IN THE HEAT OF THE STORY “They call me Mister Tibbs.” That’s the signature catchphrase from the celebrated 1967 film starring Sidney Poitier the first African-American male Oscar winn…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:16AMNEVER SAY “NEVER AGAIN” Survivor guilt is supposedly small-scale suffering, compared to the agonies of those who never get the luxury of remorse. It’s a tricky feat to accommodate near…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:39PMA DOO-WOP DREAM He’s going strong for a guy who died 400 years ago today. This, of course, is easily William Shakespeare’s most popular comedy, if only because it delivers some magical g…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:37PMPRODUCES MORE LAUGHS PER MINUTE THAN ANY OTHER MUSICAL It’s always springtime for Mel Brooks, who really does write musicals the way they used to. Even before Young Frankenstein, his 2001…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:19PMAND EVITA KEEPS ROLLING IN That great balcony scene is back. No, not R&J. It’s the one with Eva Duarte Perón’s valedictory aria “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina.” As this pri…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:54PMAS FUNNY AS A PUNCH ON THE JAW Call it a comic “war of the worlds.” It’s the tabloid-trashy tale of a Broadway show that is literally “under the gun.” As the title suggests, Woody …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:29PMDON’T WALK ON BY THIS SHOW “You won’t get a career from singing: Singing will give you a career.” That was all the encouragement that Dionne Warwick needed to make it big over 54…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:35PMAND I AM TELLING YOU — YOU ARE GOING I never saw the two touring revivals of the Tony-honored Dreamgirls that played Chicago’s old Shubert Theatre. But, like Marriott Theatre’s riv…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:33PMA GREEN-EYED RAP ROMP ADDS MOOR TO THE MIX Before Othello: The Remix it was only Shakespeare’s comedies that received the Q brothers’ trademark, rap-happy revision—Funk It Up About N…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:38PMA STUDY IN SPITE BECOMES A PUERILE HISSY FIT The joke’s on us in Thomas Bradshaw’s 75-minute Carlyle. Goodman Theatre’s premiere is agit-prop theater, a trifle that contains more guts…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:42PMCAN A CLONE HAVE AN IDENTITY CRISIS? We share 99% of our genetic material with every other human, 90% with each chimpanzee, and 30% with any bunch of lettuce. (Talk about “six degrees of s…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:40PMPUZZLE PIECES OF A PERSON Snapshots from a family album, jump cuts from a movie, scattered entries from a constant journal—it’s hard to get a fix on Mary Page Marlowe, a very different o…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:06PMDON’T ASK, DON’T TELL, DON’T GO Lucas Hnath, a disconcertingly popular scribe, writes playful, pseudo-historical, and narrative-heavy dramas crammed with deliberately stilt…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:21PMTWENTY YEARS OF HARD-HEELED HOOFING What Stomp delivered through percussive street-dancing, Forever Tango gave to Argentina’s national cooch dance, and A Chorus Line and 42nd Street d…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:32PMNOT IN MY DOWNTOWN Mosque Alert, an explosive world premiere, is seen—and felt—from all sides. Jamil Khoury’s culture-clashing creation depicts a suburban showdown, a battle over wheth…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:42PMDISRUPTION 1633 It’s intriguing but frustrating that Bertolt Brecht refuses to dramatize the most potentially powerful moment in The Life of Galileo. (It’s like presenting Romeo and Juli…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:59PMMIND OVER MUSIC Imagine Annie with psychokinetic powers, Nancy Drew as a mind-reader, or Cinderella acting as her own fairy godmother. Self-empowerment of the Mulan persuasion fuels this upb…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:26PMBEATEN UP FOR COMING OUT Awesomely authentic, Chelsea M. Warren’s setting for after all the terrible things I do isn’t just a character in itself—it’s a cast. This designer has perfe…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:46PMBOYS WILL BE PIGS Stop the presses for a late-breaking alert: Men can be crude, drunk, womanizing wretches. This astonishing revelation fuels the bottom-feeding 75 minutes of Caroline M. McG…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:46PMMISS MATCH MISMATCH Though it’s usually the other way around, sometimes musicals actually improve on the sources that inspire them. Arguably, West Side Story is stronger stuff than Romeo a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:18PMTHE WIZARD OF NOTES For half a century Harold Arlen did to notes what Monet made with colors: He found ways to make them make us very happy, equally sad, and never bored. A warm new offering…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:33PMBETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE Grim gray barracks, fortress walls topped with razor wire, smart salutes from sentry towers, cut-away trailers deployed as offices and housing, fluorescent ligh…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:36PMTHE PRICE OF POPULARITY Westerberg High is pretty low. This Reagan-era preparatory school in Sherwood, Ohio is a cesspool of snobbish belittlement. The Buckeye hellhole includes a witches’…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:36PMSHAW FRACTURES A FAMILY In 1896 George Bernard Shaw wrote You Never Can Tell (the title suggests a plot packed with surprise), his answer to the recently successful The Importance of Being E…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:36PMNEW ON NEW The debut of a quartet of new dance pieces was not without some unanticipated excitement. A patron managed to sneak two non-service dogs into the Museum of Contemporary Art’s th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:12PMA TOO-CASUAL CRUELTY Macbeth, Claudius, Goneril, and Iago were monsters–horrible but not actual. Richard III, however, is Shakespeare’s vilest historical villain. In his short, ugly …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:10PMTHE LAND OF 10,000 TAPS Call us saps or suckers but we can’t, it seems, get enough of “The Understudy Who Becomes A Star.” Not when the sweet and satisfying story is stuffed with t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:10PMLORCA’S RUNAWAY BRIDE Elemental, darkly poetic, driven by death, Federico Garcia Lorca’s domestic tragedy Blood Wedding is the 1932 installment of his peasant-primitive “Rural Trilogy.…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:10PMTAKE-OUT THEATER “This is not how I thought my future would be.” Bittersweet, broken-spirited, resigned to mediocrity, that lament fits all the characters in David Jacobi’s inexplicabl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:10PMTHIS LOSS IS OUR GAIN William Inge knew the human heart better than a surgeon. In Bus Stop, Picnic, Come Back, Little Sheba, and Dark at the Top of the Stairs, this closeted author exposes o…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:42PMMEETING IN MUSIC In the basement of the Chicago Temple, playwright/actor/musician Ronnie Malley displays his electric affinity for and considerable fluency in a dozen musical tongues. In 75 …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:20PM
