Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Drumbeats pierce the air with discomfiting bluntness, a beeline for the ear soothed into tranquility with music performed by Fred Jackson Jr., Evan Hill, and Chér Jey. Three masked figures …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:56PMThursday, July 18, 2024
The ocean is an obsession for 18-year-old Dontrell Jones III (Blake Dupree) of Baltimore, a high school graduate mere weeks from starting his full ride to Johns Hopkins, with the vastness of…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:27PMWednesday, June 12, 2024
Antigonick, Anne Carson’s 2012 translation of Sophokles’s Antigone, is both heavy and light, with terse language hand-lettered in black and red caps, interleaved with illustrations by Bi…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:16PMTuesday, March 12, 2024
The overture begins with soft and almost wistful strings creating an atmosphere of tentative beauty, like a mist entering as the sun rises—a subtle, dark, and pensive beginning to an opera…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:03PMWednesday, February 21, 2024
The view is sumptuous even before the curtain rises on Mary Zimmerman’s The Matchbox Magic Flute: chandeliers dripping with gems, stars on a painted firmament, a cascade of crimson velvet,…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:08PMTuesday, February 6, 2024
Illinois. Land of Lincoln. The Prairie State. The Inland Empire State. Home to Illinoisans, Illinoisians, and Illinoians. Algonquin for “tribe of superior men.” State bird: the cardinal.…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:46PMThursday, February 1, 2024
The 6th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival swept through Chicago as vigorously as the cold front that accompanied much of it, and puppets dominated venues all around Chicago for t…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:34PMTuesday, August 1, 2023
July 27, 4:58 PM, in the sweltering afternoon of a hothouse week, my friend Jeff and I arrived at a kiosk between a shuttered Starbucks and a Cash4Gold stand on the pedway level of Block 37.…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:08PMThursday, June 8, 2023
When you hear “Charlie Chan,” do you think of a Honolulu police detective with a penchant for fortune cookie proverbs in pidgin English, who was made into an American icon in six novels …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:54AMWednesday, March 15, 2023
Joan of Arc: history or apocrypha, saint or schizophrenic, myth or martyr? We’re all mad here, suggests Trap Door Theatre’s vivacious U.S. premiere production of Matei Vişniec’s Joan …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:57PMTuesday, February 21, 2023
No wings close the expanse of earth that widens the Court Theatre stage to a landscape in Caryl Churchill’s Fen, directed by Vanessa Stalling, with scenic design by Collette Pollard. The t…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:37PMThursday, February 2, 2023
Jasmine Sharma’s Radial Gradient, directed in its world premiere at Shattered Globe Theatre by Grace Dolezal-Ng, is the story of two students and their bid to enter a sorority at their uni…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:39AMThursday, December 15, 2022
Him (Jennifer Lim) coughs on the smoke of the incense she lights as she bows to a temporary altar in her kitchen in Carrollton, Texas. Ma (Wai Ching Ho) is propped up on a hospital bed, wher…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:38PMTuesday, December 6, 2022
Uncle Joe was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. The cardboard boxes littered the floor, filled with Joe’s tools, Joe’s college textbooks, Joe’s albums and […
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:06PMWednesday, November 9, 2022
René Magritte’s 1929 painting La Trahison des images is best known for the text it contains: painted in a curlicue script beneath the curved image of a pipe are the […]
The post When is…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:58AMWednesday, October 12, 2022
Albert Chen (Christopher Thomas Pow) is sitting on a park bench eating what appears to be a burrito or a hot pocket when a hunched old man, dressed in an […]
The post Pecking themselves to…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:04PMFriday, September 30, 2022
Now celebrating its 45th anniversary, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago presents Refraction, a mixed bill of contemporary works consisting of the world premiere of Chicago choreographer Randy Dun…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:35PMThursday, September 22, 2022
On the rooftop of a high-rise, one of many in the forest of silhouettes that comprises our city’s skyline, a professor (Dan Hanrahan) and an automotive engineer (Juanjo López) have […]
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SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:49AMFriday, September 16, 2022
It’s impossible to summarize everything that’s happening onstage this season. (It’s also hard to tell you exactly what COVID-19 precautions are required at venues now; we suggest check…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:09PMThursday, September 15, 2022
On September 24, Toolbox @ Twenty opens at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) to celebrate the Seldoms’ 20th anniversary with an exhibition and performances in a large-scale experiment in [�…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:08PMThursday, September 8, 2022
“Not that it matters, but most of what follows is true,” reads the supertitle projected over a stage sparsely set with stools. Enter a small conference of artists tasked with […]
The p…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:58PMTuesday, September 6, 2022
The stage is dark and lightly clouded with fog—in the distance, a dense heap of jumbled objects signals the end of systems and uses. Booms Day brings us into the […]
The post Seeking a f…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:28PMThursday, August 25, 2022
On August 27 in Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, the eight companies representing the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project—Ayodele Drum and Dance, Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center, D…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:47AMWednesday, August 24, 2022
In March 2020, Theatre L’Acadie opened a production of Tennessee Williams’s The Two Character Play the same week the city locked down for the COVID-19 pandemic: sibling actors, mad and […
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:51AMFriday, July 22, 2022
On plantations in the 1800s, plantation owners used diversity as a means of division. “We lay great stress on the necessity of having our labor mixed. By employing different nationalities,…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:05PMWednesday, July 13, 2022
“When people die, they move from the first person to the third person. They also move from the present tense to the past tense.” These words are spoken by Christine (Kendra Thulin), who …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:48AMThursday, June 30, 2022
The grounds are defined by meandering turns of grass and dirt, a rainfall of lightbulbs, a shining blue curve that sometimes picks up projections and reflections of what might be ghosts or c…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:39AMWednesday, June 22, 2022
Summer is officially here, in case the sweat and lightning bugs weren’t enough of a clue. In addition to the shows and artists we profiled in our summer arts preview issue this week, we’…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:01PMFriday, June 10, 2022
For the first time since a pandemic hiatus, The Fly Honey Show is live for three days only of sparkle, sweat, and shimmy. Begun in 2010 with about 30 performers in the living room of the DIY…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:01PMWednesday, June 8, 2022
The year is 1994, and rock star Jacqueline Miller (Diana DeGarmo) is zigzagging the country on a tour. Her dishonest manager has absconded with her earnings, her deadbeat saxophonist boyfrie…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:08PMMonday, June 6, 2022
Two years into this pestilence, the misery of war, the disappointment of mankind day after day weighing down desperate minds, with a future certain of nothing but social and planetary destru…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:18PM 
