Friday, June 9, 2017
One of the markers of adulthood is recognizing that your parents had lives of their own that had nothing to do with you. Often you don't see it until at least one of them has died. They live…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:48PMWednesday, June 7, 2017
Nature may abhor a vacuum, but holes in the timeline offer catnip to authors of historical fiction. Where facts cannot be found, imagination runs wild. In "Her Majesty's Will," David Blixt's…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:21PMTuesday, June 6, 2017
"Get out of my way. I feel like making some money today." Few of us can imagine sweeping into our workplace and making that pronouncement in anything other than an ironic tone. But Liz Rico …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:54PMTuesday, May 30, 2017
A couple of years ago, the feel-good channels of social networking lit up with a story about a Dutch nursing home where college students live rent-free. The idea of old and young living toge…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:41PMFriday, May 26, 2017
In "Great Expectations," Charles Dickens crafted an indelible portrait of a young man of no means whose desires to be a "gentleman" almost come true — but with tragic consequences. At its …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:30PMThursday, May 25, 2017
Summer in Chicago focuses on outdoor fun, whether it's at music festivals, street fairs, ballgames or beaches. But Chicago's red-hot theater scene also has plenty of option. Here are 30 show…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:44PMFriday, May 19, 2017
As a playwright, Luis Alfaro is best known in Chicago for his contemporary updates of Greek tragedies, such as "Oedipus El Rey," which reimagines the story of Oedipus through the lens of Chi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:12PMOn the heels of its timely and sardonic production of "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui," Trap Door Theatre takes a turn toward the elliptical and symbolic with "Into the Empty Sky," based o…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:55AMWednesday, May 17, 2017
"Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful," They Might Be Giants sang years ago. Young Jean Lee's "We're Gonna Die," now getting a heartfelt and high-energy production with Ha…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:16AMThursday, May 11, 2017
We all know the litany of complaints about life near Wrigley Field. Nonexistent parking. Drunk people committing various, um, quality-of-life offenses. But for decades, the Cubs and the loca…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:00PMMonday, May 8, 2017
What's your poison? Noir? Musicals? Gender-bending camp with a twist of melodrama? Well, guys and dolls, stir your stumps upstairs to Mary's Attic, where Hell in a Handbag's "Lady X: The Mus…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:48PMTuesday, May 2, 2017
Before HBO's harrowing prison drama "Oz" and before "The Shawshank Redemption," there was Tennessee Williams' "Not About Nightingales." Well, sort of. Though written in 1938 for the Group Th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:39PMThursday, April 27, 2017
In 2011, a group of 18 high school girls — many of them cheerleaders — in the New York town of Le Roy began exhibiting strange vocal and physical tics. The phenomenon unleashed a storm o…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:41PMTuesday, April 4, 2017
When someone has been stuck in the shadows of history, the light that finally shines on her accomplishments seems all the brighter — even if it bends and refracts through the lens of artis…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:32PMTuesday, March 28, 2017
A businessman with a crude way of talking and an outsize — but easily bruised — ego arrives in Washington, convinced he can bully and buy his way into getting what he wants. Which is mor…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:11PMTuesday, March 21, 2017
He's petulant and greedy, surrounded by thugs who take out enemies real and perceived at the drop of a hat. He mouths populist bromides while engaging in the worst excesses of corruption and…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:57PMWednesday, March 15, 2017
A vague whiff of a John Hughes movie hangs in the air over Sarah Sander's "Sycamore," in which three disaffected suburban teens attempt to figure out how to claim their identity without caus…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMThursday, March 9, 2017
What's in a name? That which we call a rose is just as bittersweet in miniature form. And so it is with Chicago Shakespeare's "Short Shakespeare! Romeo and Juliet," now dashing through the s…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00AMTuesday, March 7, 2017
The ghosts of Abu Ghraib haunt the world of Paul Pasulka's "Skin for Skin," while suggesting that the recent shameful past can only be read as prologue to our present times. It's a story wor…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:05PMWednesday, February 22, 2017
When you're basing a show around the Nicholas Brothers, who created what Fred Astaire called the greatest dance sequence ever filmed — well, brother, those are some big tap shoes to fill. …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:00AMTuesday, February 21, 2017
The narrative terrain in Irish playwright Marina Carr's work bursts with ghosts. But we're far away from, say, Conor McPherson's "The Weir," where a newly arrived transplant from Dublin find…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:09PMMonday, February 20, 2017
If one seeks a personalized metaphor for the tortured morality of being a Western superpower, look no further than conflict photographers. They run around war zones — many of those places …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:00AMThursday, February 16, 2017
The women's marches held in protest of Donald Trump's inauguration last month threw already-fraught issues of gender discrimination into high profile. Away from the pink hats, three plays on…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMWednesday, February 15, 2017
Many years ago, John Gray — author of the help-yourself-in-relationships guide "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" — appeared on Bill Maher's old "Politically Incorrect" program. F…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:30PMWednesday, February 8, 2017
The white working class has been endlessly anatomized and scrutinized in pundits' think pieces since the presidential election, in which its support for Donald Trump was attributed as key to…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMFriday, February 3, 2017
Nicole Hollander's "Sylvia" comic introduced us to "The Woman Who Does Everything More Beautifully Than You." That captures Julie Bascov, the hostess at two very different Christmas dinners …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:28AMTuesday, January 31, 2017
"The country is all, sir. The king is not." That line in David Rice's adaptation of "Captain Blood," now in a world premiere at First Folio Theatre, scored a direct hit on a night when airpo…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:00AMWednesday, January 25, 2017
"Being Scared Since 2016 Is Privilege." That observation, emblazoned on a sign in the Boston incarnation of the global women's marches on Jan. 21, carries some provocative weight in Shepsu A…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:00AMWednesday, January 18, 2017
We are such stuff as dreams are made on. So, we better pick the right dreams — and fight like hell for them. That's pretty much the message underlying Sean Kelly's "Psychonaut Librarians,"…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:12PMThursday, January 12, 2017
Norma Desmond is (sort of) alive and definitely unwell. She's just going by the name "Phedre," and her address is Cortland Avenue, not Sunset Boulevard. Or so one might surmise from Nicole W…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMTuesday, January 10, 2017
The old '60s saw, "Never trust anyone over 30," worked off the assumption that people (and perhaps by extension, institutions) grow more conservative as they age. But in the case of Pegasus …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:10PM 
