What a difference nine years makes. When Paul Slade Smith’s witty, political farce, then called A Real Lulu, premiered in the summer of 2015 at the Peninsula Players in Door Country, Wisco…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:11AMIn the program for Pulse Theatre Chicago’s world premiere production of Beneath the Willow Tree, playwright Isis Elizabeth tells us a little about the origins of her play. Begun during the…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:54AMWhen legend becomes fact, musicalize the legend (to paraphrase John Ford). Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone follow this strategy again and again over the course of their rousing 1969 musical …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:10AMCollaboraction began in the late nineties as a tiny, itinerant, non-Equity theater company, performing low-budget productions of contemporary American plays. Over the years the company has g…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFor those of us who know and love Shakespeare mostly for his most popular plays—the often produced comedies, tragedies, and histories—Pericles is a hard play to warm up to. Pericles’s …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:36AMBecause theater lovers love to be dramatic, we constantly divide shows into hits and flops, shows that soar and shows that don’t. But what about all those mid shows—shows that sometimes …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:21PMIn the late 80s and early 90s, Del Close, in the workshops he taught at iO, used to talk about slowing improv down, not forcing things, and allowing the scenes, characters, and eventually p…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:21PMUsually in productions of Romeo & Juliet, the craziest character in the play is the clever, word-drunk, not-quite-right-in-his-head Mercutio. It is Mercutio, after all, who delivers tha…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:38PMThe term “jukebox musical” is usually used in contempt to describe a musical revue with no book and no character development—just a collection of popular songs plopped on the stage, su…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:31PMWhen Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller died at 39 of pneumonia on December 15, 1943, while riding a train from LA to Chicago, he left behind a legacy as a popular singer, composer, and perform…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:16PMOrlando-based playwright Ashleigh Ann Gardner’s fascinating science-fiction play is set in a dystopian future, in a high-tech bunker where a scientist and her AI companion (really just a d…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:16PM“Any idiot can face a crisis,” Russian playwright Anton Chekhov wrote in one of his cheerier moods. “It’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.” Actually, the quote may belong…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:43PMBased on the life experiences of Sonny Mills’s great-aunt, Agnete Ottosen, in Denmark before, during, and after the Nazi occupation, The Danish Play tries to pack way too much into its nea…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:07PMMPAACT resident writer Shepsu Aakhu does something remarkable in this gentle, metaphysical play. He creates a world that successfully blends ritual and realism without succumbing to the weak…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:06PMSome shows age well, some don’t. You’d think a silly 74-year-old musical comedy like Guys and Dolls, with its cartoonish characters and sitcom plotlines (like, gambler makes a bet he can…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:21AMUnder the best of circumstances, it would be hard to make this 1983 musical soar. The story by playwright Sybille Pearson about three prosperous white, middle-class couples coping with pregn…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:40AMWritten and directed by Grant Batdorff, this satire of spy thrillers for Two Chairs Theatre at the Annoyance begins with a bang: a wry, spot-on parody of those bombastic title sequences popu…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:31AMTennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire is an iconic play that lives up to its reputation. Solidly written, packed with vivid characters and terrific dialogue, the play may run nea…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:16PMWilliam Finn and Rachel Sheinkin’s 2005 musical about a swarm of blooming, buzzing tween-age lexophiles began life as a fully improvised play, C-R-E-P-U-S-C-U-L-E, created by Rebecca Feldm…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:42AMThe title of the show is an overstatement. Yes, the show does have west coast roots; the particular version of long-form used in the show was developed at the LA-based, Second City–influen…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:21AMIf you wanted an example of a pretty well-structured contemporary American play you could do worse than Bruce Graham’s drama The Outgoing Tide. Graham’s characters—an elderly man with …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:20PMLynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1998 Tony Award-winning score for Ragtime (book by Terrence McNally) has many virtues—strong songs, strong characters, moments of great drama—but for…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:35AMThere is something about Anton Chekhov’s first successful full-length play, The Seagull, that attracts playwrights to try their hand at creating their own adaptations—faithful or otherwi…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:29PMWhen people talk about the glory years of Chicago theater they rarely mention Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. After opening in London’s West End in 1992, with Jane Ho…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMLet’s begin with what this 2006 jukebox musical is not. It is not a rich, textured, nuanced, moving, memorable musical biography of Johnny Cash. It does not attempt to do onstage what the …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:38AMAt a time when so many larger, established theaters are cutting back their seasons, laying off staff, or suspending operations, smaller theaters, like the relatively young Forest Park Theatr…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:39AMIs there a Shakespeare comedy better suited for an outdoor production in a park in July than A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Much of the play itself takes place outdoors in the summer, in the w…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:42AMAlan Janes’s musical Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story is a clever piece of work, mixing the best elements of a biographical play, a jukebox musical, and a cover band concert into a bubbly, tig…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:19AMThe Practical Theatre Company has earned its place in Chicago comedy history. In the 80s, this plucky troupe of young, energetic, gifted comic actors lit up stages around Chicago—including…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:06PMThe Puritans in New England lived fearful, close-minded, claustrophobic lives. Disdainful of all other Christian sects (especially Catholics and Quakers) and of the Native Americans who they…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:30PMThis double bill of plays from two very different theater companies (Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble and CIRCA-Pintig), working in two very different styles—one abstract, movement-based, very…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:35PM
