Tuesday, July 9, 2013
THE ENSEMBLE IS HOT, THE PLOT IS NOT Sam Shepard loves to level, if not to topple, his characters. In the treacherous course of True West, two brothers exchange identities: The Hollywood hot…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:49PMThursday, July 4, 2013
FIRST DISNEYFIED AND NOW ZIMMERMANNED, THIS MUSICAL CAN’T SEE THE JUNGLE FOR THE TREES Not one of the great animations to grace the Disney studio, 1967’s The Jungle Book was certainl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:46PMSunday, June 30, 2013
BIG LAKE BIG CITY BIG TURKEY Chicago to the broken bricks and bone, playwright Keith Huff was at his storytelling best in A Steady Rain, a big hit about a conflicted cop and his crooked cron…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:12PMSaturday, June 29, 2013
THE IMPOSTER HITS HYDE PARK HARD Because religious hypocrisy — specifically “affected zeal and pious knavery” — never goes out of fashion, Tartuffe is forever. Continuing and…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:29PMSunday, June 23, 2013
A LONG HIKE IN THE THEM THAR HILLS OF SHAKESPEARE Along with its companion piece The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare’s late-blooming “romance” Cymbeline is usually treated as a fairy tale…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:15AMFriday, June 21, 2013
FLEECING A LEGEND The tickets are free in (re)discover theatre’s generously-meant new work by company member Jessica Shoemaker. Their too-fresh offering is an anachronistic, two-act take o…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:35PMFriday, June 14, 2013
GAY PRIDE AND PREJUDICE The Pride is an invaluable offering for Pride Month, or any other for that matter. Deeply textured and perfectly enacted, this Olivier Award-winning script by Britis…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:15PMMonday, June 10, 2013
EVERY NIGHT A FULL MOON Looking back on his life and sounds from his death in 1976, Chester Arthur Burnett, now forever called Howlin Wolf, is the complex crooner at the heart of Jackie Tayl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:40PMSunday, June 9, 2013
SHIPSHAPE PRODUCTION TAKES SAIL Still subversive as it both condemns and confirms class snobbery, this smash hit from 1878 fuses Romeo and Juliet and Punch into a role-reversing romp where l…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:39PMSaturday, June 8, 2013
KISS ME, COLE Just the songs are blessing and bounty enough in A Cole Porter Songbook, Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre’s all-singing, much-dancing salute to Broadway’s suavest purveyor …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:36AMFriday, May 31, 2013
EXQUISITE SHARDS OF GLASS Never has the title of Tennessee Williams’ early masterpiece, The Glass Menagerie, been so thoroughly embraced by the set designer. Grant Sabin takes the name of …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:51AMThursday, May 30, 2013
A THUNDEROUS EVENT The “thunder” in Dragon’s Thunder comes from huge kettle drums, prominently featured in a pounding competition between a Dragon and a Tiger. (Both win). It’s one o…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:57PMSunday, May 19, 2013
THE TITLE CHARACTER IS TOO PURE FOR PEOPLE, BUT THIS PURE PRODUCTION IS FOR EVERYONE Of all Moliere’s comedies, The Misanthrope (1666), now gloriously and faithfully revived at Court…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:12PMSaturday, May 18, 2013
SCULPTED TO PERFECTION Dance should never be dull: That’s the acting credo of Boris Eifman’s kinetic Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, now erupting across the huge Auditorium Theatre stag…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:31AMThursday, May 9, 2013
THE PLAY’S NOT REALLY THE THING, THE PRODUCTION IS Further earning a proud name, Chicago Shakespeare Theater has produced Henry VIII for the first time in professional Chicago theater …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:52AMWednesday, May 8, 2013
SECONDS WHICH SHOULD BE SKIPPED, NOT SPLIT Within the messy, overwritten and frustrating new script, If You Split A Second, is a potentially interesting premise: In an instant of unthinking …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:08AMSaturday, May 4, 2013
PLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MOOR Alas, this is mainly a review of record: This is the final weekend to savor the triumphant revival of the Joffrey Ballet’s Othello. Originally given its world…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:48PMFriday, April 26, 2013
PORTER IS THE ONE WHO CARRIES THIS SHOW H.M.S. Titanic, they say, was unsinkable, but the S.S. American — the setting for Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, his biggest hit before Kiss Me Ka…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:26AMThursday, April 25, 2013
WHEN UNIONS RULED THE EARTH Outrageously overdue for revival (the last one was at Marriott Theatre in 2004), this irresistible 1954 Broadway classic harks back to a time when producers could…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:46PMTuesday, April 23, 2013
CHICAGO CAD MAKES BAD LOOK GOOD Sassy and brassy Pal Joey is a wondrous rouser that spins the tale of a roué gone rotten in Depression-era Chicago. Porchlight Music Theatre gained the excl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:22PMSEVEN CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF A PLAY Undernourished as this commissioned play may feel, it is, in fact, the last of the “Elliot Trilogy” by Quiara Alegría Hudes (bookwriter for In the H…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:55AMMonday, April 22, 2013
ALICE FALLS THROUGH AT LOOKINGGLASS “I miss myself.” That’s the plaintive cry from the titular character of Still Alice, adapted from Lisa Genova’s book, and presented by Lookingg…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:19AMSaturday, April 20, 2013
A FISH OUT OF WATER Ten years ago, the Tim Burton film Big Fish with Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney, based on Daniel Wallace’s 1998 “novel of mythic proportions,” charmed audiences wi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:37AMFriday, April 19, 2013
THEATER OF CRUELTY (TO THE AUDIENCE, THAT IS) A blast from the past, this 1963 curiosity from the once-living Living Theatre is a tribute to author Kenneth H. Brown’s total recall and recr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:13PMTuesday, April 16, 2013
COMPRESSED CRUELTY IN A SMALL STRINDBERG SHOCKER August Strindberg, the “father of modern psychological drama,” told his publisher that Creditors, a drama that he prized as much as he di…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:00PMSunday, April 14, 2013
YOU GOTTA HAVE FAITH The adventurous playwriting of Tarell Alvin McCraney, who wrote the successful “Brother/Sister Plays” (In the Red and Brown Water, The Brothers Size, and Marcus),�…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:49AMMonday, April 8, 2013
A FAMILY HAUNTED BY ITSELF Even among dysfunctional clans – an apparently exhaustible topic for today’s theater – Jason Grote’s self-haunted family in Maria/Stuart gets laurels for l…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:20PMFriday, April 5, 2013
THE FUN IN FRAUD Famed impresario P.T. Barnum banked on one cynical truth: No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. The undisputed master of the “…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:04PMThursday, March 28, 2013
BREAKOUT IN THE OUTBACK There are so many ways to glitter and be gay in American Musical Theater: La Cage Aux Folles depicts the unexpected bourgeois normality in a near-marriage of boa-wrap…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:42PMTuesday, March 19, 2013
YOU HAVE TO MEASURE CAREFULLY At the core of this dark and fascinating tragicomedy is a situation seething with modern irony: Can you be both above the law and beneath contempt? Angelo, a se…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:29PMMonday, March 18, 2013
SMOKIN’ Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller – you may not recognize who they are but you sure know what they wrote: “Love Potion #9,” “Bossa Nova Baby,” “Kansas C…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:35PM 
