Wednesday, December 11, 2024
The Joffrey Ballet’s annual holiday-time “Nutcracker” extravaganza, that revered tradition, offers so much—but it also raises the question, How much is too much?
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, November 8, 2024
This is a worthy debut for an accomplished playwright who clearly deserves more attention on our side of the border. It’s also proof of how much the Gwydion company has matured over its tw…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMTuesday, October 22, 2024
Based on a 2001 novel by Ian McEwan that was adapted for the screen in 2007, “Atonement” might be described as a sort of postmodern tearjerker: A complex, downbeat story of how a young g…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThursday, October 17, 2024
It’s a play that negates itself, and the feeling it leaves behind isn’t catharsis, but rather frustration.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, September 16, 2024
“Royko: The Toughest Man in Chicago” is mainly, and justifiably, about the public issues confronted and battles fought by a very brave and public writer on an almost daily basis over fou…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMTuesday, August 27, 2024
This is what theater needs to be in our time: a mirror not just to nature but also to the media landscape that surrounds us. Invictus has crafted a memorable production of an important and i…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMTuesday, August 13, 2024
As an illusionist, Jon Tai performs a truly impressive feat that makes the audience gasp; as a storyteller, though, the amicable and unassuming Tai comes off as less than magical.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMWednesday, July 31, 2024
The play never hits a high gear dramatically and ends on an anticlimax. But I still found “Wells and Welles” enjoyable, for the simple reason that, over the play’s single act, we do ge…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, June 14, 2024
For a smallish storefront theater like Invictus to do so well by a play as expansive and demanding as “Three Sisters” is no mean feat, and I wish the show a long and happy run.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, June 3, 2024
New York playwright Jay Stull manages to craft an ingeniously twisty, provocative meditation on artificial intelligence that takes the form of a play within a play within a darkly mysterious…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThursday, May 16, 2024
Performative intensity is a good thing, but it’s not enough to carry a play. We see this clearly in “Turret,” a show with too much heat and not enough light.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThursday, May 9, 2024
Under-plotted, more static than flowing, anticlimactic and sometimes over the top, “The Thanksgiving Play” is not a polished work of theater. But it is a powerful provocation, a real boo…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMTuesday, April 30, 2024
Veteran director Chuck Smith, our foremost August Wilson interpreter, has crafted an emotionally highly charged, exuberant, well-paced production. But even with Smith’s steady hand on the …
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMTuesday, April 23, 2024
Izzard’s dazzling performance holds up a mirror not just to nature, but to ourselves.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, April 1, 2024
With its engaging characters, pointed and fast-paced dialogue, unpredictable but logical storyline and luminous poetic flourishes, “Love Song” is a show that will charm the pants off eve…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThursday, March 14, 2024
“End Days” reminds us that the overtones of strangeness, precariousness and disequilibrium that define reality these days began exactly at the moment when the American public lost its se…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, February 26, 2024
It’s solid, gripping writing, delivered with crystalline sincerity, and it hits like a sledge hammer.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMWednesday, February 21, 2024
The Joffrey Ballet’s current—and spectacular—evening of dance is a modern-day rhapsody in blue, exploring with skill and sensitivity the range of moods and meanings associated with tha…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, February 16, 2024
Its message about the need to stand and fight against a rigged system is as relevant as ever. The work itself, though, has not aged well.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThursday, January 25, 2024
"This is one of the finest productions of a Brecht play I’ve seen in Chicago, or anywhere else for that matter."
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMTuesday, December 12, 2023
The theme of budget-busting inflation is all too relevant right now in the United States. That said, it’s no easy task updating and transposing Fo’s almost fifty-year-old tale of the ins…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMWednesday, November 1, 2023
Visually scintillating, musically varied and appealing, animated by the shamanic, shape-shifting energy of its griot/narrator, “AmericanMYTH: Crossroads” has a hell of a lot going for it…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, October 9, 2023
Gwydion Theatre, a company making its local debut, has chosen its first Chicago play well and executed even better.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMWednesday, October 4, 2023
“The Nacirema Society” could have been an edifying experience for viewers, as well as an entertaining one. That road hasn’t been taken, and the result is a comedy whose laughs lack dee…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, September 15, 2023
More ominous and socially observant than a typical melodrama, Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” is hard to categorize. It’s its own thing—call it a classic American Millerdr…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMWednesday, July 26, 2023
Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land”—the Nobel Prize-winning writer’s 1975 play, masterfully revived at Steppenwolf—is a rich and strange theater experience.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, July 7, 2023
The personal good intentions and grandiose philosophizing offered here might distract us, but they won’t do much to save us.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, June 9, 2023
The play is a real-time portrayal of an audition, that lonely, scary ordeal for actors.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, May 22, 2023
Eli is a TV writer who has become sick of writing fictional stories about fantasy heroes, and instead decides to speak only hard, personal truths designed to free himself and others from the…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, May 5, 2023
The minimum-wage workplace as depicted in this world premiere drama is a nightmare of tedious toil, endless surveillance and absolute disrespect.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, April 24, 2023
The five lead dancers skillfully meld precise, athletic movement—in a contemporary ballet mode—with expressive theatricality.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AM 
