Wednesday, February 13, 2019
As sleet and snow slashed the air outside on Tuesday night, a theatrical fire blazed onstage at the Den Theatre. In “The Total Bent,” the polymath known as Stew, perhaps best known for h…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:30PMTuesday, February 12, 2019
Midway through Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive,” a man gives fishing lessons to an unseen child. He describes the pompano as “a very shy, mercurial fish,” and advises that ca…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:00PMFriday, February 8, 2019
The grungy motel in the middle of nowhere is as much a trope for American psychological thrillers as the gloomy country manse in English murder mysteries. From “Psycho” to “Bug,” it�…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00PMMonday, January 28, 2019
Joseph Zettelmaier has become something of a playwright in residence for suburban First Folio. In addition to a trilogy of plays that skillfully reimagined classic horror stories about Frank…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:40PMThursday, January 24, 2019
The cure for the wintertime blues is apparently “Million Dollar Quartet.” Two theaters in the Chicago area — Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire and Theatre at the Center in Munster, Ind.…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:30PMTuesday, January 22, 2019
Long before “Scream” sent up the teen slasher genre, there was the “Evil Dead” trilogy. Director Sam Raimi’s low-budget homage/spoof series blended H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos about …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:50PMMonday, January 7, 2019
On the heels of a wave of diverse younger women joining the ranks of the 116th Congress, Pegasus Theatre Chicago’s 32nd Young Playwrights Festival feels right at home with the zeitgeist. T…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:00PMWednesday, December 19, 2018
Issues of identity and immigration, borders and belonging, took on harsh and frightening dimensions in the headlines this year. So in looking over the shows that made the biggest impression …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMTuesday, December 18, 2018
I’ve seen more than 30 shows at Trap Door Theatre over the past 16 years. Yet their current offering, Tadeusz Rozewicz’s “The Old Woman Broods,” may be the Trap Dooriest of them all …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMTuesday, December 4, 2018
The opening moments of Strawdog Theatre’s “The Revolutionists” feel like they might be perfectly at home at Trap Door. Four women, garbed in deconstructed variants of 18th century garb…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:00PMTuesday, November 27, 2018
In January 1951, a 30-year-old black woman with five children was diagnosed with cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. After enduring a horrific series of radiation treatments for month…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:00PMMonday, November 26, 2018
It seems every year that events conspire to make the Goodman’s production of “A Christmas Carol” an exercise in both cheery holiday escapism and timely consciousness raising. So it is …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:55PMMonday, November 19, 2018
The fraught election season of blue and red is (sort of) in the rearview mirror as bright holiday colors deck the halls and malls. Before you’re overloaded with shopping and socializing, t…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMFriday, November 16, 2018
Yes, hostelry jokes abound in staging “Holiday Inn” at a Marriott. Get them out of your system. I’ll wait. This show, now in its regional premiere at Marriott Lincolnshire, is not “W…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:35AMSunday, November 11, 2018
“Soon it’s gonna rain, I can see it. Soon it’s gonna rain, I can tell.” All right, fine. Those lyrics are from “The Fantasticks” and not “110 in the Shade,” the musical versi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMWednesday, October 31, 2018
In January 2018, Pew Research Center released the results of a study on women working in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) jobs that revealed 50 percent said they had experien…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:45PMTuesday, October 30, 2018
Belarus Free Theatre is best known locally for stunning deconstructions of classics, such as their mind-blowing production of “King Lear” at Chicago Shakespeare in 2016. But the company,…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMTuesday, October 23, 2018
Theater Unspeakable takes a cue from the Reduced Shakespeare Company by condensing the history of the American Revolution to 50 minutes. Then it further “reduces” the story by confining …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMFriday, October 19, 2018
If you stitched together a butoh performance and a zombie film, you’d come close to capturing the look and feel of the opening minutes of Remy Bumppo’s “Frankenstein.” Greg Matthew A…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:45PMTuesday, 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…
SOURCE: 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 …
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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 …
SOURCE: 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 …
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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 …
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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 …
SOURCE: 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!,�…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:30PM 
