Monday, 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 01:35PMFriday, March 15, 2013
MAY THE RAP BE WITH YOU Before Othello: The Remix it was only Shakespeare’s comedies that received the Q brothers’ trademark, rap-happy revision—Funk It Up About Nothin’ and The Bomb…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:17PMTHE NEXT STEP(S) It’s an impressive lineup for this respected Chicago company’s annual “Spring Series”—not just the always impressive Hubbard Street Dance Chicago but, here and els…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:19PMTuesday, March 12, 2013
A DEATH IN THE UNION Hershey Felder has already regaled audiences at the Royal George Theatre with his uncanny and heartfelt recreations of George Gershwin, George M. Cohan, Frederic Chopin,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:19PMMonday, March 11, 2013
WRITHING INTO REVELATION Alas, it’s over – and way too soon. Luna Negra Dance Theater’s 2013 spring program celebrated works by two contemporary Spanish choreographers: guest artist F…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:07PMSaturday, March 9, 2013
A TRUE SPRING FLING Returning to new glory and restoring golden memories after many happy visits to Chicago, Alvin Ailey Dance Theater just unleashed an unprecedented two-week, three-program…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:49AMSunday, March 3, 2013
A TISSUE OF SONGS An ambitious and sporadically powerful entry in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s fourth annual “Garage Rep,” this 2005 musical by John LaChiusa is a Rashomon-like puzzle…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:09AMSaturday, March 2, 2013
SOME THINGS, BUT NOT EVERYTHING, IS ILLUMINATED “With writing, we have second chances,” declares Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything Is Illuminated, his well-received and dauntingly compl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:35PMTuesday, February 26, 2013
WINTER FLUFF “We’re all in the gutter/But some of us have our ear to the ground.” If you find this limp lyric endlessly repeated in this silly-ass, pun-crazed musical instantly amusing…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:44PMMonday, February 25, 2013
MUSIC’S MANY BRIDGES It’s a proven power at the Black Ensemble Theater: No disease is so deadly, no crisis so catastrophic that a song can’t cure it within twenty bars. Add 20 more son…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:32PMSunday, February 24, 2013
STORIES IN A SPIN CYCLE If ever the cliché “the plot thickens” justifies itself, it’s in this relentlessly inventive 1996 work by Australian playwright Andrew Bovell; anacondas after …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:46PMFriday, February 22, 2013
25 SAINTS A 75-minute exercise in dead-end disaster tautly directed by Susan E. Bowen, this new work by Pine Box Theater ensemble member Joshua Rollins tightly fits the theater company’s a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:03PMWednesday, February 20, 2013
PARADOXICAL DUALITIES It’s brainy almost beyond endurance and savvy in its approach/avoidance strategies of gaming love. Happily, Itamar Moses’ Completeness at Theater Wit is also engros…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:43PMTuesday, February 19, 2013
TWO BATTLES IN ONE WAR As sturdily written and swiftly moving as it was in 1982, Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play remains an enduring testament to the homefront battles that African-Ame…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:21AMSunday, February 17, 2013
SPRINGING INTO SPRING In Chicago, spring can never come early enough. But, alas, it’s February, so it has to be an indoor sport. Leave it to our homegrown dance company, the Joffrey Ballet…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:56PMThursday, February 14, 2013
YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LEND THIS PRODUCTION YOUR EARS Brutal and relentless, Julius Caesar chronicles a fateful course of envy and revenge defeating idealism and loyalty: Brutus and Cas…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:12PMTuesday, February 12, 2013
VIRTUAL THEATER Teddy Ferrara, Goodman Theatre’s new commissioned work, is almost three hours long. That excess suggests that nobody had the courage to cut or, not knowing what it was abou…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:44PMWednesday, February 6, 2013
THE LADY OF THE GARDENIAS Thanks to Lanie Robertson’s bedrock-basic script, Rob Lindley’s dedicated staging and the utter effacement of a good vocalist into a great one, courtesy of …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:25PMSunday, February 3, 2013
READY FOR HER CLOSE-UP, MR. DEMILLE From the start it seemed strange that anyone would make a musical out of a movie that embodies its medium so completely. Yes, the film All About Eve deser…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:56AMSaturday, February 2, 2013
SAD TRIUMPH OF HOPE OVER EXPERIENCE It’s like kicking a puppy dog to dislike Charity Hope Valentine. Charity is the cloyingly-named heroine of the 1966 musical by Cy Coleman, Dorothy F…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:00PMThursday, January 31, 2013
A CRY TO CARE The 85-minutes of this electrifying protest play begin with a lone microphone suddenly erupting in an ear-splitting feedback. The noise is intolerable, no less than what it ush…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:13PMMonday, January 28, 2013
A DAISY CHAIN OF DEAD ENDS MAKES FOR INVIGORATING THEATER Shattered Globe Theatre has uncovered yet another tailspinning drama to live up to their name. British playwright Lucinda Cox shows …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:15PMSunday, January 27, 2013
BONDAGE IN EGYPT AND VIRGINIA Of the 150,000 Jews who lived in the U.S during the Civil War, twice as many (6,000) fought for the Union as for the Confederacy. Less well-known is the fact th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:54PMTuesday, January 22, 2013
SLOW, SAD AND STRANGE Sooner or later (preferably the former), we expect a play to pay off – to deliver a “gotcha” revelation that makes sudden or accumulated sense out of what seemed …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:50PMMonday, January 21, 2013
AMERICA’S BEST NOTES Beginning its first new season of self-generated musicals, the Mercury Theater has, true to its name, raised the temperature with A Grand Night for Singing, a heartfel…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:19PMFIXING WHAT WON’T HEAL Jon Robin Baitz’ Broadway drama Other Desert Cities depicts a crisis of apparent betrayal and imminent exposure that besets the Wyeth clan, a wealthy Jewish family…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:49AMSunday, January 20, 2013
ONE RIVER CITY DESERVES ANOTHER If ever a show spelled out summer, it’s Meredith Willson’s 1957 masterpiece The Music Man. Throughout the rollicking story the title character exu…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:46PMFriday, January 11, 2013
THAT KINKY KINESCOPE It’s a time trip that denies the original intent—a live taping of a dead T.V. series. The iconic archetype of the boob tube’s “golden age,” I Love Lucy wasn’…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:30PMSunday, January 6, 2013
YOU ONLY DIE ONCE One of the great pick-up lines that soldiers and sailors on leave during World War II (and probably the Trojan War too) used to seduce a one-night standee was, “Let’s d…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:02PMSunday, December 23, 2012
LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD It’s easy to see what drew Cameron Mackintosh to revive Lionel Bart’s hit musical 18 years ago: Dickens is a lot like Victor Hugo. Like Mackintosh’ smash Les Miser…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:42PMFriday, December 21, 2012
A DICKENS OF A PERFORMER It’s been two centuries since Charles Dickens’ birth. Miriam Margolyes, famed for her portrayals in Harry Potter, The Age of Innocence, and William Shakespeare�…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:29PM 
