Wednesday, September 18, 2024
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 …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:25PMThursday, July 18, 2024
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 da…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:44PMTuesday, June 4, 2024
The sexual round-robin that swirls through the heart of composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim’s lilting masterpiece A Little Night Music is set in motion by regrets over paths both taken and …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:48PMThe Enigmatist run time is officially 95 minutes, but you’ll want to get there a solid half hour early so you can crack the codes in the “puzzle garden” that greets audiences on the si…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:30PMThursday, May 23, 2024
The galvanic power of language to create and destroy is easy to take for granted. Language defines how we think, how others perceive us, and how we engage with the world. So what happens whe…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:04PMWednesday, May 15, 2024
It’s been too long since actor/director/writer/singer/dancer/Obama media strategist Paul Oakley Stovall dedicated his prolific talents to Chicago’s theater community. A regular on stages…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:00PMFriday, May 10, 2024
Editor’s Note: Since all the plays presented in Hamburgers & Disappointment are for two people, we thought it made some sense to have two critics writing about the festival. Capacity a…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:51AMWednesday, April 24, 2024
Brooklyn Laundry is a deceptive show: It begins with a meet-cute and briefly lulls you into the sense that it will unspool as something of a rom-com. But playwright John Patrick Shanley isn�…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:02AMWednesday, April 3, 2024
I’ve seen Jersey Boys at least six times, which I mention not as a flex but for context. It’s a fantastic show, but over the years the various productions have blurred together and becom…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:51AMWhen Harry Milas makes a royal flush materialize from the chaos of a deck we just inarguably saw shuffled at the hands of several of his 35 audience members, it’s not magic. Instead, he ex…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:27AMWednesday, March 27, 2024
Steppenwolf has long had a way with wildly dysfunctional family dramas. From Anton Chekhov’s Seagull to Sam Shepard’s True West to Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County, the off-Loop inst…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:58PMWednesday, March 6, 2024
It’s totally easy to make fun of the 1980s. Shoulder pads you could poke an eye out with. Leg warmers over fishnets. The elevation of Bret Easton Ellis into a literary celebrity. But it wa…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:20PMTuesday, January 23, 2024
Longtime cabaret chanteuse Meghan Murphy has always had an outsize stage persona. For years her “Big Red” shows (the name refers to both Murphy’s supermodel stature and flaming red hai…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:48PMWednesday, January 10, 2024
Teatro ZinZanni Presents: Love, Chaos, & Dinner has been a reliably entertaining fantasia of top-tier circus hijinks since it debuted here way back in the before times of 2019. (For a fe…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:48AMThursday, November 9, 2023
I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Stephen Sondheim’s appallingly timely tale of U.S. assassins (and wannabe assassins) since it premiered in 1990. I can tell you that Theo�…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:07AMWednesday, October 4, 2023
At first, it seems like a match made in heaven. Or rather, Mount Olympus. But marriages between goddesses and mortals are complicated, and throughout Greek myth, their unions are defined by …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:41AMMonday, October 2, 2023
Three actors play more than 50 characters over a span of some 160 years in the TimeLine Theatre/Broadway in Chicago collaboration on the epic drama The Lehman Trilogy. But it’s not dauntin…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:34AMWednesday, September 6, 2023
The titular showgirl in Gypsy isn’t necessarily Gypsy Rose Lee, the reluctant vaudeville child star who—per the “musical fable” from Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Jule Styne (score) and…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:46PMFriday, August 18, 2023
Sometimes more didactic than dramatically sound, Ella Hickson’s The Writer remains enraging and engaging as it offers a graphic crash course in the perils of playwriting while female. And,…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:18AMFriday, July 7, 2023
At the crux of writer/director Kareem Fahmy’s promising but incomplete drama is a father and a daughter, whose relationship is cruelly subject to the seemingly random structures of immigra…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:51AMThursday, June 8, 2023
Pippin was a forerunner in the big swing of musical theater away from the happy-ever-after era that defined the genre’s “golden age.” The 1972 show by Stephen Schwartz (music) and Roge…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:31AMThursday, May 4, 2023
The dramaturgy displays alone for Mercury Theater Chicago’s Big River, based on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, taught me more about Mark Twain’s 1830s-set, biting antislavery novel than…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:17AMTuesday, May 2, 2023
The woods are leaf-free spires of light, Cinderella’s sisters are outfitted in bad 80s prom dresses, and Rapunzel’s coil of blonde hair is a rope in the national touring production of In…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:28PMThursday, April 27, 2023
The devil goes down to Washington (D.C.) in the 1955 musical Damn Yankees, and he’s rarely been more irresistible than in his current incarnation at the Marriott Lincolnshire. Damn Yan…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:01PMThursday, February 23, 2023
Nilo Cruz’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics is a lit-fuse kind of drama, beginning with a slow but unmistakable simmer that ultimately detonates with scorching, devastating…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:00AMThursday, February 9, 2023
First, some mathematical context: I’ve seen A Chorus Line at least 18 times since 1976, the year the first national tour rolled into Chicago. Prior to last week, I was certain the brillian…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:00PMWednesday, January 18, 2023
The hardest working queen in showbiz? That’d be Ginger Minj (fight me). After three stints on RuPaul’s Drag Race (season seven, All Stars 2, and All Stars 6), the breakout star and two-t…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:49AMWednesday, December 21, 2022
Nearly 69 years since its birth as a smash movie, the seasonally ubiquitous White Christmas remains a good, old-fashioned holiday chestnut. It also remains an objectively odious, old holiday…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:12AMTuesday, December 20, 2022
The ghost story of Christmas was originally a way to bring attention to the problem of poverty.
SOURCE: Playbill at 04:06PMWednesday, November 23, 2022
At 25 years old, The Lion King has been seen by more than 110 million people and played every continent but Antarctica. Between global warming and ticket demand, it’s probably […]
The po…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:09AMTuesday, November 15, 2022
No matter your views on Christmas and the bulging Santa’s sack of psycho/socio/political/familial drama wrapped up in the sparkle-plenty holiday, this much I know is true: If you aren’t …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:02PM 
