Friday, April 7, 2017
Keep the faith, Chicago theater lovers. If your trust in the integrity of Steppenwolf and Tracy Letts was in any way shaken by the tortured, execrable sitcom CBS rendered from their Chicago-…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 08:58PMTuesday, March 28, 2017
In the two years since the secret Not in Our House Facebook group was formed, a number of things have changed. Chief among them is that Profiles Theatre no longer exists.…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 03:18PMMonday, February 27, 2017
In the wake of a tumultuous presidential election, this year's One-Minute Play Festival at the Den Theatre puts politics at center stage. In its seventh year, the festival—this edition is …
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 06:01PMWednesday, February 22, 2017
Now in its fourth year, the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events' OnEdge series returns with a month of experimental theater and dance shows that examine the intersections of id…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 04:02PMA social media firestorm of allegations of sexual harassment and emotional abuse ignited Tuesday afternoon and incinerated Dead Writers Collective, a six-year-old theater company, which anno…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 02:58PMThursday, February 9, 2017
Censorship, unicorns, sexism—no topic is too sensitive or outrageous for Karen Finley. The Chicago native will visit Steppenwolf for a pair of shows: Written in Sand, on February 10 and 11…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 03:57PMWednesday, January 18, 2017
Spring 1988. The Spanish puppet company Comediants is onstage at Park West and a 26-year-old Blair Thomas is in the audience having a revelation.…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 04:34PMFriday, January 6, 2017
(This essay contains spoilers.)
Popular culture often portrays the Christian pursuit of faith as a naive desire for clarity and certainty in an unsympathetic world that off…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 02:04PMWednesday, January 4, 2017
Improvisation has become the sriracha of performing arts. People are always finding new places to put it, from moviemaking to corporate-team building.…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 03:12PMFriday, December 30, 2016
Fences, in theaters now, is the first August Wilson play to be adapted into a feature film backed by a major film studio (The Piano Lesson, which was first produced in 1987, was made for TV…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 05:37PMTuesday, December 27, 2016
The Chicago theater community got a pair of year-end jolts with December announcements about the demise of Oracle Productions and the near demise of the Hypocrites.
…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 05:45PMWednesday, November 30, 2016
Neo-Futurists founder Greg Allen made the surprising announcement today that he's ending the 28-year Chicago run of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind on December 31st. He's doing so in …
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 08:08PMWednesday, November 23, 2016
In 2014 translator Nicholas Rudall and director Charles Newell gave us their canny and powerful version of Iphigenia in Aulis, Euripides's look at how, step by excruciating step, Mycenaean k…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 01:30PMTuesday, October 25, 2016
Schoolchildren are introduced to Shakespeare as literature, which might not be the best idea. I slogged through King Lear in college, and then again this summer on behalf of my book group.…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 10:00AMFriday, October 7, 2016
As a performer, comedian Dave Maher is a high-concept mischief-maker. During his recent six-week stint at the Annoyance, he spent one night intentionally shirking his responsibilities, setti…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 12:19PMTuesday, October 4, 2016
The arts section, no less, of a recent New York Times carried two stories on American racism at its roots. There was an admiring review of a new play, Underground Railroad Game, a kind of …
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 03:05PMThursday, September 29, 2016
Convinced Christians may take offense at Hand to God. Convinced Christians with a sense of humor may find themselves in the odd position of taking offense while laughing.…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 12:30PMWednesday, September 28, 2016
Hindi isn't the only language into which Mumbai's Company Theatre has translated Twelfth Night. They've also rendered it into a theatrical style that takes liberties with everything but Shak…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 06:03PMHindi isn't the only language into which Mumbai's Company Theatre has translated Twelfth Night. They've also rendered it into a theatrical style that takes liberties with everything but Shak…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 06:03PMThursday, September 22, 2016
By turns homage and send-up, faithful adaptation and freewheeling deconstruction, Life Sucks, Aaron Posner's witty, iconoclastic update of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, is much smarter and more ent…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 05:03PMFriday, August 26, 2016
This Is Modern Art, a provocative play about graffiti artists, ran for a few weeks early last year as a Steppenwolf for Young Adults production. The play, by Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval, …
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 12:00PMFriday, August 19, 2016
Back for its third year, the Chicago Musical Theatre Festival, running at Victory Gardens Theater through 8/28, presents 14 new or lightly used musicals, two of them in workshops and a dozen…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 02:30PMThursday, August 11, 2016
Nearly 300 members of the Chicago theater community gathered at a town hall meeting at Victory Gardens Theater Tuesday night to discuss the problem of a lack of roles for performers of co…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 01:30PMMonday, August 8, 2016
Arts educator, singer, actress, and entrepreneur Sulie Harand passed away peacefully in her sleep on Saturday, August 6, four days after her 97th birthday. Sulie, born August 2, 1919, was co…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 10:33AMWednesday, August 3, 2016
Crap-shootishness is part of the charm of new play festivals, and with six scripts scheduled for readings, this one will necessarily have its share. But host Victory Gardens Theater has clea…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 04:00PMIn 2010, when the young actor Corbin Bleu took over the lead role of Usnavi in In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who'd written the show's score and also originated the role, hailed him in…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 08:00AMWhen I first saw the lineup for Porchlight Music Theatre's 2016 season, I thought: Wow! This might be our chance.
…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 08:00AMThursday, July 21, 2016
A life in the theater, on- or offstage, is so notoriously difficult that it's become romanticized. Young, aspiring actors and crew members expect long hours, late nights, and hard physic…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 01:00PMTuesday, July 12, 2016
Since Profiles Theatre abruptly closed its doors nearly a month ago, six days after the Reader published its investigation of alleged abuse and misconduct within the theater, there has been…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 10:35AMTuesday, June 28, 2016
The Reader's exposé of Profiles Theatre triggered something in Chicago that one theater-world friend calls "incredibly important"—an overdue acknowledgement and fierce repudiation of abu…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 09:00AMFriday, June 17, 2016
If you want to follow the Profiles Theatre story and all its developments from the very beginning, here, in chronological order, are all the stories and blog posts the Reader has run since J…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 01:44PM 
