Tuesday, December 4, 2018
Fans of Theo Ubique Theatre, the diminutive, distinguished Chicago theater that really started the now-buoyant trend of micro-musicals in Chicago, have been left nibbling cold turkey this fa…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:25PM[SHARE]Monday, December 3, 2018
Even jukebox musicals and celebrity bio-shows need clear reasons for theatrical being. In her one-woman show, Elaine Stritch memorably described herself as a "existential problem in tights."…
SOURCE: New York Daily News at 09:00PM[SHARE]Friday, November 30, 2018
There is an excellent play buried inside Spenser Davis' "Plainclothes," an ambitious but overstuffed situation comedy from Chicago's burgeoning Broken Nose Theatre. Possibly an entire televi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:30PM[SHARE]Thursday, November 29, 2018
Twenty years ago, something strange called American Girl Place opened in Chicago. It was years ahead of its time. In fact, only now is it becoming clear just how far ahead the thinking behin…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AM[SHARE]Tuesday, November 27, 2018
The aptly named "Familiar," now at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company under the skilled direction of Danya Taymor, is a fine example of the kind of play that many well-educated children of immi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:40PM[SHARE]Monday, November 26, 2018
Ricky Jay, who died last Saturday, was the most genial, smart and loquacious magician you ever could hope to meet. Looking back on all the magic shows I've reviewed over the years in Chicago…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:00PM[SHARE]Thursday, November 22, 2018
On Thanksgiving Eve at the Oriental Theatre, several hundred of us took time to give thanks for an all-American freedom of expression " the precious right to make fun of our elders, spoof re…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00PM[SHARE]Ready to plan your holiday theater-going? Let me see if I can help. Everything mentioned in this column has been reviewed in, and recommended by, the Tribune, either this year or not too lon…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 21, 2018
The touchstone of the glorious Disney animation renaissance, "Beauty and the Beast" had eight masterful songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken when it was released as a movie: the likes of "…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:10PM[SHARE]How's your week going? Let's hope more smoothly than for the tinny hero of the gorgeous new show at Lookingglass Theatre who, in short order, is tormented by a big baby, propelled from a win…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:25PM[SHARE]Anyone who studied Jane Austen " or read her novels for pleasure " will tell you one thing above all else. She wrote juicy, deeply complex characters. This is why her six major novels have b…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AM[SHARE]Tuesday, November 20, 2018
The usual admonition to turn off your cell phones has a particular intensity at "The Woman in Black," now at the Royal George Theatre. "We use very low level levels of light in this producti…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:45AM[SHARE]Monday, November 19, 2018
Given the excitement occasioned by 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now the youngest woman ever to be elected to the United States Congress, dollars to donuts that a lot of people in TV…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:30PM[SHARE]The Cirque du Soleil will return to Chicago in 2019. But its tent will be pitched not outside the United Center, as has been the case for years, but in the south parking lot of Soldier Field…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:15AM[SHARE]Sunday, November 18, 2018
Some 26 years after its signature chopper first descended on the Auditorium Theatre, "Miss Saigon" is back in Chicago and still out-selling every other show in town. (Except one, which has a…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:30PM[SHARE]Friday, November 16, 2018
William Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" takes its name from the coming of the Feast of the Epiphany " probably now best known as the day when you're supposed to take down your holiday decorati…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:30PM[SHARE]Thursday, November 15, 2018
Hoosiers are a great mystery to the people of Broadway. Apparently, they live in small, economically challenged towns best flown over. They insist on homophobic traditional values and, when …
SOURCE: New York Daily News at 10:00PM[SHARE]What should be the arts policy of the new administration headed by the incoming Democratic governor of the State of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker? You cannot answer that question without also aski…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:55PM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 14, 2018
"The Last Session" " which I doubt you have seen staged before " is surely the only gospel-infused musical that deals with the AIDS crisis that plagued America in the waning years of the 20t…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:00PM[SHARE]Tuesday, November 13, 2018
"We will never," said Cameron Mackintosh, sounding unusually wistful, "be all together doing this again." Mackintosh " often known by the sobriquet "Mister Producer" and the most successful …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:20PM[SHARE]After 92 years, the name of the Oriental Theatre is going to disappear. Early next year, the venerable, historic venue built in Chicago at 24 W. Randolph St. in 1926 on the site of the Iroqu…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:57AM[SHARE]The long-awaited, $75 million restoration of the 93-year-old Uptown Theatre " among the highest profile historic rehabs in the city's history " will begin next summer, Chicago's Community De…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:50AM[SHARE]Sunday, November 11, 2018
In the summer of 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted, weirdly causing a stormy following summer in Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary Godwin was chilling with her lover (and soon to be her…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:30PM[SHARE]Friday, November 9, 2018
In the most powerful moment in "Bitter Earth," a new two-character play by Harrison David Rivers, we see a young white man berating his African-American lover for what he sees as shameful po…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:05PM[SHARE]Thursday, November 8, 2018
Stare hard into the gorgeous eyes of that gigantic gorilla, people: they're like deep emotional pools, transfixing in their moist, needy intensity. If they gave out Tony Awards for the peepe…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:00PM[SHARE]Tuesday, November 6, 2018
Sometimes, kind readers will write to thank me for pointing me toward a show they really liked. Other times, they'll ask me, usually in upper-case, some variation on the theme of: what was I…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:55PM[SHARE]The following is excerpted from "Rise Up!: Broadway and American Society from 'Angels in America' to 'Hamilton.'" The book about theater and social progress is by the Tribune's Chris Jones a…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AM[SHARE]Sunday, November 4, 2018
"American Son" is a tense, didactic Broadway play for our age of racially charged mistrust. In its best moments " all of which involve the star Kerry Washington " this work by lawyer-playwri…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:00PM[SHARE]Thursday, November 1, 2018
For some younger audience members inside the Helen Hayes Theatre, Harvey Fierstein's "Torch Song" must seem like a weird relic from another time " a 1982 experience, meaning a trip back to w…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]Every great playwright is a Cassandra " willing and able to warn of future disaster, should certain human tendencies go unchecked. But few relished that role with the intensity and complexit…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:20PM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Those of us who long ago hitched our covered wagons to the talent train that is Calamity West have been waiting for that play. You know, the one that propels her toward what her talent deser…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:00PM[SHARE] 
