Saturday, February 28, 2015
OPT OUT OFÂ A PLOT THAT'S NOT The real "sweeter option" is to miss this altogether. A new work written by company member John Henry Roberts and hyper-directed by Marti Lyons, The Sweeter O…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:53AM[SHARE]Friday, February 27, 2015
FAME BY DAY, A CLOSET AT NIGHT This retrospective 2010 drama by British playwright Dylan Costello is so well meant, you want to forgive it for its good intentions. But–well–don't…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:40PM[SHARE]Tuesday, February 24, 2015
DEFINITIVE DATES ON INDEPENDENCE DAY In this 95-minute one-act called Four, half the "dialogue" seems unspoken but not unfelt. The audience is literally just along for the ride. Christopher …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:59AM[SHARE]Monday, February 23, 2015
A PASSION PLAY FROM PLACID Like a baby on a breast, Lifeline Theatre thrives on adaptations of "coming of age" novels. Like many memory-rich predecessors, Jessica Wright Buha's clear and pre…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:58AM[SHARE]Sunday, February 22, 2015
SHRINK, ENLARGE THYSELF! Christopher Hampton's dramas are marvels of complicated construction, starting in the past and finding us fast. A retelling of the "creation myth" of psychoanalysis,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:25PM[SHARE]DARK DOINGS IN POSTWAR PARIS Now in an appropriately driven local premiere by Chicago Opera Theater, Tobias Picker's two-and-a-half hour opera from 2001 delivers a bleak harvest of shame. Th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:17AM[SHARE]Friday, February 20, 2015
A VICTORIAN TALE FOR TODAY Jackie Robinson was not, it seems, the first black baseball player in the major leagues. Long before 1946, Moses Fleetwood Walker was a catcher for the Toledo Blue…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:03PM[SHARE]Tuesday, February 17, 2015
DOOMSDAY THERAPY The peculiar premise behind Matt Lyle's lifestyle comedy, now running in a moderately intriguing Midwest premiere by The Ruckus, is that for some folks the end of the world …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:32PM[SHARE]Monday, February 16, 2015
ALL KINDS OF ADMISSIONS A peculiarly persuasive puzzle play, Daniel Pearle's resonant A Kid Like Jake strategically omits the title character from the cast of characters. That's very right: …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:08PM[SHARE]Sunday, February 15, 2015
VOGUEING IT AT VERSAILLES The putative appeal of David Adjmi's Marie Antoinette is that everyone likes to watch a train wreck. Now exfoliating in Steppenwolf's upper stage in a dispensable C…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:00PM[SHARE]Saturday, February 14, 2015
BEING ALIVE"AND SONDHEIM Way overdue and instantly invaluable, Porchlight Music Theatre's Sondheim on Sondheim delivers the inside look on Broadway's brightest. Rich with new arrangements fo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:43PM[SHARE]Friday, February 13, 2015
GAGA FOR GANESHA Now in residence at Victory Gardens Theater, the newly minted Rasaka Theatre Company is in hot pursuit of more diversity on Chicago stages. Their mission: to share the tales…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:54PM[SHARE]Thursday, February 12, 2015
VERY FINE FRENZIES Winter can be wonderful in Chicago"well, if you're safe inside the Auditorium Theatre for the ten performances of Unique Voices. The Joffrey Ballet's three-work showcase o…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:56PM[SHARE]Sunday, February 8, 2015
IT'S ALL FOR THE WORST…IN A GOOD WAY With his typical topsy-turvy perversity, Charles Francis Addams might have been happy had the 2009 musical inspired by his sardonic New Yorke…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:59PM[SHARE]Saturday, February 7, 2015
ELEVATING THE SUBWAY There's a very specific springboard for Redlined: A Chicago Lyric, 75 minutes of slam protest poetry: It's the elevated transit line that runs through the Windy City's N…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:54PM[SHARE]Thursday, February 5, 2015
TITS AND ASSHOLES Gay activists who deride this delight forget just how radical the musical was in 1983 (the original film even more so in 1973). A third of a century later, it's still a mer…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:34PM[SHARE]Tuesday, February 3, 2015
WILL OF FOOLS You can't take it with you"but that doesn't mean you go gently into that good night. Dividing the Estate, Raven Theatre's latest offering, is the late Horton (The Trip to Bount…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:49PM[SHARE]Sunday, February 1, 2015
ROUGH STEPS FOR A TEAM OF TEN It was worth the wait. It's been way overdue for Giordano Dance Chicago to finally play the Auditorium Theatre, part of the treasure house's ongoing 125th an…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:43PM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 27, 2015
PASSIONLESS PRONOUNCEMENTS Freud's enduring question persists: "What do women want?" Gina Gionfriddo's aggressively hip drama, now in an equally frenetic staging by Kimberly Senior, offers a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:40PM[SHARE]Monday, January 26, 2015
THE JUICY APPLES' SLICE OF LOVE You can't keep an eloquent family down. TimeLine Theatre Company's concurrent productions of election-night episodes from Richard Nelson's Apple Family Plays …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:41PM[SHARE]ACTION SNAPSHOTS IN AN APPLE HARVEST Commissioned by New York's Public Theatre, the four-part saga Apple Family Plays by the prolific Richard Nelson is a remarkable effort to preserve the pr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:21PM[SHARE]Sunday, January 25, 2015
RELUCTANT HEROISM IN A CHANGING CAUSE Oracle Theatre, Chicago's 44-seat public-access venue where tickets are free, just unleashed another populist piledriver. It's a play with several sourc…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:04PM[SHARE]Saturday, January 24, 2015
NO BOYS IN THIS BAND In only 80 minutes, Grant James Barjas's Accidentally, Like a Martyr assembles the very actual denizens of an obscure, unnamed gay bar on Manhattan's East Side"and ma…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:12PM[SHARE]Friday, January 23, 2015
ONE HAND, ONE HEART"ONE HIT! Sadly, hate conquers all in West Side Story, but the love we see and feel can hold its own. Though over a half-century old, the Bernstein/Laurents/So…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:58PM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 20, 2015
LET THERE BE DARK In endurance sagas such as Lord of the Flies and The Blue Lagoon, stranded youngsters on deserted islands try to reimagine civilization by mimicking adult classics, or else…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:58PM[SHARE]Monday, January 19, 2015
CAUGHT IN TENNESSEE'S WALTZ An opera disguised as a play, Tennessee Williams' 1951 labor of longings The Rose Tattoo is the first and last word on heartbreak. The master made a good choice t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:10PM[SHARE]Sunday, January 18, 2015
SING OUT, ETHEL! What a difference a vowel makes! After his catchy title The Book of Merman, it seems that Leo Schwartz' delightful world premiere musicale practically wrote itself: Yo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:56PM[SHARE]Saturday, January 17, 2015
ONE MIRACLE TOO MANY A very righteous offering from Stage Left Theatre, Penny Penniston's world premiere Keys of the Kingdom is a well-intentioned attempt to build bridges between ideologica…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:30PM[SHARE]Friday, January 16, 2015
HIT AND MISS SEMI-HORROR Calling your 75-minute compilation Scary Stories 2015 puts the premium on terror, a concept or condition that's hard to compete with real life. In the thoughtfully p…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:57PM[SHARE]Wednesday, January 14, 2015
FALSTAFF LITE There's potent psychology operating inside Shakespeare's two-part Henry IV, the twin tales of a false father and a false son. The latter is Prince Hal, the fiery rebel whose…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:04PM[SHARE]Saturday, December 20, 2014
IT DOESN’T GET ANY MERRIER THAN THIS This radiant revival is Light Opera Works' fourth coming of Franz Lehár's masterpiece from an earlier turn of the century. Rudy Hogenmiller's st…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:04PM[SHARE] 
