOURNEY INTO LOVE It’s a dramatic “one-off”: The same Connecticut domicile supplies the site of two enormously different plays by the same author. If Eugene O’Neill ima…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:53PMA KURT WEILL COMEBACK Here’s another triumph worth the wait. Recently revived, City Lit’s London Assurance took 120 years to return—hilariously—to a Chicago stage. Even more inexplic…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:34PMREST ASSURED: THE LIES LOVE LIVES ON You can’t keep a good comedy down. Wildly popular in its time, Dion Boucicault’s 1841 London Assurance is a mating romp that, inexplicably, has not b…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:21PMIT GETS WORSE TOO Teenage suicide due to cyberbullying deserves its storytelling: In just 70 minutes, Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill’s Late Company seems to cover the bases in …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:57PMSONGS FROM THE BOTTOM OF A BOTTLE Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre really loves the sad songs of Jacques Brel. First came A Jacques Brel Revue: Songs of War and Love in 2005. Three years later th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:18PMTHE WHITE WHALE RETURNS! You can’t keep a good cetacean down. Buoyed by the success of their 2015 inaugural production and national tour, Lookingglass Theatre Company (in association with …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:20PMTHE STAR WHO WAS A CONSTELLATION “Stardust” was the name for what made Bette Davis shine. With playwright Jessica Sherr’s solo recreation of more than big eyes and flouncing cigarette…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:32PMPROVOCATION PLUS DISRUPTION— 2017 GETS ITS PLAY! Ever since artistic director Anna Shapiro took over Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the Chicago mecca hasn’t been afraid to upset an audienc…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:58PMIS IT OK FOR PC TO FIGHT BS IN D.C. at the V.G.? (NOT WHEN IT’S TV…) There’s a cable series on the Investigation Discovery channel called Fear Thy Neighbor: It recreates real-life tr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:14PMDANCE BEGINS AT 40 For Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, it’s time to take stock. This 100-minute evening does it all and well. It’s as much a showcase for seven seminal choreographers (Lou …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:07PMA CLASSIC GOES GLOBAL It’s a marriage made in theater heaven: With a newly great Great Expectations, two very different Chicago theaters find common ground. The result is a cross-cultural …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:52PMNO TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL A broken, cash-challenged clan go on a road trip to California that somehow heals their hurt. It’s not the Joads, colorful Okies in a Ford pick-up, fleeing the dust st…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:19PMC’EST SI BON! She was infamous for her 1927 “costume” in Un Vent de Folie—a girdle of bananas. In 1934 she became the first African American woman to have a major role in a film. Acq…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:09PMFALLING WHILE RUNNING RISKS Domesticity and danger, it seems, don’t mix. The private and the public, small-scale versus big-issue matters, mingle uneasily in Time Stands Still, now in a p…
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