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]Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Despite the title, Bess Wohl's "Small Mouth Sounds" is fundamentally a play about silence. To experience the work at Chicago's A Red Orchid Theatre, where the show opened this past weekend, …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:40PM[SHARE]Come March, Berwyn's much-loved 16th Street Theater will no longer have an address on the leafy suburban street from which it took its name. It's moving west to spiffier new digs on Harlem A…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:30AM[SHARE]Monday, October 29, 2018
Billie Holiday was dead at the age of 44. Had Lady Day moved to Europe like Nina Simone, Dexter Gordon and so many of her other peers, would her life story have had a different ending? That'…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]Sunday, October 28, 2018
When the great American playwright Terrence McNally wrote "Master Class" in 1995, it was generally accepted that studying the arts with a famously tempestuous diva " like, say, the late Mari…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:45PM[SHARE]Friday, October 26, 2018
Now a hipster highway, Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago was known in the first decades of the 20th century as Dinner Pail Avenue " it was so named for the legions of workers carrying their food a…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:00PM[SHARE]Here's why you need to get out more and see international artists' perspectives on our riven America and its fraught democratic processes. You will encounter things that no U.S. company woul…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:15PM[SHARE]Thursday, October 25, 2018
The 86-year-old Elaine May " who last appeared on Broadway 52 years ago in a show that ran for about 30 seconds " is gifted with a face formed in the shape of a smile. And anyone who remembe…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]Before we get into Betty Buckley as compared with Bette Midler, trains and parades passing by, Sunday clothes to be put on, galloping waiters and all the rest of that glorious Broadway mishe…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:30PM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Whatever day you might have, the evening will be improved by a visit to a Colombian circus. Just such a troupe, Circolombia, has arrived at Chicago Shakespeare Theater's fabulous new Navy Pi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:15AM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Behold the brand-new Green Line Performing Arts Center. As of Nov. 10, Chicago will have a well-equipped, 100-seat, $5.5 million, storefront-style theater, replete with separate rehearsal sp…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:15PM[SHARE]Monday, October 22, 2018
The Goodman Theatre's gripping and highly stylized production of Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge" and American Blues Theater's lively staging of "Buddy " The Buddy Holly Story" were …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:00PM[SHARE]During World War I, many British soldiers, which is to say many young men of 16 or 17 years old, were court martialed and then shot, proverbially at dawn, by a firing squad made up of combat…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:30PM[SHARE]Sunday, October 21, 2018
Jez Butterworth's "The Ferryman," which opened with a howling roar of cacophonous humanity on Sunday night on Broadway, packs more juicy and prophetic Anglo-Irish storytelling into a fantast…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:00PM[SHARE]Friday, October 19, 2018
Aged out of haunted houses, prefer cocktails to punch, like puzzles and intimate conversation and yet still craving a seasonal scare? "Masque Macabre" is here to serve your lingering date-ni…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:50PM[SHARE]Thursday, October 18, 2018
"Truth isn't truth," Rudy Giuliani famously spluttered on "Meet the Press" last summer, trumping even presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway's much-derided coinage of the phrase "alternative …
SOURCE: New York Daily News at 10:00PM[SHARE]"Truth isn't truth," Rudy Giuliani famously spluttered on "Meet the Press" last summer, trumping even presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway's much-derided coinage of the phrase "alternative …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:00PM[SHARE]The Chicago actor Fredric Stone spelled his first name in such a way as to confound careless critics and curse copy editors. "I used to tease him about that," said Chuck Stransky, a friend o…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:45PM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 17, 2018
If you doubt that the ferocious passion of one gifted performer for one iconic role can propel an entire young cast to raise its game to the rafters, then you have not seen E. Faye Butler at…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:50PM[SHARE]When the national tour of Jerry Zaks' hit Broadway revival of "Hello, Dolly!" arrives in Chicago next week, Betty Buckley will play the starring role of Dolly Gallagher Levi, the matchmaker …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AM[SHARE]Monday, October 15, 2018
With "Avenue Q" going gangbusters on his main stage, L. Walter Stearns of the Mercury Theater is stuffing a full-blown, surround-sound "Pippin" inside his spiffy new cabaret-and-cocktails sp…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:10PM[SHARE]Sunday, October 14, 2018
As 50 percent of the Weather Girls, Martha Wash is a platinum-selling recording artist responsible not only for the iconic disco anthem "It's Raining Men" but also for many of the potent sou…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:25PM[SHARE]Friday, October 12, 2018
I first saw Pearl Cleage's "Flyin' West," a potboiler of a show set in an all-black frontier town in 1898, in Montgomery, Ala. It was 1998 and Cleage " a prolific novelist as well as a playw…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:30PM[SHARE]Thursday, October 11, 2018
The U.S. airline industry " essentially an oligarchy " has come to love the word "discipline." Abandoning its past practice of adding competitive routes and bigger planes on a whim, the like…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:20PM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Chicago's fall theater season opened in a flurry of activity in recent days. Before I talk you through what I think you should see, let me start by saying this has been a golden fall for can…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:05PM[SHARE]Sunday, October 7, 2018
The Faustian myth " wherein some ambitious dude sells his soul to the devil to score some instant gratification " is one of literature's most popular themes. There's Christopher Marlowe's "T…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:00PM[SHARE]Friday, October 5, 2018
Ah, Switzerland. Home of chocolate, cleanliness, secret bank accounts, beautiful scenery, lonely wanderers, studied neutrality and a carefully veiled past. What might it be like to stare int…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:40PM[SHARE]"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" is an atypical project for the Steppenwolf for Young Adults program, which for years has produced either original, socially conscious work…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:55PM[SHARE]Thursday, October 4, 2018
When a furious Brett Kavanaugh decried his United States Supreme Court confirmation history as a "circus," he was using the word as a pejorative: He was describing what he believed to be a c…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:35PM[SHARE]Noah Weisberg, the fine young actor playing Willy Wonka in the musical version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," has a tough gig. He has to follow the late Gene Wilder, whose twinkle-e…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:10PM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 3, 2018
On Tuesday night, the Chicago Cubs learned a tough lesson from "Macbeth": "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:30PM[SHARE] 
