4,886 stories by "Chris Jones"
A healthy theater scene needs a lively avant-garde. That might strike you as a curious statement: Chicago theater is a famously edgy and intense collection of institutions. Celebrities appea…
Charming and unpretentious as he can be in person, Stephen Sondheim (or, as they like to say in the musical theater, God) is acutely aware of his place in history. And when it comes to contr…
Disney's "The Lion King" is returning to Chicago. The hit family musical, a perennial best-seller, will return in its Broadway touring production for a seven-week engagement, beginning D…
Disney's "The Lion King" is returning to Chicago. The hit family musical, a perennial best-seller, will return in a North American touring production for a seven-week engagement, beginni…
Zeljko Djukic, the capable founding artistic director of the avant-garde Chicago company known as TUTA Theatre Chicago, has been off on a Fulbright Scholarship. He has been missed. But he's …
Zeljko Djukic, the capable founding artistic director of the avant-garde Chicago company known as TUTA Theatre Chicago, has been off on a Fulbright Scholarship. He has been missed. But he's …
Noah Haidle's play "Smokefall," which had two highly successful runs at the Goodman Theatre starring Mike Nussbaum, is to have a New York production at the MCC Theater early in 2016, it was …
For anyone who saw the first national tour of the musical "The Addams Family," the amusements currently to be had alongside Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday and Pugsley at the Mercury Theater will…
Chicago is getting another pre-Broadway tryout: "Gotta Dance," a new musical based on a 2008 Dori Berinstein documentary about the New Jersey Nets' hip-hop dance team made up of senior citiz…
Present reality means wind chill and snowpacks. Fortuitously, life is always a celebration with composer Jerry Herman on your arm. For that most helplessly optimistic of the Broadway songsmi…
In a book called "Seducing the Subconscious," Robert Heath, an advertising executive who moved into academia, makes the argument that emotional engagement is everything. No surprise there. I…
Kelli Strickland, the executive director of the Raven Theatre Company on Chicago's North Side for the past two years, has left that post to become the new executive director of the Chicago t…
So here's one way to know the recession is over: Lots of shows about the agony of life's choices. I'm overly inclined to wander down the road not traveled and second-guess myself " a habit c…
Of all the American playwrights, the late Horton Foote was the closest this country ever had to Anton Chekhov. Although Foote's reputation during his lifetime was never equal to that of Arth…
Russ Tutterow, founding artistic director of Chicago Dramatists, is stepping down after 30 years, the Chicago organization said Tuesday morning. He is to be replaced, on an interim basis, by…
I'll say this for Bruce Graham's "White Guy On the Bus," now premiering at the Northlight Theatre: It is a play with guts. This writer has previously been inclined toward sentimentality, as …
The Jan. 15 announcement of the 2015 Academy Award nominations was greeted with widespread dismay at the omission of Ava DuVernay, the director of "Selma," and David Oyelowo, the movie's sta…
To interview actor Brian Dennehy in Chicago is to be told that Chicago is a great town, to be regaled with memories of O'Rourke's tavern, the hedonistic pleasures of Gibson's Steakhouse, the…
When I first started reviewing Chicago theater " some years ago now " the commercial suburban theaters that ringed the city seemed like aberrations and relics of a former era. Places like th…
There are dramatic plays " a few thousand years of them have unfurled to date " and there are story plays. The two categories overlap in that all great drama tells a story, of course, and ev…
Feminism carried the promise of equality in marriage " a union between two equally empowered individuals, dividing up power, opportunity and responsibility; raising kids together; climbing t…
When Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" had its 1956 North American premiere " improbably at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Florida " a good portion of the audience who'd shown up to see B…
Sean Graney will return to be the artistic director of The Hypocrites, the Chicago theater company he founded 18 years ago. The Hypocrites has been under the leadership of Halena Kays, who i…
Probably the single most infuriating and limiting thing about the American theater is its lack of immediacy when it comes to political and social commentary, mostly due to the absurd rigmaro…
"West Side Story," that ever-astonishing work of musical theater, is justly famous for the gangland rumblings between the Jets and the Sharks, stunning Jerome Robbins feats of 1950s choreogr…
