4,886 stories by "Chris Jones"
When Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats" first opened in London in 1981, long before the kitty takeover of social media, I recall my teenage self marveling over a line in the newspaper advertisemen…
This past weekend, two works by the same author opened at two leading Chicago-area theater companies, Writers Theatre in Glencoe and Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago. This would not be so unu…
NEW YORK " In its home base of Chicago, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company's studiolike production of Kenneth Lonergan's closely observed and emotionally potent "This Is Our Youth" was an intim…
This weekend the new season of Chicago theater gets underway in earnest. If there is an unintended theme of the fall, I'd say it is that Chicago theater finds itself collectively engaged wit…
For the first time on such scale in the Midwest, theaters all over Chicago, the suburbs and in Milwaukee will dim their marquee lights prior to showtime.
Theatre at the Center said Wednesday that the actor George Andrew Wolff will take over the role of the taxi driver in their current production, "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." T…
At one point in "Since I Suppose," the new theater piece from the remarkable Australian company, One Step at a Time Like This, you find yourself alone in Daley Plaza, most likely in the midd…
Some in the audience at the Drury Lane Theatre Thursday night thought they were going to see "Something's Afoot," the musical spoof of Agatha Christie. An easy mistake to make. In fact, the …
Bernie Yvon was a song-and-dance man of the old school. Since he also was a disarmingly sophisticated actor " one need only have seen his Max last year in "Cabaret" or watched his younger se…
To be an actress with red hair " and Molly Glynn was so gifted " is to constantly find your name attached to adjectives like "fiery" or "feisty" after even the most minor display of independ…
For many in the Chicago theater, the day of incomprehensible tragedy Saturday began with an 8:33 a.m. Facebook post from a popular actor, Joe Foust. "I couldn't save her, I couldn't save her…
The close-knit Chicago theater community suffered almost an unbearable loss Saturday when two of its stars, the actors Bernie Yvon and Molly Glynn, were struck down in the prime of their car…
Few longtime observers consider 2013-14 a vintage year for Broadway. So weak was the overall slate that most of the new offerings were outsold by longer-lived shows from previous seasons.
Summer exits, if it ever entered. Winter remains the newly terrifying villain in the wings. And the fall theater season is upon us. With a relatively quiet season for touring shows, the focu…
To play King Lear is to confront the possibility of being unloved and ill-used in your dementia-ridden old age. To play Ebenezer Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol" is to stare into your own grav…
Roy Leonard, a courtly, erudite New Englander who became one of Chicago radio's biggest and most durable stars, a celebrity interviewer of national stature, and a trusted and thus highly inf…
Not long ago, the venerable Shattered Globe Theatre Company was, like the endangered gray whale, staring extinction in the face. So to sit at Theatre Wit and watch this long-struggling but h…
Opening nights in Chicago usually have their share of actors in the audience " some supporting friends, others just seeing the art they love. Nonetheless, the opening of Ron Keaton's "Church…
The Steppenwolf Theatre Company production of "Airline Highway" by Lisa D'Amour is to move to Broadway after its Chicago engagement. Joe Mantello directs both in Chicago and New York.
To be a haunted pub, you're really supposed to be an old pub. London's Viaduct Tavern, known for its poltergeist activity, has been a tavern since 1875. New York's waterfront Bridge Cafe, wh…
THEATER REVIEW: "Reasons to be Happy" from Profiles Theatre ★½ Although more of a comedy and less raw, Neil LaBute's "Reasons to be Happy" is almost as good as "Reasons to be Pretty…
IN PERFORMANCE: iO grand opening "Armando Diaz Experience" The occasion for the celebrity infusion was the opening weekend of the new digs for the hopefully immortal iO, longtime resident of…
"Be a great artist," a mentor tells a young Jewish painter who likes to draw Jesus Christ. "It is the only justification for all the pain you are about to cause."
In an unexpected flurry of late summer activity, it was revealed that two Chicago theater companies are eyeing new homes in buildings that once were put to use by the city of Chicago.
Be it a story of sex, booze, cocaine or, in the case of the actor Steven Strafford, crystal methamphetamine, aka the most dangerous drug in the world, the challenge with any personal narrati…
