Tuesday, July 9, 2019
MAN, OH MUSIC MAN If ever a show spelled out summer, it’s Meredith Willson’s 1957 masterpiece The Music Man. Throughout the rollicking story, the title character exudes sunny optimism,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:53PMMonday, July 8, 2019
TEMPEST BELONGS OUTDOORS The words can get windblown or contend with sirens and such. But, just as food tastes different (better?) when eaten outdoors, so does the Bard. Embracing all, Shake…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:53PMSunday, July 7, 2019
GO-GO SEE THIS SHOW-SHOW It’s a marriage made in musical heaven: A ton of fun erupts from combining seemingly antithetical elements — a 16th-century fairy-tale/poem cycle by Sir Phillip …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:46PMWednesday, June 26, 2019
AN APP-ETITE FOR AMOUR Sooner or later you knew an Internet application would get its own show, especially when it plays Dan Cupid, hooking up randy seekers of one-night stands or permanent …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:41PMTuesday, June 18, 2019
THE WINNER BY AN INCH It’s a perverse Pride Month offering that cocks a snoot at authority and respectability: “I’m the new Berlin Wall — try to tear me down!” That defiant dare ma…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:51PMSunday, June 16, 2019
A LITERAL STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Only 65 minutes long, British playwright Jez Butterworth’s spell-casting The River manages, as few plays have, to simulate a dream on stage. Heraclitus …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:47PMSaturday, June 15, 2019
THESE CASCADING CRISES ARE NOT SOON FORGOTTEN Sometimes, given the right writing, a seemingly small struggle can defy and define supposedly close kinfolk — and even stamp a society: The fu…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:13PMThursday, June 6, 2019
THE ULTIMATE DRAG RACE It’s both louder than life and strident with substance. The perfect play for Pride Month and a deafening blast from the past, Ms. Blakk for President, an uproarious…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:38PMWednesday, June 5, 2019
POINTLESS PERPLEXITY Sometimes what you see is much less than what you get. Case in point: Pride Films and Plays is closing its season with a daunting new work written by Ryan Oliveira and d…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:32PMThursday, May 30, 2019
WHAT MORE CAN THEY SING? By its riveting end Falsettos, a fusion of March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990), has jolted us with its heartbreak and won us with its wit. This …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:47PMSunday, May 26, 2019
SIX CHICKS REMIX TO NIX PRICKS Singing well is the best revenge, especially if you married the spouse from hell. So runs the cunning concept behind Six. This raucous pop concert joyously re…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:26PMFriday, May 24, 2019
SINGING UP STORMY STUFF With this theater everything good is new again — and never old. The latest homage from Black Ensemble Theater, Style and Grace: In Tribute to Lena Horne and Nancy W…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:35PMThursday, May 23, 2019
THE MONSTER WITHIN It was a dark and stormy night. Escaping a tempest by seeking shelter in the Villa Diodati on a summer night in 1814, good friends Mary Shelley (as she would later be call…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:42PMTuesday, May 21, 2019
DÉJÀ VU VS. NEVERMORE A very prolific playwright, Steven Dietz can deliver dense dramatic homage. In his 2013 Mad Beat Hip & Gone, now playing at The Edge Theater Off Broadway, his di…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:28PMRETHINKING REPRODUCTION A very pointed question arrives near the end of Rebecca Gilman’s useful 2007 drama The Crowd You’re in With, first produced in Chicago ten years ago by Goodman …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:06AMWednesday, May 15, 2019
A FRACTURED FAIRY TALE Shakespeare’s strange romance, which begins with gratuitous jealousy and ends with gratuitous forgiveness, is best savored as a fairy tale for grownups: A virtuous q…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:54PMTAKE TO THE ROAD Walt Whitman may have patented the “song of the open road,” but the Beat Generation gave it their own course correction and made it into a map. These writers of the Eise…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:54PMKEEPING ROCK REAL Letting a good thing go is a hard fate: Change is always constant but it’s never guaranteed to be good. A tough transition in Chicago’s indie rock scene is feelingly ch…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:36PMANOTHER DREAM DEFERRED The price of progress is no abstraction, not during the fully-freighted 160 minutes of Jiréh Breon Holder’s civil rights drama Too Heavy for Your Pocket. A TimeLine…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:36PMWednesday, May 1, 2019
THE PARENTS CRUSADE The setting is the story in The Children, Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Chicago premiere. Set designer Chelsea M. Warren depicts a cluttered seaside cottage off th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:03PMSaturday, April 27, 2019
THE PARALYZED PRINCE Century after century, thespian tyro after marquee headliner, something remains rotten in the state of Denmark. A defining challenge for thousands of careers, Hamlet pe…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:14PMFriday, April 26, 2019
THE WHALE WINS There’s only one more performance — on Sunday at 3 at the Harris Theatre — of Chicago Opera Theater’s awesomely ambitious Moby-Dick, a nearly-three-hour 2010 epic with…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:11PMThursday, April 25, 2019
BRITAIN’S BALLET FINDS CHICAGO Springing into the season, the Joffrey Ballet’s current visit to the Auditorium Theatre delivers very welcome art — two world premieres and a Chicago fir…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:34PMWednesday, April 24, 2019
TWIN TRAVESTIES (OF JUSTICE) ARE DOUBLE THE FUN Order in the court! Closing its season with dueling gavels, City Lit Theater offers Two Days in Court in only 90 minutes. Merrily combining G…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:17PMMonday, April 15, 2019
CAN LOVE ENABLE EVIL? There is no last supper or cross on Golgotha but, yes, Hannah and Martin is a true passion play. What makes this even stranger is that it’s as much about clashing i…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:30PMSunday, April 14, 2019
GOTTA DANCE! Now 44 years old, which means that a third generation of hoofers is now recreating it, A Chorus Line remains the late Michael Bennett’s breakthrough backstage musical, winner…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:00PMSaturday, April 13, 2019
HATE VS. MUSIC It’s impossible to grasp a monster evil like genocide as a whole, to weigh it as so many calculable, tangible acts of human failure that yield a vast vileness and a terrible…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:30PMWednesday, April 3, 2019
THE BOYFRIENDS ARE BACK Back by popular demand but for only one week at the Auditorium Theatre, the mega-jukebox musical Jersey Boys continues to stir up a perfect storm of industrial-stre…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:00PMTuesday, April 2, 2019
AFFIRMATIVE RE-ACTION Don’t let the title fool you. Produced last year at Lincoln Center Theater, Admissions arrived too early to address the recent scandal involving illegal offenses in c…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:30PMMonday, April 1, 2019
DOES LOVE NEED A LEASH? “The heart wants what the heart wants.” Emily Dickinson’s seemingly simple saying (akin to Gertrude Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose”) in fact packs a …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:33PMThursday, March 28, 2019
TODAY’S LOST BOYS Theater takes us places and shows us stuff that we might never freely choose to go or see. Exhibits A-Z areYen, a 2013 visit to Gorki’s “lower depths” by British pl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:08AM 
