Before Martyna Majok won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for her drama Cost of Living (which was planned for this season at Victory Gardens before the board decided to close up shop at the Tony A…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:42PMPearl Cleage isn’t from Chicago, but she’s been produced enough here that she feels like an adopted playwright at least. Now-defunct Eclipse Theatre Company (dedicated to the one playwri…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:42AMThere’s a great show about a Founding Father onstage right now in Chicago who is not named Alexander Hamilton. And while it doesn’t feature an award-winning score by Lin-Manuel Miranda, …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:07AM“Well, look who’s come to dinner!” bellows Gerald (Ronald L. Conner) to the neighbors he and wife Patricia (Sydney Charles) have invited to their home in Inda Craig-Galván’s WELCOME…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMChicago playwright Brett Neveu is so good at writing about the darker side of life (as in his 2002 play Eric LaRue, now a film directed by Michael Shannon, his fellow ensemble member at A Re…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMI don’t know who came up with the idea of a Pearl Cleage festival for Chicago theater, but based on Mikael Burke’s gorgeous production of the Atlanta poet laureate’s 1995 drama, Blues …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMAt this point, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is beyond critic-proof. (Once you’ve had an entire episode of Drunk History dedicated to your recap of the events in your musical, what else …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMThough it’s based loosely on a real story, John Webster’s Jacobean revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi plays like a cross between torture porn and Shakespeare, what with the piling up o…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMWhen The Beauty Queen of Leenane first premiered with Galway’s Druid Theatre in 1996, it marked its author, Martin McDonagh (then just shy of age 26) as an exhilarating new voice in Celtic…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:08PMWater People Theater’s last full-length production was The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon, presented in September 2019 as part of the Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Fest…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:25AMSeveral years before they struck Disney gold with Beauty and the Beast, the musical team of composer Alan Menken and book writer and lyricist Howard Ashman stuck their toes into campy cult w…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:10AMThe play about lucha libre is hoping to bring in new audiences to the Chicago theatre.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:25PMIt’s beginning to feel like we’re having a mini festival this year of plays about the romantic and professional conflicts facing artist (or academic) couples, between First Floor’s Hat…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:49PMLast summer, Hell in a Handbag presented A Fine Feathered Murder: A Miss Marbled Mystery, a spoof of Agatha Christie’s famous spinster detective, Miss Marple. Now, they’re putting Angela…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:54AMSeeing “Springtime for Hitler” in all its bad-taste glory hits a little differently when it’s staged in Skokie in 2023. The suburb is of course the home of the Illinois Holocaust Museu…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:54AMLoy Webb’s professional playwriting debut, The Light, caused quite a stir in its 2018 world premiere with New Colony (later renamed the New Coordinates, who are now defunct). The onetime c…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:32AMLong recognized as Chicago’s most diverse neighborhood, Albany Park has also served for generations as the destination for immigrant families. As the University of Chicago’s Chicago Stud…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:23PMHarold Pinter’s 1974 play No Man’s Land occupies the territory between his earlier “comedies of menace,” such as The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, and the more overtly political …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:26PMThe description for Henok Negash’s Meant to Be at the Chicago Magic Lounge makes it sound a little like a navel-gazing self-actualization exercise. Negash, we’re told, “specializes in …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:52PMThere are days I don’t think I can handle one more essay on the precarious state of the American theater. It’s not that I’m in denial about the existential threats facing so many insti…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:05PMGeorge Brant’s Marie and Rosetta, now at Northlight in a production directed by E. Faye Butler, is a tribute to the contributions of Black women in gospel, rhythm and blues, and rock, as e…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:54AMDorothy Parker once famously observed, “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:28AMThe SpongeBob Musical had its pre-Broadway run here in 2016. I missed that, but I can’t imagine it was any more delightful than what Kokandy Productions has concocted in the basement at th…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:57PMTaken alone, political thrillers and farce can be tricky beasts to pull off. Put them together and you really have to have everything honed to the sharpest point possible for the laughs to l…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:31AMDuring the years that I’ve seen Kate Arrington onstage at Steppenwolf, “chameleonic” is the adjective that most often comes to mind. From show to show, she never seems to play the same…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:55AMPete Townshend wasn’t able to make it to Chicago for Monday night’s opening of The Who’s Tommy at the Goodman. But there was plenty of star power onstage already, particularly in Ali L…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:43AMThe venerable Studebaker Theater in the Fine Arts building opened its newly renovated auditorium last summer with the underwhelming musical Skates. This summer, it’s rolling the dice on Pe…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:28AMFifteen years after its Broadway debut, Passing Strange, Stew’s bildungsroman set to rock and pop songs (Heidi Rodewald cowrote the music) still has the power to captivate. Tim Rhoze’s p…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:12AMMany decades ago, the late (and much missed) humor magazine Spy ran a feature entitled “Why Johnny Can’t Act,” outlining the bizarre techniques of acting teachers in New York. More rec…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:47AMRemote work, for those fortunate enough to enjoy it, has killed off many aspects of professional life that were long overdue to be put down: Agonizing commutes. $18 cafeteria salads. Ramblin…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:37AMThe 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 01:49PM
