Today is Sunday, December 22, 2024 Broadway Baby Birthdays: Ralph Fiennes Andrew Lippa
There’s self-aware—and then there’s [title of show]. Billed as being “about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical,” PrideArts launches its 2024-25 season with…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:55AMAt one point in Hell in a Handbag’s new opus, Poor People! The Parody Musical, the central protagonist, L’il Orphan Arnie (Dakota Hughes), complains, “Nothing makes sense when I try to…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:09PMT.S. Eliot conceived of his verse play Murder in the Cathedral in 1935. It was performed at Canterbury Cathedral and in the very room where the murder that provides the inciting incident of …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:55PMIt’s amazing that this play about old souls moves along at such a brisk pace. Theatre Above the Law’s new production of Craig Lucas’s romantic comedy/drama Prelude to a Kiss is inten…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:42AMIt’s tempting to start a review of Beyond the Garden Gate with a comment like, “The fairy tales I grew up with were never like this.” But let’s face it: The fairy tales we grew up wi…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:25PMMark David Kaplan is terrific as Tevye in Drury Lane’s new production of the Jerry Bock–Joseph Stein–Sheldon Harnick classic. The show opens in a deep haze, transporting us into Tevye�…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:42PMThings get meta pretty quickly when you walk into the theater of Chicago Loop Synagogue to see Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins. Cast members come out to schmooze with the audience members (…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:52AMAs a burgeoning, albeit un-self-aware, gay kid in the 70s, I developed an inexplicable fascination with TV and film scenes where women changed outfits quickly. When Cher had her own show, sh…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:00AMA stellar cast more than makes up for some of the inherent unevenness in Charles Busch’s The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, produced at Skokie Theatre as part of MadKap Productions’s 20…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:11AMAt one point in Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre’s excellent production of Harrison David Rivers’s This Bitter Earth, the central character, Jesse (Matthew Lolar-Johnson), says to his activist…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:01AMNear the end of Black Ensemble Theater’s (BET) superb new revue A Taste of Soul, co-emcee Qiana McNary mentions that the show’s creators hope to leave the audience both “full and hungr…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:54PMObama campaign operatives stationed in East Cleveland at the height of the 2008 presidential run felt like they were at the center of the political world. An idealistic—and existentially l…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:36PMI’m generally not a huge fan of material wherein creative folk in any discipline—theater, film, publishing, music—turn to their own profession for inspiration. If a movie is about film…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:42AMEven as the audience find their seats before the start of PrideArts’s new production one in two, they’ll get a sense that their relationship with the actors for the next 90 minutes will …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:15PMThe Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, first presented on Broadway in 1978 and memorably mounted as a film in 1982, is ironically one of the most prescient musicals for the 21st century. The s…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:01PMI try not to lose myself in hyperbole, but I’m guessing Tom Whalley’s Jack Off the Beanstalk (a bawdy take on the classic British “panto”) is the only play this […] The post Have y…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:03PMSarah Sapperstein’s Maggie the Cat commands your attention with her act one monologues in MadKap Productions’s mounting of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Skokie Theatre,…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:07AMIn Boeing-Boeing, the 1960 French sex comedy by Marc Camoletti (translated by Beverly Cross and Francis Evans) that’s now being mounted by Saint Sebastian Players, protagonist Bernard (Gar…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:27PMSam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a rural Illinois family beset by delusion and dysfunction is brilliantly brought to life by AstonRep Theatre Company. Alcoholic patriar…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:20AMMusic Theater Works (MTW) ambitiously takes on some of the problems with Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s formless and dated book, keeping our focus on Arthur (Michael Metcalf), Guene…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:43AMDr. Barbra Joan Frankenstreisand (Tyler Anthony Smith)—that ultimate hyphenate: superstar-mad scientist—has commandeered the stage at the Raven Room at Redline VR bar for what she calls …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:14AMTwo emotionally intense woman-centered productions are among the offerings at this fall’s fifth Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, with the first focusing on the psyc…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:23PMThe titular girlfriend in the local premiere of the two-person musical (book by Todd Almond, music and lyrics by Matthew Sweet) kicking off PrideArts’s 2022-23 season never appears. Referr…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:29AMLate in Evanston’s Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre’s production of The Mamalogues, one character asks, “If I am my ancestors’ wildest dream, why am I still living out their worst nightmar…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:53PMAirport (1970) introduced many tropes so closely associated with the 70s disaster genre: the reverence for—and subsequent destabilization of—then-new technologies, in this case the Boein…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMFor LGBTQ+ audiences and their allies who may not want to spend all of their Pride weekend on the north side, the arts collective TRQPITECA offers an alternative. TRQPITECA, formed in 2015, …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:23PMFor Chicago-based director Donterrio, the late-00s musical Passing Strange represents a road map for how an artist—no matter the medium in which they create—can live their life. The sh…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:34PM
