Tuesday, September 30, 2025
A thing of beauty is a joy forever. " John Keats Sleep-deprived and fortified with four cups of coffee, I hauled my cranky, cynical self on a Sunday morning to the Chicago Children's Theatre…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:23PM[SHARE]Sunday, September 28, 2025
TWO CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR An aging, reclusive movie star strikes up a relationship with a struggling writer. It may sound familiar but this isn't Sunset Boulevard, more's the pit…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:00AM[SHARE]Tuesday, September 23, 2025
THREE WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL In 1978, five women gather in an upper-middle-class home in Karaj, Iran, to primp and prepare themselves; one of them is getting married and being that they are …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:02AM[SHARE]Monday, September 22, 2025
WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY Late in the first act of Lauren Gunderson's The Book of Will, a character makes an impassioned plea to her husband, John Heminges, one of William Shakespea…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:00AM[SHARE]Sunday, September 21, 2025
NOBODY PUTS THIS BABY IN A CORNER A set doesn't get any sparser than the one for Gangsta Baby, in the sense that there isn't one. You step in off the street into a basement with two dozen ch…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, September 18, 2025
TAKE A TRIP DOWN THIS RABBIT HOLE Coping with familial grief has long been fertile ground for theatre, from Rabbit Hole to Hamlet to Antigone, performed almost 2500 years ago at the birth of…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:51AM[SHARE]A STAR VEHICLE ON THE ROAD TO FRANCIS GUINAN I confess to some amount of trepidation as I settled into my seat at the Goodman Theatre, launching its centennial season with the world premiere…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:50AM[SHARE]Tuesday, September 16, 2025
A CLIFFHANGER For the Midwest premiere of TL;DR: Thelma Louise: Dyke Remix, a rock musical by Ellarose Chary (book & lyrics) and Brandon James Gwinn (music and lyrics), the entirety of t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:52AM[SHARE]Sunday, September 7, 2025
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE… Early in the proceedings of Things with Friends, the new play by Kristoffer Diaz (Hell's Kitchen, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity) a character dismisses an…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:09PM[SHARE]Thursday, August 28, 2025
WHO NEEDS A HEALTHY CORTEX WHEN YOU'VE GOT THIRTY-TWO SHOWSTOPPERS? The urge to create has served as a muse for countless forms of art: literature, opera, film, and theatre are littered with…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:42PM[SHARE]Saturday, August 23, 2025
The circus is in town! The entrance to the Cambria Hotel on West Randolph Street in Chicago is so nondescript as to be almost invisible. Barely wider than its revolving door, you could walk …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:25PM[SHARE]Friday, August 22, 2025
MUFFLE THIS MUFFED; IT'S COMEDY LOST IN THE NOISE The films of Christopher Guest are sui generis. From hundreds of hours of improvisation, his talented troupe of actors create memorable char…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:21AM[SHARE]Monday, August 11, 2025
RIDE THIS TRAIN TO THE END OF THE LINE One of Chicago's oldest store-front theaters, City Lit, opens its 45th season with a production of Pulitzer winner, Stephen Adly Gurgis' Jesus Hopped T…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:50AM[SHARE]Saturday, August 9, 2025
FROM TWEE TO TRÈS MAGNIFIQUE It's fascinating how some stories lend themselves better to one medium than the other. In 2001, the French romantic comedy, Amélie was an unexpected worldwid…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:27PM[SHARE]Friday, August 8, 2025
DON'T LET THIS PARADE PASS YOU BY In 1913, in Atlanta, Georgia, the body of Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old factory laborer, was found in the basement of a pencil factory. On the flimsiest …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:00AM[SHARE]Monday, July 28, 2025
GAME. SET. NOT QUITE MATCH. Tennis great and feminist icon Billie Jean King gets the biography treatment in Billie Jean by Lauren Gunderson. Opening the new season of Chicago Shakespeare, th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:11PM[SHARE]Tuesday, July 15, 2025
A FITFULLY AMUSING THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM IN SKOKIE A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a glorious farce, a 20th-century construction based on the characters an…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:51AM[SHARE]Saturday, July 12, 2025
THE BUSINESS OF NOSTALGIA: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST ALL DRESSED UP WITH NOWHERE TO GO Last Thursday night, a rainy July 10th, ensconced in the stunningly beautiful Cadillac Palace Theatre, I fin…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:12PM[SHARE]Thursday, July 10, 2025
SEND IN THE CLOWNS Farce is not a style of performance one sees too often these days and that's probably because it is extraordinarily difficult to pull off, requiring complete commitment fr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:58AM[SHARE]Wednesday, July 2, 2025
COLOR ME DISAPPOINTED I came to see the Goodman Theatre's current production of The Color Purple with a complicated history. I devoured Alice Walker's novel three times as a callow teenager …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:19AM[SHARE]Monday, June 30, 2025
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE What is theatre? This was the question that popped into my head as I took my seat in the tiny TUTA Theatre space in Chicago's Ravenswood Manor neighborhood, ready to t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:14PM[SHARE]Monday, June 16, 2025
SICKENINGLY FUNNY Noah Diaz's You Will Get Sick, which opened last night at Steppenwolf, is an odd bird of a play. It begins with an irresistible premise: a middle-aged woman, Callan, respon…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:54PM[SHARE]STORYTELLING THAT LAUNCHES A THOUSAND SHIPS There is a moment in Court Theatre's fourth (!) iteration of An Iliad where The Poet holds a flashlight below his chin"I immediately flashed back …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:00AM[SHARE] 
