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 04:18PMPLAYING GOD AIN’T FOR AMATEURS Following his return from a decade in exile in Siberia as a dissenter against the Romanov order, Fyodor Dostoevsky intended his second novel, written as much…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:50PMANATOMY IS NOT DESTINY Bursting with more arguments than solutions; cerebral, metaphorical and personal (sometimes simultaneously); Sarah Treem’s two-act, two-person drama is also two play…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:09PMTHE DUKE WHO WAS A KING A blast from the “big band” past, Queenie Pie is the great late Duke Ellington’s sole–if unfinished—opera, recently revived in Los Angeles. On February …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:00AMFATS FOREVER “One never knows, do one?” That’s the favorite catchphrase of Fats Waller (1904-1943), an irrepressible master of music. The 285-pound, cherubic-cheeked jokester genius is…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:40PMENCHANTED FORGIVENESS When the sorcerer Prospero discards his magic staff and abjures his spellbinding ways, it is, of course, Shakespeare’s swan song too. (The play will no longer be the …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:14PMAN EVICTION NOTICE FOR THE 1% This is Brecht’s real Mother Courage, not “Canteen Anna,” the pointless survivor of the cautionary later play who thrives on war (which as, Brecht implies…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:00PMPARENTAL RIGHTS, GRANDPARENTAL WRONGS As with her hit debut drama Spinning Into Butter (1999), Rebecca Gilman’s newest agitation Luna Gale, directed by Robert Falls at Goodman Theatre, put…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:15PMAN EXALTATION OF LARK We all know Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, and The Children’s Hour, even the 1977 film Julia, based on her book Pentimento. But The…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:54PMNO CLOSURE EVER A tangle of shifting sympathies and treacherous turns, Johnna Adams’ spare 75-minute, two-hander one-act teeters on a knife edge during every burning second. Its setting an…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:36PMDONE TO DEATH A ton of fun gets dumped in this calculated musical spinoff from Mel Brooks’ funniest film. As with The Producers, Brooks’ expanded version of Young Frankenstein (with his …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:50PMDO TELL MAMA TO COME TO THIS CABARET Just as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show swallows Annie Get Your Gun, the Kit Kat Klub engulfs a backstage story that becomes a show within a show in Caba…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:50PMA BARD OUT OF WATER Here’s what we know for sure is the background for MadKap Production’s Midwest premiere: In 1933 Nobel laureate and, in his own estimation, the greatest writer in the…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:00PMANOTHER BRIDGE TOO FAR Solstice offers a disturbing look at a chaotic class-ridden conflict, and British playwright Zinnie Harris delivers some ugly goods: She imagines—and A Red Orchid Th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:51PMDISREGARD BEAUREGARD Much in the spirit of Ben Jonson’s salacious Volpone and Giovanni Boccaccio’s same-titled lascivious tale of irrepressible lust, Niccolò Machiavelli’s own …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:53AMPARANORMAL PASSION Love can conquer death. That potent wishful thinking was why audiences gobbled up the popular 1990 film Ghost. It also explains why it was turned into a musical, which has…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:31PMNOW E.T. REALLY CAN GO HOME A justified hit, bright as any of the lights on Michigan Avenue, Lookingglass Theatre Company’s exhilarating adaptation of Antoine de St-Exupery’s classic and…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:12PMONCE AGAIN, ATTENTION MUST BE PAID British playwright Nina Raine’s Tribes, which played Off-Broadway last year and has been produced regionally, depicts an oppressively intellectual Britis…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:21PMLIGHT BECOMES MOVEMENT: THE AMERICA WINDOWS BURST INTO BEING Following its world debut last October as a “gift to the city” (gratefully accepted by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, also in attendance…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:17PMOLD LECHERS GET NO RESPECT Merrily set at Christmastide at the height of the swing era, Barbara Gaines’ sumptuous Navy Pier staging of Shakespeare’s slightest comedy is hilarious, certai…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:59PMCONSCIENCE KEEPING IN A CRACKLING PLOT Taut, true and richly wrought, this 1945 potboiler by unashamed socialist playwright J.B. Priestley remains, three generations later, a clarion call to…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:56PMJOFFREY’S JOYOUS JEWEL Now in its 26th annual presentation, the late Robert Joffrey’s evergreen staging of Peter IlyichTchaikovsky’s beloved Christmas ballet blesses both the Audit…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:54PMA GAY CHRISTMAS ALL OVER CHICAGOLAND In a major first, the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus just performed its Christmas concert at the prestigious Harris Theatre at Millennium Park in downtown Ch…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:33AMSOME SOULS THWART SAVING We Three Lizas, last year’s in-your-face gay holiday hit, is back with a purportedly new book and an expanded score. Relocated from the Steppenwolf Garage to Stage…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:07PMBURNING THE YULE LOG AT BOTH ENDS Striking a comfortable balance between sticky and sentimental, schmaltz and cynicism, five short plays by as many Chicago writers (and directed by another s…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:36PMA CATTY YULETIDE LAUGH RIOT Following the well-earned 15-year run of Rudolph the Red-Hosed Reindeer, Hell in a Handbag Productions replaces it with a worthy winner. David Cerda’s wicked ho…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:38PMASHES TO THEATER Now moving from Andersonville to Lakeview, the best production of 2011 is back to rival any currently playing: No longer sprawling the width of the Neo Futurarium’s stretc…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:12PMLEGENDS OF THE HOMELESS As the title suggests, Naomi Iizuka’s uncompromising drama exposes snapshots of the urban underbelly. It focuses, so to speak, on homeless kids, prostitutes and…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:06PMFOR THE RECORD With only a matinee remaining today, it’s soon to be history, but this River North Dance Chicago is offering some stunning steps at the Harris Theater in their annual fa…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:49AMA NEST OF VIPERS Don’t stop the presses. Yet another blatant spin-off (if not rip-off) of August: Osage County has splattered on the boards. What the world needs beyond peace and prosperit…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:35PMSNUFFING OUT SNOBBERY Preferring acting over setting, Gale Childs Daly’s joyously theatrical adaptation of Charles Dickens’ coming-of-age masterpiece uses six actors to play almost 40 ch…
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