84 stories by "Brianhey"
Paragraph One. Playwright Lucas Hnath’s having a Chicago moment, with his “Isaac’s Eye” in simultaneous production at Writers Theatre this fall. “Death Tax̶…
By Loy Webb There is a contagious energy that fills the room upon meeting Definition Theatre Company (DTC). One look at their bright hopeful eyes, erect self-confident posture, and fiery pas…
They say the clothes make the man, and so I think can a space make the theater company. For years, Red Tape Theatre was safely ensconced in a cavernous and decrepit old gymnasium attached to…
RECOMMENDED "An armed society is a polite society," goes the old NRA slogan. Perhaps, but it's also an insane society, as demonstrated by Nick Jones' play "The Coward," receiving its Midwest…
RECOMMENDED "She was ruthless. She was evil. She was a theater critic, for God's sake!" Delivered in the baritonal vocal stylings of Chicago's own national treasure Alene Robertson, this pro…
Which graduate of our public school system hasn't read the CliffsNotes for Melville's "Moby Dick," along with Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet" and "Beowulf?" With "The Whaleship Essex," sa…
I missed "reasons to be pretty" when Profiles Theatre debuted it Chicago back in 2011. What many consider to be playwright Neil LaBute's best work, the show presents the fallout from a man's…
RECOMMENDED A few days ago, a friend and I were joking about the plot of Lerner and Loewe’s “Brigadoon” when he quipped, “What a silly story,” then, quickly rea…
By Dennis Polkow Director and choreographer Rachel Rockwell seems to be the lady with the golden touch, the one with an uncanny talent for taking old classic shows that you thought you knew …
RECOMMENDED Those of an age to recall the 1971 version of the John-Michael Tebelak/Stephen Schwartz musical "Godspell" are in for some surprises while enjoying the 2012 revised version on st…
RECOMMENDED Images from the early days of mass airline travel, the “Mad Men” years, depict the life of a flight attendant (then called stewardesses) as one of high-flying youth a…
RECOMMENDED Late in the second act of playwright Mona Mansour’s marvelous “The Way West,” a pizza-delivery guy gets into a tussle over declined credit cards with the play&#…
RECOMMENDED Playwright David Ives has made his reputation with smart translation-adaptations of classic French works, most recently his retooling of Moliere’s “The Misanthrope…
RECOMMENDED At its best, theater uses its characters and their stories as vessels for big ideas, for provocations that make audiences think about new concepts, or to consider old notions in …
RECOMMENDED Opening a Stephen Sondheim show, even one of his most popular, two days before Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Gary Griffin"the city’s unquestioned master of stellar So…
RECOMMENDED Walking out of the theater, I overheard a woman telling her companion, “even when I’m already feeling good when I get here, I leave feeling better.” That sums u…
RECOMMENDED Two scientists"two women from two different generations"are talking about the evolution of human female anatomy and the conversation veers into the subject of love. The older, se…
RECOMMENDED That the most famous image emanating from a Norwegian mind, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” is an existential wail seems appropriate for a land where darkness weig…
Top 5 Plays of 2013 Simpatico, A Red Orchid Theatre Head of Passes, Steppenwolf Smokefall, Goodman Theatre Measure for Measure, Goodman Theatre Hank Williams: Lost Highway, American Blues Th…
RECOMMENDED I kept thinking about the story of my parents’ oft-discussed first meeting"at a dance hall in Fargo, North Dakota sometime at the dawn of the JFK era"as I watched one of th…
Sometimes Chicago Shakespeare produces bold reinventions of classics. Other times it brings in world-theater innovators as one of the most globally minded cultural entities in Chicago. And t…
RECOMMENDED Director Chuck Smith has taken Cheryl L West’s play about three generations of African-American porters working on a luxury Pullman train bound from Chicago to New Orleans …
RECOMMENDED Pre-curtain and offstage, singing guitarists make music, setting the tone for a play that opens on a pastoral setting of two nineteenth-century Spanish peasants, two sisters on o…
RECOMMENDED It’s probably a foreign notion to younger audiences that just a generation or so ago the idea of a television food celebrity was as alien as a six-eyed martian. That such n…
RECOMMENDED Has any American been so universally idolized in the last century as Martin Luther King, Jr? On April 3, 1968, five years after “I Have A Dream” and almost a dozen ye…
