Saturday, April 26, 2014
PREHISTORIC PERSPECTIVE ON THE PRESENT Extended until mid-May, Theater Wit’s Midwest debut of Madeleine George’s sharp new show has clearly touched hearts and nerves. It’s no secret: F…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:39PMThursday, April 24, 2014
MATCHMAKERS GET BURNED In the social maze of Regency England, where any successful matrimony required sexual politics and emotional intrigue, novelist Jane Austen understood how love gets lo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:44PMSaturday, April 19, 2014
RECRUITING FOR THE 1% Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár is much better known for the spindrift, gossamer pleasures of his Liliom (which inspired Carousel) and The Good Fairy (which gave u…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:55PMTuesday, April 15, 2014
A WILD(E) ADAPTATION A spectacle that swirls and thrills, The House Theatre of Chicago’s Dorian has updated Oscar Wilde’s classic cautionary tale from Victorian music halls to today’s …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:40PMMonday, April 14, 2014
THE CONDITIONAL KINDNESS OF STRANGERS An episodic evening set in and around a hotel near O’Hare Airport, Marisa Wegrzyn’s itinerant one-act both celebrates and red-flags those encou…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:43PMSunday, April 13, 2014
WATCHING LOSERS LOSE IS A LOSE/LOSE SITUATION After a brief show of compassion for life’s casualties and some welcome sympathy for the underdog in Good People and The Motherfucker with the…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:56PMTuesday, April 8, 2014
THE BANALITY OF SURVIVAL A crowded creation, Our Class remembers the Holocaust by forgetting nothing. Intent on conscience-keeping, burning to reclaim a slice of history, this dogged docudra…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:27PMMonday, April 7, 2014
FREED FROM A CELLAR The inception of this 2006 work from Chicago’s neighborhood-based Albany Park Theater Project is a remark made by a 14-year-old member of their youth ensemble: “I lea…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:46PMThursday, April 3, 2014
MERRY PRANKSTERS’ MEDIEVAL MELTDOWN Cheeky, goofy and sassy as it “cocks a snoot” at a literary legend, this irrepressible import from Kneehigh, a brassy Cornwall theater, should be in…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:52PMSaturday, March 29, 2014
BLING BRINGS CLOSURE Now playing at Chicago’s downtown Storefront Theatre, The Jewels, TUTA Theatre’s world premiere adaptation of a story by Guy de Maupassant, is not to be confused wit…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:29PMSunday, March 23, 2014
ABRACADABRA! In a welcome and overdue debut at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre, this weekend Houston Ballet offered two performances only of their sumptuous three-act ballet Aladdin, an Arabi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:35PMFriday, March 21, 2014
SONDHEIM’S SWAN SONG? In one edifice—Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier—you find the beginning and possibly the end of Stephen Sondheim’s stellar career. The Courtyard Stage is…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:30PMWednesday, March 19, 2014
FUR A GOOD TIME, CALL MASOCHISM ON PARADE David Ives’ two-person fetish comedy, Venus in Fur, is a sexy crowd pleaser and an actors’ tour de force exercise. The play casts a spell of…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:22PMTuesday, March 18, 2014
(SOCIAL) MEDIA MADNESS Gay playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (contributor to Glee and Big Love) may have stumbled with his over-the-top dark comedy Say You Love Satan–produced in Chica…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:58PMSaturday, March 15, 2014
LIES ARE HARD TO LIMIT Are some lies lighter than others and thus lesser? Charles Van Doren will always be tainted for knowing the answers in advance in the 1959 Geritol quiz show scandal. S…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:36PMFriday, March 14, 2014
DANCING WINTER AWAY Erupting only through Sunday, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago has devoted its spring series to four eclectic-to-dynamic works from 1989 to 2001 by Czech choreographer Jiří…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:51PMTuesday, March 11, 2014
THE RHAPSODIC SIDE OF STALKING Stendhal wrote a story once about a man who also wrote a story as a way to force himself to fall in love. It seems an impossibly pure task. Passion carries tha…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:42PMMonday, March 10, 2014
SOUL MATES FROM 167 YEARS AGO “Oh, we have paid for our children’s place in the world. We have paid again and again.” This assertion of achievement rings terribly true after two and a …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:48PMSaturday, March 8, 2014
THE FORCE OF FORGIVENESS What’s too ugly or scary to process, let alone to confront, in real life is grist for the mill of theater, such as how a gun appears and death comes out of nowhere…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:30PMThursday, March 6, 2014
STEPS THAT SOAR Produced by Moya Doherty, the dynamo behind Riverdance, director John McColgan’s well-crafted spinoff just launched its U.S. premiere at Chicago’s Oriental Theatre before…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:13PMTuesday, March 4, 2014
BAPTISM IN WORDS Seminar, Theresa Rebeck’s utterly engaging one-act, is all about the wonders and terrors of writing. Both in the author’s dazzling dialogue and the fascinating issues sh…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:45PMSaturday, March 1, 2014
HAPPY IN THEIR SECOND HOME It’s its second annual homecoming, the much-anticipated, event-filled Alvin Ailey American Theater arrives at the Auditorium Theatre, as well as to community ven…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:29PMFriday, February 28, 2014
CHERCHEZ LA CORPSE Sometimes truths get told that only murder can out. The quaint, perhaps anachronistic, setting for David Alex’ problematic two-act drama, just premiered by MadKap Produc…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:30PMTuesday, February 25, 2014
WHEN THE BRASS RING IS JUST ANOTHER NOOSE The siren song of the bitch-goddess “success” croons loud and clear in this cautionary, modern melodrama. Golden Boy, Clifford Odets’ …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:30PMMonday, February 24, 2014
FRANCE TRIMS ITS 1% WITH THE GUILLOTINE 2014 has been as good to 1859 as it was to the late 18th century. Christopher M. Walsh’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel—a saga of unexpect…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:51PMFriday, February 21, 2014
A SEXUAL CAGE FIGHT The punning title—Cock—is a heavy clue on what to expect. From the moment you enter, you know you won’t confuse this 80-minute tour de theatre with anything else. P…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:02PMWednesday, February 19, 2014
RACIAL PROFILING AND YOU Smoothly staged by Jessica Thebus for the Goodman Theatre local premiere, the blame game reaches Olympic proportions in Tracey Scott Wilson’s wicked two-act troubl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:06PMSunday, February 16, 2014
NASTY NESTING DOLLS In Steppenwolf’s new show, it’s the specifics that startle. There’s enough grit here to repave Chicago’s countless February potholes. But, despite its well-ro…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:18PMFriday, February 14, 2014
A ROSE WHO EVENTUALLY BLOOMS Gypsy is as much a celebration of the addictive insanity of show business as a chronicle of the checkered childhood of super-stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Stephen Son…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:45PMThursday, February 13, 2014
STATE OF THE STEPS Playing (in every sense of the word) through Feb. 23, Joffrey Ballet’s three-part showcase of Contemporary Choreographers delivers some (happily) bloodless cutting-edge …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:35PMMonday, February 10, 2014
IT DOESN’T GET MORE GOLDEN THAN THIS Hot stuff on a cold night! Just released as a companion piece to Black Ensemble Theater’s runaway hit It’s All-Right to Have a Good Time: The S…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:18PM 
