Thursday, July 25, 2013
RECOMMENDED Last summer at Victory Gardens, the intense “Oedipus el Rey” uncovered parallels between King Oedipus’ dark road to blind incest and Los Angeles’ treacherous gang life. N…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:37PMWednesday, July 24, 2013
RECOMMENDED The glam-rock bio-concert, “Hedwig and The Angry Inch,” boasts a fervent cult following, to say the least. But the show about a transgender East German expat rocker inspires …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:34PMMonday, July 22, 2013
RECOMMENDED In the summer, while just about every other theater company is busy celebrating William Shakespeare, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the bard’s local namesake, packs its Court…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:45PMThursday, July 18, 2013
Theater is sharing its wardrobe with television these days. Some of our best playwrights have day jobs on TV shows such as “Mad Men” and the fallen “Smash.” Additionally, those stage…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 04:33PMTuesday, July 16, 2013
By Johnny Oleksinski A man stands alone at the end of a long runway, unable to move. On the other side are his three children and, in the middle, perch two threatening immigration officers. …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMThursday, July 11, 2013
Despite its reputation as Shakespeare’s longest play, you won’t come across too many four-hour “Hamlet”’s anymore, unless Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 unabridged film version pops up l…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 12:13PM“A Steady Rain”-playwright Keith Huff’s newest caper, “Big Lake Big City” at Lookingglass Theatre Company, is a total bust. A wannabe satire of already what’s probably the mo…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 12:08PMSunday, July 7, 2013
RECOMMENDED Belleville means “beautiful town.” It’s a neighborhood in Paris that, through its naïve moniker, comes to represent the entire fairy-tale French city. Paris is, without qu…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:51PMMonday, July 1, 2013
A child stands alone in a dank, prim, suffocating Victorian parlor. His room is but a speck on the Goodman’s looming proscenium. It isn’t all sooty; some furniture is bathed in a particu…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00PMMonday, June 24, 2013
RECOMMENDED Black Ensemble Theater’s “Ain’t No Cryin’ The Blues: In Memory of Howlin Wolf,” is as much a memory play as it is a jukebox biography-musical. The s…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 05:05PM“Boeing Boeing,” a French technicolor sex farce written by Marc Camoletti in 1962, is the cuckold uncle in a long family line of French farce. Something about the sixties—and I…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 12:08PMMonday, June 17, 2013
By Johnny Oleksinski “Even if you think you don’t know Buddy Holly’s songs, you probably do,” says actor Ryan G. Dunkin reassuringly. He knows them better than most people. Dunkin pl…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMSunday, June 16, 2013
“You make the world lousy,” says Doc after a group of Jets rapes Anita, girlfriend of Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks. “That’s the way we found it,” shoots back Riff, a Jet, wip…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:49AMThursday, June 13, 2013
By Johnny Oleksinski Last year’s Sketchbook, Collaboraction’s annual festival of new work, was remarkably impressive. The unexpectedly profound and profoundly enjoyable “Ho…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:00PMA Hawaiian shirt and a cowboy hat! That’s surely not what writer Alexandre Dumas had pictured in his mind’s eye when he penned “The Three Musketeers” in 1844. When Porthos (Christoph…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 12:02PMAlthough the writer Sherod Santos is known in literary circles for his body of poetry, his words are taking the stage in “Lives of the Pigeons,” receiving a world premiere at The…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:58AMSunday, June 9, 2013
With their popular and tuneful musicals, John Kander and the late Fred Ebb fashioned a storied career essentially from derivation. That’s not to slight the duo’s awesome achievements bec…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 09:24PMThursday, June 6, 2013
There are a couple playwright-screenwriters that are of particular interest at the moment. One is Elizabeth Meriwether, scribe of the hilarious and twisted “Heddatron” and the far less f…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 04:51PMTuesday, June 4, 2013
By Johnny Oleksinski Another year, another Non-Equity Jeff Award Ceremony. Folks around these parts call it “Theater Prom” for a reason. The banter is awkward, the recipients are…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:43AMThursday, May 30, 2013
On the far wall of Rivendell Theatre is an illustrated moon cycle, starting from waxing crescent transitioning all the way to a big full moon and back again in the opposite direction. In the…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:40AMA fabulous teacher once described to me, in a harsh English screech, the probable conditions that Shakespeare was working under during the late sixteenth century. “On one side,” she said…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 10:41AMWednesday, May 29, 2013
The story of the solider returning home from war is as ancient as Odysseus and as contemporary as the evening news. The specifics may vary, but the central conceit of the Greek legend is the…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMTuesday, May 28, 2013
By Johnny Oleksinski Right away I knew something was up at the Civic Opera House on January 5. The lights dimmed and the familiar, soothing British brogue of Lyric Opera principal conductor …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMTuesday, May 21, 2013
By Johnny Oleksinski Playwright and Chicago native son David Ives is receiving a rolling homecoming by happenstance this season and next. Last winter, Chicago Shakespeare Theater presented h…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMSaturday, May 18, 2013
Late in Neil LaBute’s ”In The Company of Men,” the most deplorable character I’ve ever seen in a domestic drama relaxedly watches “Seinfeld” after confessing to …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 04:29PMFriday, May 17, 2013
RECOMMENDED Few works of theater have the adrenaline-fueled urgency of “Roadkill.” But it’s not the familiar rush of exhilaration; it’s the primal clamor for survival that pu…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 09:02PMWednesday, May 15, 2013
By Eric Shoemaker The Back to Back Theatre ensemble is no ordinary group of performers. The company has existed since 1987 to bring disabled actors to the stage in order to build, together, …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMMonday, May 13, 2013
The biggest revelation of Craig Wright’s “Orange Flower Water” is that it wasn’t written in 1982. Wright, a playwright particularly relevant after the recent Broadway…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 06:42PMAs Rhea Perlman walks into Lou’s, the kind of neighborhood bar you wind down the holidays at, a warm sensation creeps its way from your toenails to your topmost follicles. Carla is bac…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 06:10PMThe hubbub in the men’s restroom at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre a couple years ago was highly energized. During intermission of J.T. Rogers’ “Blood and Gif…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 02:06PMFriday, May 10, 2013
There is churchly ambience to “Henry VIII,” which opened Wednesday night at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Catholic clergymen clad in red vestments descend the central aisle to the…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 11:46PM 
