Wednesday, July 24, 2024
In 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 01:21PMTuesday, July 9, 2024
Usually 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 03:38PMWednesday, July 3, 2024
The 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 05:16PMTuesday, June 18, 2024
Orlando-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 05:16PMWednesday, June 12, 2024
“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 01:43PMWednesday, May 29, 2024
Based 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 04:07PMWednesday, May 1, 2024
MPAACT 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 04:06PMWednesday, April 24, 2024
Some 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 10:40AMWednesday, April 17, 2024
Written 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 11:31AMWednesday, March 27, 2024
Tennessee 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 04:16PMWednesday, March 13, 2024
William 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 11:42AMWednesday, March 6, 2024
The 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 10:21AMWednesday, February 7, 2024
If 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 03:20PMThursday, November 9, 2023
Lynn 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 10:35AMThursday, October 19, 2023
There 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 02:29PMThursday, September 21, 2023
When 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 11:00AMThursday, September 14, 2023
Let’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 10:38AMThursday, August 10, 2023
At 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 11:39AMWednesday, July 19, 2023
Is 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 11:42AMFriday, July 7, 2023
Alan 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 11:19AMFriday, June 23, 2023
The 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 12:06PMWednesday, May 24, 2023
The 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 04:30PMThursday, May 11, 2023
This 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 03:35PMThursday, May 4, 2023
Pay no attention to the show’s baggy, forgettable, mildly pompous title. This smart, tightly written play is at once a very funny satire of the Star Wars saga—and Star Wars fans—a hear…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:18AMWednesday, April 26, 2023
There have been many versions of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s Grease: the raunchy one that premiered at Kingston Mines in 1971; a much cleaned-up version that opened a year later in New Y…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:07PMThe idea of turning Richard Linklater’s brilliant 2003 film comedy, School of Rock (about a struggling guitarist/substitute teacher coaching his prep-school students on how to, well, rock)…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:57AMThursday, March 23, 2023
Dame Peggy Ashcroft considered the role of Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s notoriously difficult Happy Days a “summit part,” one of those roles, like Hamlet or King Lear, that tests an acto…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:53PMThursday, February 9, 2023
Big Fish bombed on Broadway. Based on Tim Burton’s 2003 movie version of Daniel Wallace’s 1998 novel Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, the show, with a score by Andrew Lippa and a…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:11AMWednesday, January 18, 2023
I remember when rock was young. So, evidently, does Chicago playwright Katie Coleman, as she well attests in her intelligent, heartfelt play about two young Soviets, hopping and bopping to a…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:54PM 
