THREE WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL In 1978, five women gather in an upper-middle-class home in Karaj, Iran, to primp and prepare themselves; one of them is getting married and being that they are …
WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY Late in the first act of Lauren Gunderson's The Book of Will, a character makes an impassioned plea to her husband, John Heminges, one of William Shakespea…
NOBODY PUTS THIS BABY IN A CORNER A set doesn't get any sparser than the one for Gangsta Baby, in the sense that there isn't one. You step in off the street into a basement with two dozen ch…
TAKE A TRIP DOWN THIS RABBIT HOLE Coping with familial grief has long been fertile ground for theatre, from Rabbit Hole to Hamlet to Antigone, performed almost 2500 years ago at the birth of…
A STAR VEHICLE ON THE ROAD TO FRANCIS GUINAN I confess to some amount of trepidation as I settled into my seat at the Goodman Theatre, launching its centennial season with the world premiere…
A CLIFFHANGER For the Midwest premiere of TL;DR: Thelma Louise: Dyke Remix, a rock musical by Ellarose Chary (book & lyrics) and Brandon James Gwinn (music and lyrics), the entirety of t…
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE… Early in the proceedings of Things with Friends, the new play by Kristoffer Diaz (Hell's Kitchen, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity) a character dismisses an…
WHO NEEDS A HEALTHY CORTEX WHEN YOU'VE GOT THIRTY-TWO SHOWSTOPPERS? The urge to create has served as a muse for countless forms of art: literature, opera, film, and theatre are littered with…
The circus is in town! The entrance to the Cambria Hotel on West Randolph Street in Chicago is so nondescript as to be almost invisible. Barely wider than its revolving door, you could walk …
MUFFLE THIS MUFFED; IT'S COMEDY LOST IN THE NOISE The films of Christopher Guest are sui generis. From hundreds of hours of improvisation, his talented troupe of actors create memorable char…
RIDE THIS TRAIN TO THE END OF THE LINE One of Chicago's oldest store-front theaters, City Lit, opens its 45th season with a production of Pulitzer winner, Stephen Adly Gurgis' Jesus Hopped T…
FROM TWEE TO TRÈS MAGNIFIQUE It's fascinating how some stories lend themselves better to one medium than the other. In 2001, the French romantic comedy, Amélie was an unexpected worldwid…
DON'T LET THIS PARADE PASS YOU BY In 1913, in Atlanta, Georgia, the body of Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old factory laborer, was found in the basement of a pencil factory. On the flimsiest …
GAME. SET. NOT QUITE MATCH. Tennis great and feminist icon Billie Jean King gets the biography treatment in Billie Jean by Lauren Gunderson. Opening the new season of Chicago Shakespeare, th…
A FITFULLY AMUSING THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM IN SKOKIE A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a glorious farce, a 20th-century construction based on the characters an…
THE BUSINESS OF NOSTALGIA: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST ALL DRESSED UP WITH NOWHERE TO GO Last Thursday night, a rainy July 10th, ensconced in the stunningly beautiful Cadillac Palace Theatre, I fin…
SEND IN THE CLOWNS Farce is not a style of performance one sees too often these days and that's probably because it is extraordinarily difficult to pull off, requiring complete commitment fr…
COLOR ME DISAPPOINTED I came to see the Goodman Theatre's current production of The Color Purple with a complicated history. I devoured Alice Walker's novel three times as a callow teenager …
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE What is theatre? This was the question that popped into my head as I took my seat in the tiny TUTA Theatre space in Chicago's Ravenswood Manor neighborhood, ready to t…
SICKENINGLY FUNNY Noah Diaz's You Will Get Sick, which opened last night at Steppenwolf, is an odd bird of a play. It begins with an irresistible premise: a middle-aged woman, Callan, respon…
STORYTELLING THAT LAUNCHES A THOUSAND SHIPS There is a moment in Court Theatre's fourth (!) iteration of An Iliad where The Poet holds a flashlight below his chin"I immediately flashed back …