321 stories by "Bob Bullen"
The cliffhanger that concludes the first half of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America is designed to stun. It’s the moment when the angel — an earth-shattering vision or a…
There’s a rock revolution going on, and should you choose to attend, you’ve automatically become an unwitting member of The Numberless. Who are The Numberless, you ask? Why, they…
Ok. I may be a Chicago theatre addict, but even I have my limits. You see, I get roughly several dozen press invitations a day for shows, which at first was awesome, but now it’s a bit…
Simon Callow’s one-man show, Being Shakespeare, took the U.K. by storm and is now making a short stop at Chicago’s Broadway Playhouse, courtesy of Chicago Shakespeare TheatreR…
Re-Spiced: A Silk Road Cabaret isn’t your mother’s cabaret. It’s bold, colorful, eclectic, relevant and shockingly subversive. I’ve seen a lot of cabaret in my time, …
Shannon Matesky and Harry Groener in Steppenwolf’s “The March“ When adapting a 400 page epic novel for the stage, you usually have about three options: 1) Make the play 6 h…
Hit the Wall, a powerful new play about the Stonewall Uprising produced by the relatively newbie theater company The Inconvenience, is one of those shows everyone in Chicago is talking about…
Erin Creighton and John Sessler in Street Tempo Theatre’s “Little Shop of Horrors.” Photo credit: Linda Gartz You think you’ve seen Little Shop, right? You’ve p…
Sometimes I take living in the city for granted. To avoid the rat race, I typically take the Pedway to get from the train to my downtown office and back again, which means that I may go for …
Ah, Chicago theatre. The place where people willingly toil away for countless hours in windowless black boxes, bearing their souls for little to no pay. As a frequent voyeur of such perversi…
This audition video for Goodman Theatre’s Crowns is quite charming. These two young actresses look like they’re completely gobsmacked to be working on this show, and their energy…
Fela!, which started as an Off-Broadway show in 2008 and has grown into an international sensation (and is now playing at Chicago's Oriental Theatre through April 15), follows the life of Af…
There are many fancy Hollywood actor types who got their start toiling away in Chicago storefront theatre. I won’t name them here (we get to that later), but trust me: it’s true.…
In Mark St. Germain’s play, Freud’s Last Session, which is receiving its Chicago premiere with the original New York cast, director and producers, he imagines what would happen i…
Sometimes there are those characters in a movie or play that you wish could be extracted from the clutter around them and given their own showcase piece. Such is the case with the characters…
While there were many moments in Goodman Theatre’s deeply disturbing and immensely fascinating production of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real that flew over my head, one thing cer…
They say role play is a great form of therapy. But in French playwright Jean Genet’s 1947 play, The Maids, this concept is taken to a whole new sadomasochistic level. Two maids, who al…
Not that anybody has asked for my opinion on the matter, but here ya go… I’m not going to rehash all the back story on this, because by now you’ve probably heard it all (in…
What do you get when you take five singer/comedians, one pianist, a top hat filled with fictional song titles and shove them on a stage? You get BEST MUSICAL! A Completely Improvised Musical…
Do you have your tickets to Theo Ubique’s The Light in the Piazza? No? Well, you should, because it’s remarkable. In fact, Chris Jones gave it an out-and-out rave and said that K…
My latest HuffPo review is now live, people. Check it. — After 16 years renting spaces around town, Rivendell Theatre Ensemble — Chicago’s only producing organization dedic…
There are some people out there (you know who you are) who refer to me as “Ravinia Bob.” Over time, this nickname was been truncated to “RivB,” and eventually “…
Can you believe it? Phantom is a quarter of a century old. It’s the longest running show on Broadway, has generated roughly 4,678,980 katillion dollars, and your beer guzzling brother-…
“Laramie is a community, not a ‘project,’” declares a biting editorial published in the Laramie Boomerang on October 12, 2008 — the tenth anniversary of Matthew…
[image source] Yesterday evening, as my cab pulled up to The Den Theatre for Nothing Special Productions’ My Kinda Town, this totally true conversation transpired between me and the cr…
