All stories by Kerry Reid on BroadwayStars

Friday, March 17, 2023

Loss and joy by Kerry Reid

“The shit we deal with in Baghdad, it doesn’t exist in America,” declares Sahir early in Martin Yousif Zebari’s Layalina, now in a world premiere at the Goodman under Sivan Battat’…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:11PM

Great songs, so-so script by Kerry Reid

On the ticketing page for Broadway in Chicago’s presentation of the touring version of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, there’s a small line at the bottom: “Please note that Tina Turner …

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:50PM
Wednesday, March 15, 2023

The lies of others by Kerry Reid

I’m just going to get the obvious adjective out of the way right now: Rajiv Joseph’s Describe the Night, now in its local premiere at Steppenwolf under Austin Pendleton’s direction, is…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:24PM

Street songs by Kerry Reid

In what was seen at the time as quite the upset, Avenue Q took home the Tony Award for best musical in 2004, beating out the Wicked machine and the critically acclaimed Caroline, or Change. …

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:18PM
Friday, March 10, 2023

Sisters in arms by Kerry Reid

When it comes to Factory Theater, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Shannon O’Neill’s play The Kelly Girls, about two sisters in Northern Ireland, would be close in tone and spirit t…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:08PM
Thursday, March 2, 2023

Dublin songs by Kerry Reid

Romantic regret and stubborn optimism seem as intertwined in the national character of Ireland as a Saint Brigid’s cross, and those qualities suffuse Once, the 2012 musical adapted by Iris…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:32PM

Here he is, baby by Kerry Reid

Artists Lounge Live, started by the husband-and-wife team of Michael and Angela Ingersoll, specializes in presenting tribute shows to various musical legends. (Michael Ingersoll was in the o…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:05PM
Thursday, February 23, 2023

Warm and fuzzy by Kerry Reid

Charles Dickens’s schoolmaster Mr. Gradgrind from Hard Times (he who insists, “Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts”) would feel right at home in the…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:00AM
Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Floor Show keeps swinging by Kerry Reid

Alex Grelle and Jesse Morgan Young’s Floor Show premiered in a brief electric run in February 2020 at the Chopin. The plan was to bring it back later that spring. But then . . . you know. …

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:45PM

Sisters in war by Kerry Reid

Dominick Alesia’s original musical, now in a world premiere with the Impostors under Stefan Roseen’s direction, follows a young girl, Amelia, as she searches through a country shattered …

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:17PM
Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Seeing the forest and the trees by Kerry Reid

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical Into the Woods premiered three years before Robert Bly’s Iron John sent men into the wilderness as part of the “mythopoetic men’s movement…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:16PM

#OscarsSoWhite by Kerry Reid

This past fall, TimeLine offered a blistering revival of Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind, in which a Black actress in a 1950s Broadway play about lynching (penned and directed by white m…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:50PM
Friday, February 10, 2023

A league of her own by Kerry Reid

Like theater, baseball has no set time clock by which the action must unfold. It takes as long as it takes to finish the nine innings. That can lead to longueurs, or it can raise the stakes.…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:39AM
Thursday, February 2, 2023

Dead romantics by Kerry Reid

Every time I hear someone describe Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a “romance,” I die a little inside. It’s a portrait of dysfunction, abuse, codependency, and revenge. Which, s…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:07AM
Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Tehran tête-à-tête by Kerry Reid

Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968, out of anger that he wouldn’t produce her play/manifesto Up Your Ass. Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, out of anger a…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:40PM
Friday, January 27, 2023

Waves of memory by Kerry Reid

Christina Anderson’s luminous and wise the ripple, the wave that carried me home (now at the Goodman in a coproduction with Berkeley Rep, where it played in fall 2022) unfolds in mesmerizi…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AM
Wednesday, December 21, 2022

A big-hearted Little Women by Kerry Reid

First Folio Theatre planned to produce the world premiere of Heather Chrisler’s adaptation of Little Women back in spring of 2020, but COVID took that production out just as surely as scar…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:34AM
Wednesday, December 7, 2022

The food of love by Kerry Reid

Shakespeare was queering the narrative before that term even existed. So it makes sense that Midsommer Flight’s seventh annual production of Twelfth Night at the Lincoln Park Conservatory …

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:16PM
Wednesday, November 30, 2022

God bless us, once again by Kerry Reid

At a preshow reception introducing the Goodman’s new artistic director, Susan V. Booth, executive director Roche Schulfer talked about how the theater’s production of A Christmas Carol, …

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:00PM
Wednesday, November 23, 2022

A mixed quartet by Kerry Reid

Theatre Above the Law’s sampler platter of four one-acts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (most of them seldom produced) offers mixed results. The opening piece, A Dollar […] …

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:20AM
Thursday, November 17, 2022

She sees you, white American theater by Kerry Reid

Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind made its off-Broadway debut in 1955, but it never made the leap to the Great White Way (emphasis most definitely on “White”). The white producers [……

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:39AM
Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Ewe oughta know by Kerry Reid

Lifeline Theatre’s acclaimed KidSeries has had good luck with the silly bucolic tales of Doreen Cronin (illustrated by Betsy Lewin), from 2003’s production of Click Clack Moo: Cows That …

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:14PM

A surreal Seoul story by Kerry Reid

Hansol Jung’s 2016 play, Among the Dead, now in an intriguing, surprisingly funny, and sometimes quite moving production with Jackalope Theatre, occupies a bit of the same surreal territor…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:48PM
Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Manservant and manchild by Kerry Reid

Fourteen years ago, First Folio Theatre presented Jeeves Intervenes, the first in what would prove to be a reliably crowd-pleasing series of adaptations by Margaret Raether of P.G. Wodehouse…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:59AM
Thursday, November 3, 2022

Going for the gold by Kerry Reid

If you’re an adult of a certain age, hearing the name “Peabody” in conjunction with science may make you think of a polymath anthropomorphic cartoon dog, companion to young lad […] T…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:12PM

You say you want a revolution? by Kerry Reid

When it comes to bold and audacious stagings of Measure for Measure (for my money, the most unpleasant of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”), it’s hard to top Robert Falls’s dark take-…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:57PM
Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Heavenly blues by Kerry Reid

Black Ensemble Theater’s latest follows the company’s tried-and-true formula with an otherworldly twist. In Blue Heaven, written and directed by Daryl D. Brooks (BET’s producing managi…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:31PM
Monday, October 31, 2022

How The Twenty-Sided Tavern Lets Audiences Choose Their Own Adventure by Kerry Reid

This show at the Broadway Playhouse in Chicago is inspired by Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs.

SOURCE: Playbill at 10:54AM
Friday, October 28, 2022

Adulting and its discontents by Kerry Reid

Though it’s called The Cleanup, Hallie Palladino’s new play, now in a world premiere with Prop Thtr under Jen Poulin’s direction, is all about messiness in the aftermath of the […] T…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:55AM
Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Murder, she wrote by Kerry Reid

Women love true-crime stories—so much so that SNL spoofed the fascination a few years ago with a song about women relaxing alone at home watching their favorite “Murder Show.” Fans […

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:18PM
Thursday, October 20, 2022

Seeing the crab by Kerry Reid

Six weeks after my mother died of colon cancer in 2008 (which was almost eight years after my dad died of lung cancer), my sister was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, […] The post Seeing the…

SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:32PM

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