Tuesday, October 16, 2018
What’s more dangerous than a heretic? A pagan. At least, that’s the view propounded by Jan, the young Czech sorta-dissident in Tom Stoppard’s 2006 “Rock ’N’ Roll.” First seen l…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:00PMTuesday, October 9, 2018
Lynn Nottage may be one of the most humane playwrights in our contemporary canon. Her plays give breathing space for her characters to find their voices, no matter how constricted their own …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:30PMFriday, October 5, 2018
In June 2017, an article by Mark Gokavi in the Dayton Daily News mentioned that one man in the Ohio city had been revived via Narcan by police 20 times after overdosing on opioids. An office…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:15PMMonday, October 1, 2018
The late Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company provided the blueprint for David Cerda’s Hell in a Handbag Productions, purveyors of quality camp since 2002. So it’s perhap…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:00PMMonday, September 24, 2018
Omigod you guys! Sisterhood is awesome! If you want a show that celebrates female friendship with flying colors (mostly on the pink end of the spectrum), then have no fear — Elle Woods is …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:07PMMonday, September 17, 2018
The Modern Prometheus is getting quite a workout on Chicago stages this year, with three adaptations of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” opening this fall and a fourth in the spring. The …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:45PMWednesday, September 12, 2018
Years before she put herself in the world of “Straight White Men” (the play that gave her the distinction of being the first Asian-American playwright to get a Broadway production), Youn…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:15PMTuesday, September 11, 2018
Days get shorter, weather gets brisker — and the stages get busier. The fall theater season is always filled with more shows than anyone could possibly see. But here are a few of our best …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMMonday, August 13, 2018
Director Ron OJ Parson’s staging of Athol Fugard’s “Blood Knot” caused a stir earlier this summer at Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre due to the casting of a white actor in the…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:55PMMonday, August 6, 2018
Here’s something that’s hard to believe, but absolutely true: Chicago Shakespeare’s current Shakespeare in the Parks tour of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” marks the first time Barb…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:00PMWednesday, July 25, 2018
The costs of warfare on the home front come into sharp — and at times almost unbearable — focus in “The Hero’s Wife,” Aline Lathrop’s taut two-character piece at Berwyn’s 16th …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:40PMMonday, July 23, 2018
Tackling a musical adaptation of “The Taming of the Shrew” in the nearly 70-year-old footsteps of “Kiss Me, Kate” takes chutzpah. While Cole Porter can rest easy that “Shrew’d!,…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:30PMThursday, July 19, 2018
“This is the Plains, a state of mind, right, some spiritual affliction, like the blues” says Barbara, the eldest daughter of the Oklahoma Weston clan in Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage C…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:05AMFriday, July 6, 2018
After the 2016 massacre of 49 people at Orlando’s Pulse dance club, fresh attention landed on a tragedy in the gay community decades earlier. On June 24, 1973, an arsonist set fire to the …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00PMTuesday, July 3, 2018
“Easy as pie” doesn’t apply to the life of Jenna, the anguished-but-still-warmhearted baking whiz at the heart of “Waitress.” But then, the colloquialism refers not to the act of c…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:30PMMonday, June 25, 2018
Is “You Can’t Take It With You,” that nuttiest of chestnuts in the classic American comedy canon, the play we need right now? Arguably, no. Given the current stakes for our democracy, …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:15AMFriday, June 8, 2018
Combining Shakespeare and songcraft is a Broadway tradition — whether it be “Kiss Me, Kate” or “Something Rotten!” But Len Cariou’s “Broadway & the Bard” brings the two toget…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:20AMThursday, June 7, 2018
Smart horror is turning out to be the piquant flavor of the season in smaller theater offerings. On the heels of Ike Holter’s “The Light Fantastic” at Jackalope (running through June 1…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:15PMMonday, June 4, 2018
If Virginia Woolf’s time-traveling, gender-shifting “Orlando” had crash-landed in the French courts of Louis XV and Louis XVI, the result might be a bit like Canadian playwright Mark B…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:05PMWednesday, May 23, 2018
When spring comes so late, we know it’s even harder to take time away from beaches and barbecues, street fairs and sunshine. But great theater happens year-round in Chicago. Here are 25 pi…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMMonday, May 21, 2018
If class and social status determine how we live, why shouldn’t it determine how we die? That premise is the jumping-off point for Lucas Baisch’s “Refrigerator,” now in a world premi…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00PMThursday, May 10, 2018
When are penguins — those adorable, tuxedo-clad flightless waddlers — the stuff of controversy? When they’re in a same-sex relationship, of course. The true story of Roy and Silo, two …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:00PMMonday, May 7, 2018
Nothing has changed, but everything is changing. That’s the first gut reaction to “Columbinus,” the docudrama about the 1999 attacks at Columbine High School that ended with 15 dead, i…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:55PMThursday, May 3, 2018
The young artists of Albany Park Theater Project have explored the theme of “home” many times in the past, including in their celebrated production of “Home/Land,” which looked at th…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:30PMTuesday, April 24, 2018
When it first opened in 1989, “Grand Hotel” won more plaudits for Tommy Tune’s stylish direction and choreography than for its score (by Robert Wright, George Forrest and Maury Yeston)…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:00AMMonday, April 23, 2018
The American dream of home ownership is indelibly entwined with our shameful history of racial discrimination. That’s particularly true in Chicago, which has served as a laboratory for seg…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:30PMMonday, April 2, 2018
Caught in a poetic no man’s land between Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and Wilfred Owen’s grim battlefield verses, Stephen Massicotte’s World War I-er…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:30PMThursday, March 22, 2018
“What does a woman want?” Sigmund Freud famously asked. If he’d taken a glance at 21st-century advertising featuring women, he might well have answered “salad!” The Hairpin, a femi…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:15AMMonday, March 19, 2018
The recording studio as the crucible of creative dreams figures in a lot of plays and movies. Sam Phillips’ legendary Sun Studios alone gave us the jukebox musical “Million Dollar Quarte…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:30PMMonday, March 12, 2018
“The most defiant nose in France” gets a contemporary makeover in BoHo Theatre’s “Cyrano.” But though Edmond Rostand’s script has been sculpted and contemporized in places, the o…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:20PMFriday, March 9, 2018
Much as we might prefer living in less interesting times, Sideshow Theatre Company’s opening of Mia Chung’s “You for Me for You” — on the night that the White House announced a mee…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:15AM 
