Meet de new members of De Bois Band! Don't miss Spencer Sutherland & Anthony Gargiula in & Juliet on Broadway beginning Sept 15. & Juliet is the hit Broadway musical created by the Emmy-winning writer of Schitt’s Creek & p…
A musical based on War and Peace sounds like a ludicrous proposition. And of course it is"which is why Dave Malloy's Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 only focuses on a 70-page i…
Avoidant and in denial. Most of us have been there. But when college girl Davy, played by Emma Samuelson in Never Better, leans into these strategies, it causes problems. Still mourning the …
In Chicago Shakespeare's violent, bloody, overstuffed freight train of a production, the traditionally heroic King Henry V is a symbol of unchecked nationalism. Henry VThrough 10/6: Tue 7 PM…
Northlight Theatre's The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, written by Daniel Jamieson, featuring music by Ian Ross, and directed by Elizabeth Margolius, is a delightful journey of love and artistry.…
What do we owe our community? Ourselves? Spicy and explosive, the must-see East Texas Hot Links lives up to its name. The latest offering from director Ron OJ Parson at the Court Theatre is …
Reading the statistics on femicides in the adjacent exhibit set up for Water People Theater's The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon triggered my emotions and an alarming memory of my visit t…
You think the Titanic had a disastrous maiden voyage? Consider the Vasa, a Swedish warship constructed by King Gustavus Adolphus (sometimes called "the father of modern warfare") between 162…
The tense family dinner has long been a trope for American realism. Just off the top of my head, plays that have such a device as a central dramatic event include Tracy Letts's August: Osage…
Here's the thing about icons: they're not known for their flexibility. Take Pablo Picasso's towering, untitled 1967 Core-Ten steel sculpture outside Daley Plaza. It's been featured on so man…
As my first experience with this Kenneth Lonergan 1996 contemporary classic, seeing it in a small black box, directed by and starring twentysomethings, was a visceral thrill. Under Andrew Sh…
Within a Shadow, now in its world premiere from Lex the Movie in association with Red Theater, is an ambitious two-act dramedy that digs into the complexities of estrangement, cultural ident…
What a difference nine years makes. When Paul Slade Smith's witty, political farce, then called A Real Lulu, premiered in the summer of 2015 at the Peninsula Players in Door Country, Wiscons…
In the program for Pulse Theatre Chicago's world premiere production of Beneath the Willow Tree, playwright Isis Elizabeth tells us a little about the origins of her play. Begun during the p…
Janet Ulrich Brooks is my kind of theatrical royalty: a no-nonsense performer who can play everything from firebrand playwright Lillian Hellman to diva Maria Callas with riveting conviction.…
In Jonathan Demme's 1986 anti-screwball comedy, Something Wild, Jeff Daniels's straight-arrow yuppie gets his life turned upside down in a scary way by Melanie Griffith's wild child, Lulu. T…
With The Full Monty, Paramount Theatre completes the trifecta of musicals derived from movies about British deindustrialization, on the heels of 2021's Kinky Boots and Billy Elliot earlier t…
When legend becomes fact, musicalize the legend (to paraphrase John Ford). Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone follow this strategy again and again over the course of their rousing 1969 musical …
At long last, true believers, the third installment of Mark Pracht's "Four-Color Trilogy""The House of Ideas"is here, opening the 2024"'25 season at City Lit Theater. Following Pracht's firs…
In a couple of weeks, the national tour of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child lands at the James M. Nederlander Theatre. The show, written by Jack Thorne from an original story by Harry Potte…
There's self-aware"and then there's [title of show]. Billed as being "about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical," PrideArts launches its 2024-25 season with the Broad…
On July 27, 1982, as editor of Chicago GayLife newspaper, I attended a meeting in Washington, D.C., between government health officials and a group of LGBTQ+ activists and leaders of organiz…
Steppenwolf has been mixing it up in recent (post-COVID shutdown) years with solo comedy outings from national names like Mike Birbiglia (The Old Man and the Pool) and Alex Edelman (Just for…
I'd never heard of Neal Adelman before seeing brand-new Dodge Box Theatre's evening of one-acts, presented under the somewhat confounding omnibus title of Legato Limbo Loud or GoFastWait, at…
Adapting stage to screen poses many problems. There's usually something leaden and, uh, stagey about making a movie of a play; witness how few watchable Shakespeare films there are. They're …
Existing IP doesn't always translate from screen to musical theater stage. In many ways, Back to the Future: the Musical is one of those shows. Some of the songs are mediocre at best and its…
Domestic violence, suicide, bullying"Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's 1945 musical Carousel is as famous for its dark subject matter as its soaring score. (My high school graduatio…
During the pandemic shutdown, perhaps nothing surprised me as much with Zoom theater as seeing magicians work their craft without the close-up settings we're so used to, especially in Chicag…
Fat Theatre Project makes an exuberant debut with The InterPlays, an anthology of short plays celebrating and untangling the enigma of love. Founded by Eileen Tull in early 2024, Fat The…
For those of us who know and love Shakespeare mostly for his most popular plays"the often produced comedies, tragedies, and histories"Pericles is a hard play to warm up to. Pericles's story …
Tin Drum Theatre Company's inaugural production is well-suited for its motto, "where dramatic disturbances are the norm." Founding member Steve Needham's original one-act, directed by cofoun…
There is irony in this play bookending itself with a Blanche DuBois scene from A Streetcar Named Desire, because those moments hold more nuance than the rest of This One Will Grow. As the yo…
For their follow-up to 2006's Spring Awakening, composer Duncan Sheik and librettist and lyricist Steven Sater turned to Lewis Carroll's children's classic. Set in a bomb shelter during the …
One of the sinister knock-on effects of religious institutions rejecting queer people is how it encourages so many of them to negate inner faith altogether"to throw out the spiritual baby wi…
Because theater lovers love to be dramatic, we constantly divide shows into hits and flops, shows that soar and shows that don't. But what about all those mid shows"shows that sometimes ente…
We're spoiled for choice when it comes to magic practitioners in Chicago, but David Parr is always a good bet for a fun and thought-provoking night out. His current Wednesday-night show at t…
There's a cartoon that made the rounds on social media a few years ago laying out the dissonance for the modern comedy scene. In the first two frames, labeled "Comedians at the Club," a guy …
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy is held so closely by so many people that it's a tall order for anyone to adapt Middle-earth into another art form. Take Amazon's original stre…
It takes a special kind of person to enjoy Saw the Musical. That's because you must be a fan of the film to appreciate this production's absurdity at its fullest. Luckily, Saw is my Rocky Ho…
As Steppenwolf Theatre's world premiere production of Samuel D. Hunter's Little Bear Ridge Road nears the end of its run, Steep Theatre presents the Chicago premiere of Hunter's 2022 drama, …
Amy Crider's entertaining and stimulating new play Wells and Welles, receiving its world premiere in a very well-acted non-Equity production by Lucid Theater at the City Lit Theater space in…
I suspect more people would find poetry accessible if, instead of reading it on the page, they experienced it in live performance"especially one on par with Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre's curr…
In the late 80s and early 90s, Del Close, in the workshops he taught at iO, used to talk about slowing improv down, not forcing things, and allowing the scenes, characters, and eventuallyÂ�…
Drumbeats pierce the air with discomfiting bluntness, a beeline for the ear soothed into tranquility with music performed by Fred Jackson Jr., Evan Hill, and Chér Jey. Three masked figures …
The summer between graduation from high school and college, for those of us who went, was a shaky time filled with its fair share of doubt, anxiety, and questions. Meet Sam. She's just gradu…
The ocean is an obsession for 18-year-old Dontrell Jones III (Blake Dupree) of Baltimore, a high school graduate mere weeks from starting his full ride to Johns Hopkins, with the vastness of…
In the tradition of rom-coms like the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors, Audrey Cefaly's The Last Wide Open uses the conceit of what-ifs to take us through a missed-it-by-that-much …
Being a musician can be a lonely business. Want even a wisp of a prayer of making it into one of the world's professional classical orchestras? Be prepared to spend five hours or more a day"…
Haven Chicago is going out the way they came in 11 years ago"sweaty, sexy, sinuous, and unapologetic. In 2013, the company announced their presence with a production of John Cameron Mitchell…
Claustrophobia versus freedom"it's a theme of sorts in this dramatic fantasy by Elizabeth Egloff (billed as a psychosexual thriller, directed by Erin Sheets, produced by Theatre L'Acadie). A…
It was the unsecured, random bundle of cords that first caught my eye at Otherworld Theatre's The Lightning Thief: A Percy Jackson Musical. They were slung around the railing to the audience…
