Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Manchester — whose big Lancashire heart was broken into pieces Monday night — is England's Second City. It's not the second-biggest city in terms of population: Birmingham, in the Midlan…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:17PMTuesday, May 23, 2017
Actor Samuel G. Roberson Jr., who died of pneumonia Sunday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, was diagnosed with leukemia when he was 8 years old. That experience, said his father, Samuel Ro…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:26PMOn Monday night at the Steppenwolf Theatre — a rare chance to see such a talent in an intimate setting — Audra McDonald ordered up a little singalong to "I Could Have Danced All Night," …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:17PMMonday, May 22, 2017
Mary Chase's "Harvey" — a Colorado journalist's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1944 Broadway play about a man with an imaginary lapine friend — actually has a good deal in common with Ken Kesey'…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:34PMSunday, May 21, 2017
Albert Einstein is an ideal role for Mike Nussbaum, the new show, "Relativity," at the Northlight Theatre reveals. I speak not merely of the fusion of extraordinary mental capability, althou…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:18PMAging clowns were buying aerialists drinks at the bar. Publicists of four decades standing stood shoulder-to-shoulder with retired jugglers. Jackets read "The Medeiros Troupe," long-faded…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00AMFriday, May 19, 2017
Come with the Theater Loop to the circus: The Tribune's Chris Jones and photographer Zbigniew Bzdak will be at the final performances by the Ringling Bros. in New York, backstage and ringsi…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:30PMIn 1925, the 19-year-old Josephine Baker moved to France to appear in "La Revue Negre" at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. For a hugely talented young American who was born poor and stymied b…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:34PMTime for the lofty to ascend the podium and offer a few words of speechified wisdom to the restless class of 2017, all ready, willing and eager to rectify a nation currently in chaos. At lea…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMThursday, May 18, 2017
Before there was Hell in a Handbag Productions, there was Sweetcorn Playhouse in Andersonville, the 60-seat home of Sweetback Productions where a young man named David Cerda once frolicked i…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMTuesday, May 16, 2017
Despite a tryout trek out West, a book and direction by no less than James Lapine and a mid-process rebooting that replaced much of the cast and most of William Finn's initial score, the mus…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:15PMMonday, May 15, 2017
Few things are as vexing in the theater as plays wherein the characters spend all their time on the phone. Unless you have some kind of exceptionally smart or distinctive metaphor for relati…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:29PMFriday, May 12, 2017
Is there such a thing as a third space for company dancers, and what might that be? I speak not here of Starbucks but of a place somewhere between the sanctuary of the rehearsal room — whe…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:44PMHealth officials in Minnesota have been dealing in recent days with a costly and dangerous outbreak of measles in children, centered in the large community of Somali immigrants in and around…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:16AMThursday, May 11, 2017
Downtown Chicago is bursting with shows this spring weekend. More than 15,000 people will be in or around the Loop on Friday and Saturday night, watching a show. There's more on offer than a…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMWednesday, May 10, 2017
Jonathan Larson was not much interested in legacy: His gorgeous masterpiece "Rent" is an ode to living for the moment. "There is no future. There is no past," its characters sing. "I live th…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:58PMTuesday, May 9, 2017
At one point in "Objects in the Mirror," the gripping story of an African refugee who somehow makes it out of a Guinean refugee camp that held 90,000 hopefuls in a petri dish of malaria, dys…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:46PMMonday, May 8, 2017
Dating back to the days of Nick Offerman and the late, lamented Defiant Theatre, Chicago has a long and tortured history with slasher theater. But although the desire to bring some of the ic…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:51PMFriday, May 5, 2017
There once were more than 350 black-owned clubs and other businesses in the jazz-infused Black Bottom (the term derived from the color of the soil), the east side neighborhood of Detroit tha…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:58PMLast Sunday night, a group of America's most prominent chefs, restaurateurs and marketing executives gathered at Vermilion, the remarkable River North restaurant renowned for owner Rohini De…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMThursday, May 4, 2017
Prolonged emotional intimacy can be tricky at the Marriott Theatre — an in-the-round auditorium where the physical stillness of a scene always is limited by the audience's tolerance for wa…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:06PMSurely no playwright has penned more works about African-American history — especially about the black intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries — than Charles Smith. I've been …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMTuesday, May 2, 2017
In the middle of the 1940s, an employment agency named Castle, Baron and Associates began advertising Chicago factory jobs in Puerto Rico; those who made the move north were mostly single. A…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:02PMMonday, May 1, 2017
The new musicals "Dear Evan Hansen," "Come From Away," "Groundhog Day the Musical," and "Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812" all scored their expected Tony Award nominations in New Yo…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:07PMWilliam Osetek, the director of the highly entertaining new production of "Chicago" at the Drury Lane Theatre in Oakbrook Terrace, has been trying to get the rights to this most deliciously …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:59PMSunday, April 30, 2017
What — beyond a better understanding of the social and economic consequences of English phonology — does Eliza Doolittle actually get from Henry Higgins? That question has long hung over…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:40PMFriday, April 28, 2017
Writing an appreciation of Martha Lavey is far from easy, not least because Lavey, whose death this week at the age of 60 plunged all who love Chicago theater into a deep state of mourning, …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00AMThursday, April 27, 2017
The sudden exit of a spouse can clear the stubborn male mind, as can the well-timed slam of a door. Thus scholars and students have argued for years over whether Henrik Ibsen, the author of …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:35PMA quiz for you, theater-loving reader: When was the last time a professional Chicago theater company produced "Chicago," a musical that burnishes the city's scandalous reputation each and ev…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMWednesday, April 26, 2017
Most works of art dealing with the post-traumatic stress suffered by those who served and saw action overseas have dealt with the war in Vietnam or the wars in Iraq. The so-called Greatest G…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PMTuesday, April 25, 2017
An indefatigable, unstinting and intellectually voracious artistic director who reinvented Chicago’s most audacious and aggressive theater for a new era, Martha Lavey wrestled the Steppenw…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:39PM 
