No one who was living in Chicago in 1994 can ever forget the death of 5-year-old Eric Morse, who fell to his death from the 14th floor of the Ida B. Wells public housing complex on Chicago's…
"Louis
"Louis and Keely 'Live' at the Sahara," the show about the singer-musician Louis Prima and his partner Keely Smith, has posted its closing notice at the Royal George Theatre for May 17.
If, like me, you frequently find yourself afflicted by melancholy " which we'll define here as a mild but persistent form of sadness of vague or indeterminate cause " then I think you will v…
When Sean Graney staged his 12-hour epic "All Our Tragic" for the company known as The Hypocrites last fall, he knew that the audience would need a few warm and funny guides through the dark…
When Sean Graney staged his 12-hour epic "All Our Tragic" for the company known as The Hypocrites last fall, he knew that the audience would need a few warm and funny guides through the dark…
The hospice inside Weiss Memorial Hospital on Chicago's North Side is a quiet and peaceful place. But for the last several days, one room therein has been bustling with people.
At one crucial moment in playwright Warren Leight's "Side Man," a deeply affectionate tribute to the journeyman jazzman and the price he pays for his passion, we see a musician watching Elvi…
As AMC's "Mad Men" approaches its final three episodes, it's already clear that the series auteur Matthew Weiner is honing in on the anguish of, and the anguish caused by, absent parents.
Last weekend's scandal-ette at the Joseph Jefferson Awards Committee was a reminder of the increased difficulty of carving out hard-and-fast categories from the interconnected (not to mentio…
The Definition Theatre Company, an intriguing new Chicago theater company formed by graduates of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and currently in its inaugural season, describ…
"Fun Home," the moving new musical with a book and lyrics by Lisa Korn, music by Jeanine Tesori and the subject of the early family life of the lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, was n…
They have some competition for the "Alice in Wonderland" title " Taylor Swift-size competition " but the new take on the beloved works of Lewis Carroll at Chicago Children's Theatre is certa…
If you are a fan of the comedic lyricist's art " the provision of the perfect rhyme, the acknowledgment of alliterative pleasures, the coupling of deliciously contrasting notions, the matchi…
The Joseph Jefferson Awards Committee said on Saturday that it had disqualified The Hypocrites from its 2014-15 non-Equity awards, due to its discovery of the theater's status as a Equ…
At the Second City e.t.c. comedy show the other night, I was pulled up short. The moment was a sequence of sketches all dealing with our addiction to technology. After watching someone play …
Sean Graney's epic production of "All Our Tragic," a 12-hour adaptation of every Greek play, emerged at the top of the heap of nominations for the Joseph Jefferson Awards honoring excellence…
UPDATE: Here is a full list of the nominations for the Joseph Jefferson Awards honoring excellence in non-Equity Chicago theater during the 2014-15 season. These nominations were changed Apr…
NEW YORK " With most of its stellar original cast from the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago intact, Lisa D'Amour's "Airline Highway" moves to Broadway as an affectionate updating of Lanfo…
NEW YORK - When I first saw "The Visit" at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 2001, I wrote that here was a strange, difficult, slow-to-build musical that could still pierce the skin with its…
NEW YORK " With most of its stellar original cast from the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago intact, Lisa D'Amour's "Airline Highway" moves to Broadway as an affectionate updating of Lanford Wi…
At one point in his Chicago show at Thalia Hall in Pilsen Wednesday night, Simon Amstell, the popular young British comedian known for the quiz show "Never Mind the Buzzcocks" and now on a k…
In a cafe on the Upper East Side this week, incoming Steppenwolf Theatre artistic director Anna D. Shapiro sat down to talk about her new job in Chicago. For the past year, Shapiro, her husb…
NEW YORK - In a cafe on the Upper East Side this week, incoming Steppenwolf Theatre artistic director Anna D. Shapiro sat down to talk about her new job in Chicago. For the past year, Shapir…
NEW YORK " For the first half hour of "Something Rotten!" " the wacky new Broadway musical set among insecure creative types in an ersatz version of Elizabethan London where Shakespeare is a…