The less political Second City tries to be, the more effective they are. At least, that’s the conclusion I’ve come to after seeing last year’s stellar mainstage revue, Do the Right Thi…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:49PMImpostors Theatre Company closes out its season with an anthology of five short plays by local writers, all derived from the prompt of “trolley.” It’s a mixed bag, opening with the del…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:27PMWhat is it that draws great writers to boxing as a subject? Is it an identification with the sport’s pure brutal (yet calculated) physicality removed from the need for verbal acuity? A way…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:13AMI don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that Theater Wit’s local premiere of 2019’s The Whistleblower by Itamar Moses is opening in the midst of the WGA strike. Certainly El…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:26PMTo say that Heidi Schreck’s 2017 Pulitizer-and-Tony-nominated play What the Constitution Means to Me hits differently in a post-Roe v. Wade world is a huge understatement. TimeLine’s cur…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:13PMLee Breuer’s 1983 reimagining of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus as a Black Pentecostal church service (featuring music by Bob Telson) didn’t make it to Chicago until 1990. But that loc…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:00PMYou don’t have to be a sucker for love-hate romances among the literati to fall in love with Rehana Lew Mirza’s Hatefuck, but it helps. Then again, Lew Mirza’s play, now in its local p…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:43AMImagine if Harper, the Valium-addicted Mormon wife in Angels in America who imagines herself in Antarctica, actually met famous explorer Ernest Shackleton through some rift in the time-space…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:25PMA Bronzeville six-flat frames the sometimes melodramatic but compelling story in Tina Fakhrid-Deen’s Dandelions, now in a world premiere at MPAACT under the direction of Lauren Wells-Mann.…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:33PMBack in 2012, playwright and solo artist Dael Orlandersmith performed Black n Blue Boys/Broken Men at the Goodman’s Owen Theatre. In a series of monologues drawn from interviews with sever…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:08PMI first saw Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s autobiographical From the Mississippi Delta over 30 years ago in the old Goodman studio theater space. Though it’s been revived many times since…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:52PMDory, or “Rascal,” as she is known to her family, is a six-year-old with a lively imagination, which includes her not-quite-a-monster best friend, Mary. Her older siblings, exasperated b…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:15PMJackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, but is only getting its Chicago premiere now courtesy of Definition Theatre. After seeing Tyrone Phillips’s staging at the c…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:01PMAfter five people (including a nine-year-old child) were murdered in a mass shooting in Texas last week, Governor Greg Abbott tweeted, “I’ve announced a $50K reward for info on the crimi…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:24PMIndia Nicole Burton’s Panther Women: An Army for the Liberation has already played at Cleveland Public Theatre and Indianapolis’s Phoenix Theatre as part of the National New Play Network…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:23PMCutting Oscar Wilde’s 1895 classic comedy of manners down to a sleek 90-minute running time is a bold step, but Theatre Above the Law’s current staging, directed by Tony Lawry, manages t…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:36PMAleshea Harris’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down, produced by Congo Square Theatre last year, provided a trenchant and sometimes anguished portrayal of how racialized violence affects Bl…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:17AMJessica Dickey’s world premiere at Remy Bumppo (directed by Marti Lyons) has some echoes of Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife: the playwright appears as a character, researching the life of…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:02AMThe last great production of The Cherry Orchard I saw was at Steppenwolf, nearly 20 years ago. Tina Landau turned the company’s upstairs theater into a near-immersive experience, with Ricc…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:02AMThough it premiered in 1981 with the Negro Ensemble Company, won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and was subsequently turned into the well-received 1984 film A Soldier’s Story, Charles …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:58PMBarbara Gaines started her tenure as artistic director for Chicago Shakespeare Theater (then called Chicago Shakespeare Workshop) in 1986 by staging Henry V on the rooftop of the Red Lion Pu…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:58AM“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 04:11PMOn 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 03:50PMI’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 04:24PMIn 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 01:18PMWhen 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 12:08PMRomantic 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 05:32PMArtists 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 04:05PMCharles 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 10:00AMAlex 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 01:45PMDominick 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
