Wednesday, May 22, 2024
With stories of migrants and climate change in the news every day, Chicago playwright Dolores Díaz’s Black Sunday couldn’t be more timely—even if it is set in 1935. TimeLine Theatre�…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:05PMMonday, May 20, 2024
What was in the water in Hollywood in the late 80s and early 90s to instigate so many films (Fatal Attraction, She-Devil, Soapdish) about obsessed and vengeful women? Was it just part of the…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:24PMFriday, May 17, 2024
If you’ve been looking for the 21st century’s answer to Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, your wait is over. Levi Holloway’s Turret, now in a world premiere (also directed by the playwright)…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:00AMFriday, May 10, 2024
My only memory of a Thanksgiving play from my school days stretches back to first grade, when I was asked to play a young Pilgrim boy instead of a girl—because there were more girls than b…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:39AMEditor’s Note: Since all the plays presented in Hamburgers & Disappointment are for two people, we thought it made some sense to have two critics writing about the festival. Capacity a…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:51AMWednesday, May 8, 2024
“Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie, if you believe it.” Jason Alexander doesn’t repeat this famous George Costanza line from Seinfeld in Rob Ulin’s morality comedy, Judgment Day…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:39AMWednesday, April 24, 2024
There have been several intriguing plays about siblings dealing with loss onstage this year, including Leah Nanako Winkler’s The Brightest Thing in the World at About Face Theatre and the …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:07PMA one-person take on Hamlet starring a famous comedian sounds like a recipe for self-indulgence. (Or the opening premise for a deliberately off-kilter affair, as in the ridiculous and sublim…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:46AMIt’s tempting to say that Neil Simon’s 1963 romantic comedy Barefoot in the Park hasn’t aged well. But even when it premiered on Broadway with Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley as ne…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:43AMFriday, April 19, 2024
Chicago Children’s Theatre’s (CCT) first production, back in 2006, was the Tony Award-nominated A Year With Frog and Toad, created by brothers Robert (music) and Willie Reale (book and l…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:09AMWednesday, April 17, 2024
Hershey Felder first played Frédéric Chopin at the now-closed Royal George Theatre in 2005—one of several solo shows about great composers that Felder has created over the years (he’s …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:42PMWednesday, April 3, 2024
British playwright Simon Stephens has been produced here so often, he’s practically an honorary Chicagoan. So it’s perhaps puzzling that his adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, The…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:44AMAll the ingredients for a whimsical look at unlikely love are in place in Nick Robideau’s Inanimate, now in its local premiere at Theater Wit under Jeremy Wechsler’s direction. But like …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:13AMWednesday, March 27, 2024
The early moments of Leah Nanako Winkler’s The Brightest Thing in the World, now in a heartfelt midwest premiere with About Face Theatre under Keira Fromm’s direction, reminded me a bit …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:11PMThursday, March 21, 2024
As her name suggests, Cloudia has been obsessed with clouds her entire life. In particular, she’s always wanted to see a legendary Cloud Man for herself. So she moves into a cabin on Cloud…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:15PMWednesday, March 13, 2024
The same day I saw Aurora Real de Asua’s Wipeout at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, I read an essay by onetime Reader staffer Heather Kenny about women finding midlife empowerment in outdoor s…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:55AMRonnie Marmo has been extremely candid about his struggles with addiction, especially in the context of playing Lenny Bruce, as he has for several years in his show I’m Not a Comedian . . …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:03AMWednesday, March 6, 2024
Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble’s Meditations on Being is a sampler platter of eight pieces that in some way “reflects on what one remembers.” Not all the work on display here necessarily…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:59AMDeborah Zoe Laufer’s 2007 dramedy, End Days, has intermittent moments of charm woven into a premise that is trying way too hard for profundity and whimsy. (When a show begins with someone …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:48AMWednesday, February 28, 2024
Charles Smith writes historical plays with lively consciences that provide ample opportunities for his characters to debate. But first and foremost, he writes plays about people who are nego…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:01PMRonán Noone’s 2019 solo play, The Smuggler, now in a local premiere with Jackalope Theatre Company, seems to carry the DNA of early Conor McPherson plays in its bones. In particular, Noon…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:34AMWednesday, February 21, 2024
Wendy Kesselman’s 1997 adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank did some things that original adapters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett didn’t back in 1955 (slightly more than ten years …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:28PMI spent a semester studying in London in the winter of 1985, and one of the first concerts I attended was a benefit at Brixton Academy for the striking coal miners, featuring Aztec Camera an…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:01PMScheduled long before the current conflagration in the Middle East, Writers Theatre’s lovely, intimate staging of The Band’s Visit, the multiple Tony Award–winning musical, which premi…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:09PMFriday, February 16, 2024
Conor McPherson’s Girl From the North Country draws on some of the same narrative tropes that the Irish playwright has used in the past in plays like The Weir and The Seafarer. A group of …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:05AMTuesday, February 13, 2024
Gwydion Theatre Company is a relatively new addition to the Chicago storefront scene (they moved here from Los Angeles last year), but their current revival of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:38PMThe night before seeing Edward Hall’s stylish, arresting—but not totally convincing—production of Richard III at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, I finally caught up with Danai Gurira’s …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:17PMBack in college, when I mentioned I was writing a paper on Antigone as presented in both the Sophoclean original and in Jean Anouilh’s 1944 French Resistance–era update, a dorm friend ro…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:29PMWednesday, February 7, 2024
Anna Ouyang Moench is having a moment on Chicago stages right now; her play In Quietness, about women at an evangelical Homemaking House, is playing at A Red Orchid Theatre. Now Gift Theatre…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:28PMDav Pilkey’s popular series of kids’ books about a crime-fighting superhero mutant dog form the basis for this touring TheaterWorks USA musical production, which has settled in at the St…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:27PMThursday, February 1, 2024
The 6th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival swept through Chicago as vigorously as the cold front that accompanied much of it, and puppets dominated venues all around Chicago for t…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:34PM 
