Monday, November 9, 2015
WHEN LIFE IMITATES OPERA Life imitates opera: Concluding Eclipse Theatre Company’s season-long retrospective of oeuvres by Terrence McNally (Lips Together, Teeth Apart and A Perfect Gane…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:05PMFriday, November 6, 2015
A HALF CENTURY OF HOOFING After 50 years of high-impact dancing, it’s worth taking a five-city victory lap. Twyla Tharp’s troupe, featured at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre this weekend,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:30PMMonday, November 2, 2015
A ROM-COM TO RELISH AND REGRET Taking a chance at love–that’s the germ and gist of Neil Simon’s mating comedy. Chapter Two remains a quasi-autobiographical depiction of the natio…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:44PMSaturday, October 31, 2015
FUTURE SHOCK FROM A PAST PRANK In less than 90 minutes this new one-act by Meridith Friedman plays hard: By show’s end we get an absorbing case history in situational ethics. Cautionary sc…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:21PMSunday, October 25, 2015
A VERY SELECTIVE SILENCE “Let hands do what lips do.” Shakespeare never meant the line so literally as it feels in R+J: The Vineyard. Red Theater Chicago delivers a bold resetting, movin…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:49PMFriday, October 23, 2015
TEA AND SYMPATHY–AND TRANSGENDERED KIDS It makes an irresistible transformation tale: Teachers shape students, then get golden too as a Midas touch reverses course. We love it in To S…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:54PMSunday, October 18, 2015
SAILING OF AGE Prepare to buckle your swashes, shiver your timbers and avoid Davey Jones’ locker. In a co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre Company sets sail…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:46PMFriday, October 16, 2015
A SYMPHONY OF QUIRKS An Evening of Work by William Forsythe is a dull title for a frenetic program. This is kinetic dance, its percussive paces almost too fast for feeling. Three years in t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:04PMThursday, October 15, 2015
FROM MYTHS TO MOVEMENTS A kind of Mulan among major works of 19th-century ballet (it celebrates a young nymph’s coming of age), Leo Delibes’ Sylvia is not as famous as his simpler, m…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:13PMKILLING COUSINS Serial killers can be fun. In the film Theatre of Blood Vincent Price sardonically played a Shakespearean actor, a hate-filled ham who doggedly “offs” the critics who pan…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:53AMOSCAR’S JUKEBOX It’s a title to win a crowd on the spot: The revue Hollywood’s Greatest Song Hits just requires the right arrangements for a cabaret showcase of four solid talents. Add…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:52AMCAPTURES EVERYTHING BUT THE COMEDY Two big ironies attach to the new show at the Broadway Playhouse in Water Tower Place. First, it’s called Unspeakable but it’s not afraid to say anythi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:52AMI’M FEELING UNLUCKY The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence is Theatre Wit’s latest local premiere by Madeleine George, author of Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, a 2014…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:52AMTHE OLD TESTAMENT MEETS THE NEW WORLD A saga of American origins, John Steinbeck’s most ambitious novel was published in 1952 and, three years later, starred James Dean and Julie Harris in…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:52AMBREAD AND BOXING Raw as realism requires, good plays about boxing are more than just Rocky slugfests. Like Clifford Odets’ seminal Golden Boy, they transform an atavistic popular distracti…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:52AMI DID IT FOR THE DAUGHTERS Does evil alter when it switches sexes? Right now the Storefront Theatre is hosting No Beast So Fierce, adaptor/director Max Traux’s gender-bending exploration …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:52AMMonday, September 28, 2015
DRAMATIC PROFILING In the three years since American Theater Company debuted this corrosive cultural tragicomedy on the North Side, Disgraced has become a massive hit, with revivals on Broad…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:59PMA TRAGICOMEDY WITH TRICKS Well, why not do The Tempest as a magic show? It comes with Shakespeare’s territory. During the Duke of Milan’s unhappy exile, deposed by his nefarious brother,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:59PMTHEY DO IT ALL FOR US 14 years ago, terror became a date in the calendar. “9/11” casts an ever darker shadow onto the future. It also remains the latest official loss of American innocen…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:59PMYOKED ASUNDER Don’t believe the ironic title of a first-act song: Daisy and Violet Hilton were not your “Typical Girls Next Door.” Conjoined (or “Siamese” twins), they were, grotes…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:53PMCOMING CHOREOGRAPHY Opening its 60th season, the Joffrey Ballet literally leaps into the future with Millennials, a three-part program at the Auditorium Theatre. Closing Sunday, it features …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:53PMBOYS WILL BE PIGS The title can mislead: Dogfight is not about World War I flying aces Eddie Rickenbacker and The Red Baron doing loop-the-loops as they shoot each other out of the sky. Dogf…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:53PMThursday, September 10, 2015
WHEN GETTING THERE ISN’T HALF THE FUN Call it a combination of Locked Up Abroad and Coming to America. In 90 gorgeously pictured minutes, “multi-racial” performer Debra Erhardt thrilli…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:23PMTuesday, September 8, 2015
DELIVERANCE FROM DROUGHT It’s a terrific recipe for powerful theater. Confront audiences with an unfinished situation amid a collective challenge–with seemingly no way out. Then intr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:43AMFriday, September 4, 2015
A POOR MAN’S PETER PAN Let’s put two prequels in perspective: What the novel-based Wicked is to The Wizard of Oz, Peter and the Starcatcher, a novel-derived “origins tale,” is for Si…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:49PMBEYOND THE PALE Bad Jews (the provocative title not as anti-Semitic as it sounds) was a 2015 hit at London’s St. James and New York’s Roundabout theaters. In the Chicago area Jeremy Wech…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:38AMMonday, August 31, 2015
PLOYS IN THE ATTIC It’s noble to sacrifice for loved ones who need you. But what if it was for nothing? Arthur Miller’s 1968 family play The Price puts its title to rich use. Ostensibly,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:04PMFriday, August 28, 2015
DIXIE DOODLES IN DISTRESS Beth Henley, author of 1979’s Pulitzer-winning Crimes of the Heart, has practically patented the Southern stereotype. Drawling in a stilted patois, Henley’s des…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:16PMThursday, August 27, 2015
FROM THE MINES TO THE MOON A feel-good story of literal uplift, the new musical October Sky, like the 1999 film, is an anagram of Rocket Boys, the true-life confessional of Homer H. Hickam, …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:16PMSaturday, August 22, 2015
WAKING UP FROM THE AMERICAN DREAM The title of Oracle Theatre’s typically invigorating offering, THIS HOUSE BELIEVES THE AMERICAN DREAM IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO, is actually…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:51PMMonday, August 17, 2015
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND Whenever it’s revived, it’s hard to imagine a more necessary musical than this 1949 Pulitzer Prize winner. Seventy years after the Japanese surrender, it remains a he…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:36PM 
