Wednesday, March 29, 2023
“People get funny in their old age. It turns out this is a great town to be old and funny in," Dana Olsen said of Practical Theatre's return.
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:47AMSunday, December 18, 2022
It has been the annual December tradition for Tribune critics and writers to mark the places and people and things that have departed.
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AMFriday, April 29, 2022
In person, on stage or on the page, Susan Nussbaum was a delight, a ferociously talented actor, writer and passionate disability rights activist.
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:30PMThursday, October 21, 2021
The campus contains a teaching kitchen and a wood shop, a live fire cooking station, a member’s lounge with a cafe and bar, co-working spaces, a small library and event spaces.
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMMonday, September 14, 2020
It's tough to laugh right now, and it's essential to laugh right now. But how and at what? Zanies in Chicago takes steps to reopen, and I'm reminded of advice from Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AMMonday, October 29, 2018
Bert Haas has arguable heard more jokes than anyone on this planet. Since 1980, with only a reluctant interlude of a few years when he unsatisfactorily tested other careers, he has worked at…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:50PMMonday, June 4, 2018
Once more unto the breach we go, with the fourth installment of “Ask Rick,” the experiment intended as a way for readers to ask me questions that they might have about the place we all c…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:00PMThursday, September 28, 2017
Ginger Reiter lost power in her house when Hurricane Irma visited her in Florida a couple of weeks ago, but that was nothing compared to what happened four decades ago when that human hurric…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:05PMFriday, August 25, 2017
There are 29 miles of Chicago lakefront, a strand of sand and concrete and grass and trees that hug the shore so stylishly that seen from afar it appears to be some abstract necklace. Not lo…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:55AMWednesday, July 19, 2017
Rahm Emanuel needed a desk. His predecessor, Richard M. Daley, took his desk with him when he left office after his 22-year tenure, and the new mayor's fifth-floor office at City Hall was de…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMFriday, July 14, 2017
While Brigid Murphy was talking with typical enthusiasm about the many people with whom she has shared a stage over the decades — the fire eaters, singers, dancers, rope-twirlers, storytel…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:45AMThursday, April 27, 2017
The first time I saw Joe Mantegna in the flesh he was in the flesh, naked as a newborn baby on stage at the Shubert Theatre in a 1969 production of "Hair." It was his first professional acti…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:26PMTuesday, March 21, 2017
The first years of his life spent in the company of an ice-skating chimpanzee named Spanky, Jonathan Pitts has spent the last two decades of his 57 years in the company of a vast array of ta…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:11AMTuesday, March 7, 2017
And so, sitting with 15 or so other people on Saturday afternoon in a small theater inside the Stage 773 complex at 1225 W. Belmont Ave., there was a great deal of laughter during the show t…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:25AMFriday, March 3, 2017
Tania Castroverde Moskalenko has yet to find a favorite seat in the Auditorium Theatre. "I am still trying them all out," she said, smiling as she stood in the majestic theater, which was ro…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:18PMMonday, January 30, 2017
Saturday was the first night of the two-week celebration of the Chinese New Year. It is, by that country's calendar, year 4,715 (Year of the Rooster), and all that 11 young men from Beijing …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:05PMThursday, January 26, 2017
Irvine Welsh, the prolific Scottish author, became famous and successful in 1993 with the publication of his first novel, a rough-and-tumble tale of a group of heroin addicts and thieves in …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:47PMThursday, January 12, 2017
It came out of nowhere, really: a few seemingly harmless snowflakes drifting down in the early Thursday morning hours of Jan. 26, 1967. Few noticed. Few worried. This was Chicago in winter, …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:43PMThursday, September 15, 2016
Jeremy McCarter moved here from Brooklyn three years ago with his wife and their baby girl. His wife, a journalist, had taken a new job, and her parents lived close enough to Chicago for the…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:19PMMonday, August 29, 2016
It is impossible for people of a certain age to walk down Wells Street in the vicinity of North Avenue and not be transported to a bygone time. This sort of thing can happen in a lot of diff…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:52PMFriday, January 29, 2016
Michael Jordan was not born here.
Neither was Oprah Winfrey, political corruption, Mike Ditka, Al Capone, potholes, Carl Sandburg or many other people and things we often claim as our own. …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:22PMMichael Jordan was not born here. Neither was Oprah Winfrey, political corruption, Mike Ditka, Al Capone, potholes, Carl Sandburg or many other people and things we often claim as our own. B…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:58AMThursday, July 23, 2015
The taverns that line the stretch of Western Avenue that slices through the charming and historically significant neighborhood of Beverly on the Far South Side are lively and essential place…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:39AMMonday, July 20, 2015
There was, of course, the inevitable sorrow that came with the news of the deaths of Roberta Custer (June 8) and Richard Fire (July 8). But then - Isn't the mind a remarkable thing? - came m…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:52PMFriday, July 10, 2015
Inside the sumptuous and stylish living room of a downtown apartment with a spectacular view east to the lake, two people sit on a bench in front of a shimmering black grand piano.
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:55AMThursday, July 9, 2015
Inside the sumptuous and stylish living room of a downtown apartment with a spectacular view east to the lake, two people sit on a bench in front of a shimmering black grand piano.
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:07PMMonday, May 4, 2015
Friday, March 6, 2015
Sitting in the darkness that is the inside of Zanies comedy club no matter the time of day or the glare of the sun on Wells Street outside, it is impossible not to be thrown back into the pa…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00PMWednesday, October 22, 2014
The current production of William Shakespeare's "King Lear," playing through Nov. 9 at the handsome and justifiably renowned Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, stars Larry Yando as th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:08PMFriday, September 26, 2014
In the beginning was the notebook, and the notebook was filled with dreams, and those dreams, against all sorts of odds and in the face of red tape, carping, money-hunting and alterations, w…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:28PMTuesday, September 9, 2014
Most of us, for reasons having to do with lack of talent, physical gifts or luck, must at some time give up our youthful dreams. And so we realized long ago that we would not be playing quar…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00PM 
