Tuesday, August 9, 2016
What is any self respecting coffee shop if not a homing beacon to the young and somewhat adrift? Offering employment to some. And for others, perhaps the reassuring feeling that you've left …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:16PMTuesday, July 26, 2016
"You are becoming entrancing to me," Gustav Klimt says to a model sitting before him. And then quickly, under his breath: "Trouble." The late-19th century Viennese painter, most famous for h…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:49PMTuesday, July 12, 2016
A group of prehistoric pals seem to be getting by just fine hanging out on the savanna until one night lightning strikes and sets a spear aflame. Suddenly this Stone Age tribe has access to …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:55PMTuesday, June 28, 2016
Jack the Ripper's final victim is believed to have been a young prostitute named Mary Jane Kelly. She was just one of many women in late-19th century London who found themselves without a hu…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:19PMThursday, June 23, 2016
The cast and crew of "Chicago Fire" work a long season — 10 months in all, and plenty of it outside in whatever weather the city throws at them — but the hiatus is turning out to be a bu…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:17PMTuesday, June 14, 2016
Profiles Theatre, the small off-Loop company which was recently the subject of a long Chicago Reader cover story documenting allegations of intimidation, sexual misconduct and stage combat g…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:58PMAiming satirical barbs at the NSA isn't a bad idea for a show. But the material actually has to be a satire to work. "Tapped: A Treasonous Musical Comedy" proves that it is possible write an…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:08PMWednesday, June 1, 2016
For 10 years, the Improvised Shakespeare Company has been blazing an Elizabethan trail through the city's improv scene, where comedy shows rarely see such longevity. The reason it hast did l…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:44AMWatch enough nature documentaries and you'll hear no judgment from the narrators, even when the footage shows a mother animal rejecting her baby fawn or pup or chick. It happens, the calm vo…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:00AMFriday, May 20, 2016
Like a hyperactive kid just back from theater camp, Shirley Lame (pronounced le-MAY) takes the stage to sing classic Broadway duets all by her lonesome. Embodied, to the hilt, by Rebecca Soh…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:05PMOnce upon a time, back in the analog days of the '70s, David Mamet gazed upon the mating habits of the young and single in his play "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," and in "Double Text," a br…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:26AMThursday, May 12, 2016
Last weekend, tucked away in the Northwest Side offices of a company that makes socket screws and industrial fasteners, a small film crew assembled. The retro, dusty ambience of the place �…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:40PMFriday, May 6, 2016
Nobody wants to give (or receive) bad news. Including: Your show is a stinker. For those of us who neither perform nor work in theater, there are few barriers to sharing an honest opinion am…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMThursday, May 5, 2016
John Ball's 1965 novel "In the Heat of the Night" — about a black police detective named Virgil Tibbs stoically pushing back on bigotry while helping law enforcement in a small Southern to…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:31PM"You're a nobody and you suffer like a nobody," a character is bluntly informed in "The House of Blue Leaves," John Guare's breakout play, first seen in 1966, which stuffs all sorts of ugly,…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:10AMWednesday, May 4, 2016
Snubfest, the annual event featuring sketch comedy, stand-up, storytelling and solo performances rejected by other festivals, returns in June with "Saturday Night Live" alum Tim Kazurinsky…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:18PMWednesday, April 27, 2016
Chicago improv veteran and "Pitch Perfect" screenwriter Kay Cannon will be back performing a special one-night show in Chicago Saturday at iO Theater. Among those scheduled to join her on st…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:30PMThursday, April 21, 2016
A one-act festival of 10-minute plays "incorporating an element of nudity" was announced today by Stage 773, the Lakeview venue. If you've been around Chicago theater long enough, either as …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:57PMFriday, April 15, 2016
A woman sits in the waiting room of an obstetrician's office, while her female partner is in another room being inseminated, and a young couple nearby can't help but tell her how brave she i…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:56AMThursday, April 14, 2016
Playwright and TV writer Tanya Saracho, who launched her career in Chicago, has been named showrunner for the new Starz series "Pour Vida," which is currently in development.
According to a…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:10PMPlaywright and TV writer Tanya Saracho, who launched her career in Chicago, has been named showrunner for the new Starz series "Pour Vida," which is currently in development. According to a …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:27PMThursday, April 7, 2016
Outside of Second City, you don't see much topical comedy in Chicago sketch shows. More often the focus is on characters than social commentary, and that's not a knock. But these are strange…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:45PMWhen onstage mishaps strike, the rule is always the same: The show must go on. But the best kind of improv acknowledges what's happening in the room. And when an audio glitch from iO Theater…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:20AMOutside of Second City, you don't see much topical comedy in Chicago sketch shows. More often the focus is on characters than social commentary, and that's not a knock. But these are strange…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:18AMThursday, March 24, 2016
Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" has had many a screen adaptation over the years, the most popular by far being the 1995 BBC rendering (known as The One With Colin Firth in a Wet Shirt). …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:20PM"You look really good, and you smell really good," a woman says to her estranged lover in this sketch comedy show at the Annoyance. He's a no-good something-or-other she just can't quit. "Do…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:10PMFriday, March 11, 2016
A gruesome crime occurs offstage in this tense 1997 drama from Northern Irish playwright Gary Mitchell. A teenage girl is raped after a party one night and left for dead, a shocking turn of …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:08PMThursday, March 10, 2016
A neighborhood halfway to gentrification offers all sorts of ideological clashes between the working-class old guard and their moneyed new brethren. And Chicago's Uptown, where Neil Connelly…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:56PMWednesday, March 2, 2016
Among the comedy pilots CBS is shooting this spring is "Superior Donuts," based on the 2008 Tracy Letts play of the same name.
Like its source material, the pilot centers on the owner of a …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:07PMAmong the comedy pilots CBS is shooting this spring is "Superior Donuts," based on the 2008 Tracy Letts play of the same name. Like its source material, the pilot centers on the owner of a C…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:01PMWednesday, February 24, 2016
So often it is the little things that set off a marital battle royale. All those petty irritations (would it kill you to pick up your socks?!?) have a nasty way of underscoring bigger issues…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:08PM 
