Friday, 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 08:29PMThursday, December 20, 2012
A GILBERT AND SULLIVAN FOR 2012 The best show of the year has finally arrived. The Book of Mormon is a perfectly packaged fusion of the satire we need in a sassy musical comedy and the ente…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:51PMThursday, December 13, 2012
MOLIÈRE FOR DUMMIES Attend David Ives’ The School for Lies—a manic contemporary travesty—if you want to fully appreciate Molière’s 1666 masterpiece The Misanthrope, as serious a co…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:18PMFriday, December 7, 2012
FINDING NEW WAYS TO TURN A BODY The big news from Hubbard Street Dance Chicago as the intrepid troupe launches their four-day “winter series” at the Harris Theatre in Millennium Park? It…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:31PMThursday, December 6, 2012
A DOCTORED WHO How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical is only 90 minutes long—not much more time than it would take to watch the beloved animation and read the book by the late Dr. Se…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:33PMMonday, December 3, 2012
A TASTY POTPOURRI PASTICHE IS MORE PASTRY THAN PORRIDGE Billed as “a holiday bender” (as in gender), About Face Theatre’s 90-minute confection includes a 45-minute “cocktail hour” …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:33PMTuesday, November 27, 2012
A SKIRMISH OF WIT THAT CAN ONLY BE SHAW In 1896, George Bernard Shaw planned to beat Oscar Wilde at his own playful plotting and acerbic wit, so he wrote his answer to the recently successfu…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:40PMTuesday, November 20, 2012
DOWN HOME TO HEAL UP It’s hard to make healing feel dramatic. But that’s the challenge to which Julie Marie Myatt mostly rises in this engaging Midwest premiere. In 90 minutes she depict…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:08PMSaturday, November 17, 2012
RETRO GERSHWIN STILL BESTS TODAY’S STANDARDS Like the unsurpassable Crazy for You, My One and Only is more than more than a dozen recycled Gershwin tunes. In the spirit of those daffy Jazz…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:50PMTuesday, November 13, 2012
MINING MEMORIES Adam Guettel’s Floyd Collins remains the ultimate spelunking musical as it depicts a cave explorer entrapped by both hard rock and a media spectacle. The Burnt Part Boys, a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:14PMSunday, November 4, 2012
TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE PLAY Developed by Raven Theatre’s Workshop Series, these ten hit-and-run “playlettes” by John Weagly take only 52 minutes to rearrange reality into quirky juxt…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:55AMSaturday, November 3, 2012
THE FRAMEWORK IS A BIT ODD, BUT THE MOVEMENT IS GLORIOUS Not to be confused with the frenetic film starring Nicole Kidman or the older Oscar winner with Jose Ferrer as Toulouse Lautrec, this…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:07PMSaturday, October 27, 2012
KINETIC COOL IN MILLENNIUM PARK As evidenced at last night’s opening, Giordano Dance Chicago’s Fall Engagement—a two-night gig at the Harris Theater—is a major installment in the com…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:15PMFriday, October 26, 2012
A RUSH TO DOOM As the breathless title suggests, there’s nothing placid or contained about Liz Duffy Adams’ hyper-poetic hybrid of interior monologues and frantic dialogue. The metaphori…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:46PMSaturday, October 20, 2012
LATE NIGHT CHUB THAT’S HARD TO SWALLOW The only excuse for reviewing this 70-minute trifle is that they’re charging $20 to see it when it would be worth twice as much to pay to get out. …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:48PMThursday, October 18, 2012
TRYOUT SHOULD GET THE BOOT UNTIL IT WORKS OUT THE KINKS Prepare yourself for some disparate reviews of Kinky Boots, which had its pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago’s Bank of America Theater l…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:34PMWednesday, October 17, 2012
INTO THE TOILET The 1996 film Trainspotting was notorious for its spare-no-sensitivity, take-no-prisoners look at Edinburgh heroin addicts. Based on Irvine Welsh’s bottom-feeding novel, it…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:55PMMonday, October 15, 2012
EVIL WILL TRAVEL In his great works, like Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and even in his lesser efforts, such as Broken Glass, Arthur Miller forces us to confess a greater loyalty th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:16PMTHE FORCE OF FAMILY Looming over this long multi-generational family epic by Adrianna Sevahn Nicholas is the shadow of genocide—the 1915 slaughter by Turks of 1.5 million Armenians, a prec…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:50AMThursday, October 11, 2012
KILLER’S REMORSE It’s a bit haunting that Black Watch is performed in a National Guard armory where soldiers, like the Scottish laddies depicted in Gregory Burke’s combat pageant, trai…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:49PMMonday, October 1, 2012
PASSION IN A POOL It took Ovidius Naso, a 1st century Roman poet, to do full justice to Greek myths. Metamorphoses assembled a panoply of gods, heroes and mortals into 15 books of Latin hexa…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:01PMSaturday, September 29, 2012
A PUB CRAWL FROM FOLKLORE INTO FANTASY The black-box stage on the sixth floor of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Navy Pier complex is now a Scottish pub. In these still-dark confines beneath…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:36AMTuesday, September 25, 2012
David Cromer directs the Goodman Theater's revival. Though one of Tennessee Williams' lesser works. Still, even when he goes overboard, Williams dives deeper into our desperation--daily, mon…
SOURCE: CurtainUp at 07:46AMFriday, September 21, 2012
A BIG KNIFE THAT ISN’T VERY SHARP Clifford Odets is justly famed for his agit-prop Depression-era New York-based protest plays (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Golden Boy), but The…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:33PMTuesday, September 18, 2012
SEE SCAPE A wonderfully questioning work from 1975, Edward Albee’s whimsical, Pulitzer-winning domestic drama literally reflects our world as seen by diametrical couples. Seascape meets la…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:40PMSunday, September 16, 2012
THE PLOT THAT WOULD NOT DIE Doggedly dedicated but exhausting at nearly three hours, Robert Kauzlaric’s adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ mystery thriller The Woman in White is, to quote ano…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:04PMSaturday, June 9, 2012
A perfect play for Pride Month, this labor of love by Paul Oakley Stovall examines, raucously and gently, the challenge of how one minority learns to cherish another. Phylicial Rashad direct…
SOURCE: CurtainUp at 09:32AMThursday, April 19, 2012
Frank Galati's epic adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's novel at Steppenwolf.
SOURCE: CurtainUp at 06:20AMWednesday, December 14, 2011
Playwright Enda Walsh seems to be all over the place -- musical theater librettist, solo play in Brooklyn. . .and this at Chicago's Steppenwolf Downstairs Theater. . .
SOURCE: CurtainUp at 03:03PMWednesday, June 29, 2011
World premiere of David Henry Hwang's play which is headed for Broadway this fall
SOURCE: CurtainUp at 01:12PM 
