Thursday, September 21, 2023
Noah Haidle’s play got absolutely savaged in New York, with the critics’ main objection being that the story of a family over time had already been told in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town a…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMThursday, September 14, 2023
When it’s directed wrong, Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge comes off as a dated melodrama about the unthinkability of incest. Fortunately, director Louis Contey at Shattered Globe …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:52AMIt’s incredibly ambitious for a Chicago company to choose A Chorus Line, because although the city has a strong dance community, it’s not one with a tradition of crossing over into theat…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:54AMTuesday, August 22, 2023
It looks so simple: two people occupy a stage, waiting for something and talking about nothing. But Waiting for Godot works because Samuel Beckett was a genius, and because waiting itself w…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 06:12PMTuesday, August 1, 2023
It’s not clear that there’s anything funny about the life story or legacy of John D. Rockefeller, which raises the question of Corn Productions’ attraction to the material and goal in …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:49PMThursday, June 29, 2023
Hair is such an icon—profanity and naked people on Broadway, oh my!—that it can be hard to remember it’s an actual play with a plot (Gerome Ragni and James Rado wrote the book and lyri…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:32AMThursday, June 8, 2023
In most productions of West Side Story (and I’ve seen half a dozen or more), Tony is the weakest link: the character just isn’t as cool as Riff or as sexy as Bernardo. He’s kind of a d…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:18AMThursday, May 4, 2023
If verisimilitude and timeliness were all it took to create a great play, Ken Green’s world premiere comedy-drama about working in big-box retail would be a home run. Its dialogue captures…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:05AMFriday, April 21, 2023
Donnetta Lavinia Grays’s play is about the limits of love—both in what it can accomplish, even when it feels infinite, and in what it can tolerate before it disappears. Monique (the prot…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:33AMFriday, April 14, 2023
Motherhouse begins with a recently bereaved daughter struggling to write her mother’s eulogy. Her mother’s four sisters arrive to help with the task but instead reenact every unresolve…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:34AMThursday, March 23, 2023
Directors have two jobs: to help the audience understand what the play is about and to stage it so the audience can see it. Director Fred Anzevino has failed at both here. The Threepenny Ope…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:53AMThursday, March 2, 2023
One can imagine what inspired directors Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page to rework this 1960s musical about the Continental Congress. There’s the attraction of doing a piece about the nati…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:31PMWednesday, February 15, 2023
Like most speculative fiction (and every original Star Trek episode), Ezekiel’s Wheel is a fable: a story whose moral applies to circumstances other than those being described. Determining…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:40PMThursday, February 2, 2023
Ann Noble’s play about an Irish family decompensating after the mother’s death had its premiere in Chicago nearly 30 years ago, and it’s showing its age. There are plots and subplots a…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:22AMFriday, January 27, 2023
If you were concerned that Chicago’s storefront theaters lost their mojo during the pandemic, get thee to Terry McCabe’s gripping production of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. It’…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMWednesday, January 18, 2023
It would be hard to find a more appealing trio to embody Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical musical tick, tick . . . BOOM! than the ones in BoHo Theatre’s production—and “embody” i…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:36PMWednesday, December 7, 2022
Playwrights Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon wrap up their Pride and Prejudice fan fiction trilogy with Georgiana and Kitty, once more bringing to the center of the action characters perip…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:36PMWednesday, November 2, 2022
It’s hard to write a play whose hero is the American Medical Association (AMA), even as embodied by crusading Dr. Morris Fishbein (the appealing Andrew Bosworth) and his equally earnest [�…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:07PMThursday, October 27, 2022
Refuge, the wrenching portrait of a Central American woman’s effort to reach the U.S. receiving its midwest premiere at Theo Ubique, is less a play than a ritual with music […]
The post …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:04AMThursday, October 13, 2022
Playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury had too many things in mind when she wrote this play about Mary Seacole, a real-life Jamaican-born healer who improbably served in the 19th-century Crimean W…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:49PMWednesday, September 14, 2022
Long before the term “meta” entered common parlance there was Arsenic and Old Lace, a 1939 play by Joseph Kesselring about how plays are ridiculous. It’s also a play about […]
The po…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:13PMThursday, September 8, 2022
If you didn’t know that Noël Coward was an actor as well as a playwright, you’d figure it out within minutes of seeing any of his plays: how else to […]
The post Cool Kids vs. Normies…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:10PMWednesday, August 31, 2022
If National Merit had to be pitched as a movie, it would be “The Breakfast Club in a test prep class.” Competing for high scores and the scholarship that goes […]
The post Teaching to …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:16PMWednesday, August 10, 2022
There are half a dozen exceptionally talented individuals in the new Second City e.t.c. revue, Great Altercations. But that turns out to be a problem: they remain individuals rather than for…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:35PMWednesday, July 13, 2022
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it’s actually harder to write a rave review than it is to write a pan. How to communicate the thrill of seeing a show that’s just exactly what…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:28AMWednesday, July 6, 2022
Natalie Y. Moore’s play The Billboard, now in a world premiere with 16th Street Theater, is subtitled “A Play About Abortion.” In the spirit of Chicago improv, allow me to say: Yes, an…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:10AMWednesday, May 25, 2022
This is an impeccable production of a play whose weaknesses outweigh its considerable strengths. It’s the 1960s episode of August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, tracing a century of life in …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:06PMThursday, May 12, 2022
When everyone on the stage is excellent, it shows a director fully in command of the material. That’s the case with Cody Estle’s production of The Luckiest by Melissa Ross, receiving its…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 07:00AMTuesday, March 10, 2020
Heidi Schreck weaves together civics, feminism, and personal history in this vital production.
At the very start of What the Constitution Means to Me, author Hei…
SOURCE: www.chicagoreader.com at 05:05PMTuesday, March 3, 2020
Douglas Turner Ward's 1965 satirical one-act holds more historic than contemporary interest.
Day of Absence is a show with one joke and two audiences. The joke i…
SOURCE: www.chicagoreader.com at 05:50PM 
