FALLING 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…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:04PMLOOKING BEFORE THEY LEAP It’s a night of dance discoveries. Four Chicago-based choreographers create a splendid showcase in danc(e)volve, two world premieres and two nearly new offerings a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:51PMCHOOSING BETWEEN FAMILY AND FUTURE In xenophobic times wracked by exclusionary panics, any immigrant’s odyssey speaks for millions of refugees, within as much as outside the U.S.. Truth-ba…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:02PMBLOOD ON THE NOTES Jazz doesn’t just soothe—it can bleed. Both acts happen throughout these 150 minutes, never more so than at the end. Paradise Blue brings the lyricism of Tennessee Wil…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:46PMLACERATING LA-LA LAND It’s a crash course in one man’s life-long damage control: Up close, personal, and, therapeutically playful, Dylan Brody’s Driving Hollywood is a liberal-minded C…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:28PMLITTLE SHOP OF HAPPINESS Who can’t love She Loves Me? This utterly unpretentious, easily adored chamber musical delivers the first word in entertainment and the last word in love. Complete…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:33PMPUNCTURING PREVARICATIONS We’ve seen a lot of lying lately—enough to make Pierre Corneille’s 1644 comedy The Liar cruelly contemporary. An uncharacteristic farce from a famously tragic…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:35PMTHINK GLOBALLY, DANCE LOCALLY Leaps of faith meet jumps for joy. Closing its 2016-2017 season with a bold new offering by Alexander Ekman, Global Visionaries is a salute to the future and th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:48PMBEFORE ANY GLASS MENAGERIE, A PRISON SWEATBOX It’s not the “odor of mendacity” that wafts through this Tennessee Williams play—it’s more like the whiff of tear gas. The “kindness…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:49PMDISCO DESPAIR Now festering at Chicago’s A Red Orchid Theatre, 3C, David Adjmi’s 90-minute one-act, is perversely perky, as zany as a zombie. With rapid-fire non-sequiturs and six crazy/…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:13PMHAPPY HOAX OR LITERARY LARCENY? Can we really separate a creator from his art? Can our sense of Shakespeare feel more real to us than his characters do? These aren’t rhetorical questions: …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:32PMHIVE AGAINST HIVE Bees, it seems, are humming their last. In the future,honey could well be synthetic. Appropriately debuting on Earth Day weekend, this world premiere from Chicago’s Victo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:58PMA WHOLE NEW WORLD FROM BROADWAY: A MUSICAL THAT TRULY SOARS “Open sesame” indeed! It’s “Abracadabra” times ten as the arrival of Aladdin in Chi-town feels as triumphant as Prin…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:21PMSONDHEIM’S CARE PACKAGE FOR LOST LOVERS In a melodically and lyrically mediocre time like, for instance, 2017, even lesser songs by Stephen Sondheim beat half the musicals at large. In 198…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:30PM“IT’S A FREE COUNTRY!” It’s one of the seven wonders of the American theater: Few sights on stage are as magical as watching Billie Dawn wise up. This dumb-as-a-rock good-time girl s…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:40PMAN IDENTITY QUEST COMES UP EMPTY As the cops say, “Nothing to see here, folks. Move right along.” Or, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there is no “there there.” Both cautions appl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:57PMDEATH BY ANECDOTE A playwright dredges up her past at her peril. As with Goodman Theatre’s current confusion King of the Yees, Sarah Ruhl’s For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday is a very…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:50PMFINDING FOCUS Linda Vista is billed as “an adult comedy about immature behavior.” Surprisingly tender, Tracy Letts’ Steppenwolf stunner examines one man’s mid-life crisis from all si…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:57PMA SPADEFUL OF SUGAR As the supplicating ballad puts it, “Let’s hope she will stay.” Not just the quintessentially “practically perfect” nanny, Mary Poppins is a kind of cosmic cure…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:16PM260 HOOVES AND 96 FEET Pegasus would be proud: The vast White Big Top commanding the south parking lot of Chicago’s Soldier Field barely hints at the $30 million “theatrical adventure”…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:37PMTOIL AND TROUBLE There are no miniaturized marvels, no surprises sprung from trap doors, no white rabbits from a hat. Beyond Caring bears none of Lookingglass Theatre Company’s vintage mak…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:55PMSGT. PEPPER’S AT 50; LET IT RAIN For baby boomers wanting to share their childhood with their kids, for all the true-blue or late-blooming fans of the Fab Four whose great regret is that t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:50PMMORE THAN LAVENDER, BEYOND A RAINBOW Finding another noble excuse to make music, for its fourth concert this season Chicago Sinfonietta offered a sweet salute to a worthy cause. Performed to…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:56PMA SEASON OF SOAPS IN ONE SHOW An exhilarating, over-the-top, floridly artificial romp, Destiny of Desire is as wonderfully hokey as its title. A Chicago premiere, Goodman Theatre’s co-prod…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:34PMDRAMATIZING WHAT CANNOT BE KNOWN Aerobic exercises for the cerebral cortex, Tom Stoppard’s daunting dramas (The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Invention of Love) go for the gray matter. In perpe…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:07PMIF ONLY SINCERITY MEANT SUCCESS You really want this play to work. It means so well and maybe so much. But it’s hard to find a worthy resolution in a play about repeated, nation-wide viola…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:44PMIN SEARCH OF A STORY Loved ones seen in stasis are probably truer to most families. No clans are ever collectively happy or purposeful, only the members and not, of course, all the time. But…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:15PMABBONDANZA! What a gem of a jewel is this rarely done masterwork! It’s what Candide was to Leonard Bernstein or Porgy and Bess to George Gershwin, a folk opera to rise above mere musicals.…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:10PMCANNED SPAM-ILTON For little more than an hour, Spamilton, an attention-deficit musical travesty, never lets up until we’re let out. Exploding with relentless volleys of unfriendly fire, i…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:59PMPLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MORE INCHES “I’m the new Berlin Wall. Try to tear me down!” That defiant dare marks the flaming arrival of Hedwig Schmidt, survivor-heroine of John Cameron Mit…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:37PMTHE SOUR SMELL OF SUCCESS Never confuse fear with respect. During the Cold War, when the Russians were less deniably our enemies, op-ed tyro Joe Alsop rivaled gossip czar Walter Winchell in …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:17PM
