Monday, May 25, 2015
There’s a problem sometimes at music festivals where you’re too far away from the band to hear them. Sometimes it’s because you didn’t get there early enough to get a good spot. Some…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 09:35AMThursday, May 14, 2015
RECOMMENDED There is nothing little about Lillian Hellman’s 1939 potboiler “The Little Foxes.” The characters, the drama, the incestuous pairing of family and greed, it is …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:15AMThursday, May 7, 2015
RECOMMENDED I spent some time after I left Irish Theatre of Chicago’s “The White Road” thinking about how I would have fared. The play chronicles the famous 1914 Shackleton expedition�…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:00AMRECOMMENDED “Bad Jews” is kind of a cheap title, but it’s also a smart one. It reminds you of cable softcore porn or direct-to-video prank anthologies. It’s attention-get…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00AMWednesday, April 29, 2015
What would drive a man to venture out alone in the dark reaches of the galaxy? Your typical 1950s serial might have you believe that it is his impeccable sense of adventure, his desire to ac…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:00AMThursday, April 23, 2015
RECOMMENDED “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” a new play by Emmett Rensin now premiering with First Floor Theater, takes its name from a famous 1964 essay by Richard Hof…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:35AMSunday, April 19, 2015
RECOMMENDED Just because someone’s died doesn’t make their death a martyrdom. It doesn’t mean they were a saint. Complicated or downright negative feelings that a person had for someon…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:05AMTuesday, April 14, 2015
RECOMMENDED The family-sitting-room genre is built on secrecy. Sometimes it’s a literal secret, one that lurks from the opening curtain until just the right moment—usually right before a…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:45AMPeople will probably never stop basing plays (and movies and books) on “The Odyssey.” Homer’s ancient epic poem chronicling Odysseus’ long return home from Troy is elemental …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 09:30AMFriday, April 10, 2015
In case you are worried about false advertising, the opening number of “Murder Ballad,” currently receiving its Chicago premiere courtesy of Bailiwick Chicago, confirms that you are, in …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:00PMThursday, April 9, 2015
RECOMMENDED There’s a lovely moment partway through the second act of Adam Pasen’s very funny, big-hearted play “Badfic Love” wherein ex-jock and current law student …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:45PMTuesday, March 31, 2015
Friends are the opposite of Matthew McConnaughey’s beloved “high school girls.” You keep getting older, and they keep getting older too. You change, they change. Eventually you might s…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:30AMMonday, March 30, 2015
RECOMMENDED The most famous quote from famous Chicago muckracker Upton Sinclair about his groundbreaking novel “The Jungle” is the following: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 04:00PMRECOMMENDED The man in front of you is not from here. He’s a traveler from a foreign land. In fact “Traveler” is the only name by which he is identified. And as a person not from here …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:30AMFriday, March 27, 2015
The old maxim says, “You can’t go home again.” Which is of course not true. It’s a lying old maxim, a blanket statement that ignores an entire class of people for who…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 09:00AMWednesday, March 25, 2015
RECOMMENDED The evening begins in an explosion of noise. From the moment the audience enters, tramps and junkies and nightwalkers prowl around the space, almost like they’re protecting it …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:51AMFriday, March 20, 2015
RECOMMENDED I think August Wilson’s play scripts might do more heavy lifting than those of any other American playwright. And what I mean by that is that if you stay true to them and treat…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 12:05PMWednesday, March 18, 2015
By Alex Huntsberger Normally when a new theater company opens in Chicago it is cause for little fanfare. Small storefront companies come and go with the transience of a celebrity parody twi…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:33AMThursday, March 12, 2015
The Iron Stag King RECOMMENDED If “Game of Thrones” took the Arthurian high fantasy genre and dragged it off its clean white pedestal down into the muck, then The House Theatre�…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 12:00PMWho hasn’t spent a romantic day with someone that could be described as “magical?” But for Jenny (Kristen Johnson), the heroine of Shannon Pritchard’s new play “Traces”, the magi…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:00AMTuesday, March 10, 2015
RECOMMENDED There is value in works of art that confuse, especially in the theater. So many plays from all across history can be boiled down to little more than allegory, parable or argument…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 03:00PMThursday, March 5, 2015
RECOMMENDED Sitting in the audience waiting for Babes with Blades’ all-female production of “Titus Andronicus” to begin, I did what any audience member does and took in the set, de…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 04:30PMTuesday, March 3, 2015
RECOMMENDED David Greig’s “Dunsinane” is a play playing three different games at once. The first game is that the play is a kinda-sorta sequel to Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” The sec…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 09:00AMMonday, March 2, 2015
Christopher Shinn’s “Four” first premiered in 2001 and over a decade later it seems very much a product of its times. First of all there’s the setting: Hartford, 1996, the Fourth of …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:05AMFriday, February 27, 2015
RECOMMENDED The plays of Samuel Beckett are self-contained worlds. They are shorn of history, context and anything resembling realism: life boiled down to its bone-broth essence. So when dir…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:45AMTuesday, February 24, 2015
RECOMMENDED Describing what Paul Downs Calaizzo’s “Really Really” is really about is not easy. The play is a Molotov kegger of sex, class, politics and violence. It’s…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00AMMonday, February 23, 2015
RECOMMENDED Sharr White’s “The Other Place” begins as something like a memoir. Julianna, a successful scientist turned big pharma pitch woman (played with equal measures of…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 06:00PMWednesday, January 21, 2015
RECOMMENDED In case you were wondering, yes, the title of this show is referring to THAT Mr. Burns, of “The Simpsons” infamy. But this isn’t a show about him. And it isn’t a show abo…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 03:30PMWhen a new play is tackling a current social issue, for instance the tensions between atheists, gays and right-wing mega-churches, there is always a difficult line to walk between arguing an…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:00PMRECOMMENDED “Nasty, Brutish & Short” is a wonderful title if not a particularly apt one for this DIY evening of storefront puppet theater. A more accurate title might be “Charming,…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:00AMMonday, January 19, 2015
RECOMMENDED It’s probably appropriate that a show called “The Table” constantly refers back to the fact that it takes place on, wait for it, a table. The frequent reminders are not onl…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00AM 
