Wednesday, September 11, 2024
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, Wiscons…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:11AM[SHARE]In 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 p…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:54AM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 4, 2024
When 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 11:10AM[SHARE]Tuesday, September 3, 2024
Collaboraction 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 08:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, August 14, 2024
For 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 story …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:36AM[SHARE]Wednesday, August 7, 2024
Because 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 ente…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:21PM[SHARE]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 eventuallyÂ�…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:21PM[SHARE]Tuesday, 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 t…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:38PM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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, sung by …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:31PM[SHARE]When 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 performing …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:16PM[SHARE]Tuesday, 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 dis…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:16PM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 to anothe…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:43PM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 nearl…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:07PM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 04:06PM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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't g…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:21AM[SHARE]Under 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 10:40AM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 11:31AM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 04:16PM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 Feldman…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:42AM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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"influence…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:21AM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 Alzhei…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:20PM[SHARE]Thursday, 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 my mo…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:35AM[SHARE]Thursday, 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 otherwise.�…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:29PM[SHARE]Thursday, 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 Horroc…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, 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 ro…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:38AM[SHARE]Thursday, 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 11:39AM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 woo…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:42AM[SHARE]Friday, 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, tight…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:19AM[SHARE]Friday, 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 C…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:06PM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 04:30PM[SHARE]Thursday, 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 s…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:35PM[SHARE] 
