Hoosiers are a great mystery to the people of Broadway. Apparently, they live in small, economically challenged towns best flown over. They insist on homophobic traditional values and, when …
What should be the arts policy of the new administration headed by the incoming Democratic governor of the State of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker? You cannot answer that question without also aski…
"The Last Session" " which I doubt you have seen staged before " is surely the only gospel-infused musical that deals with the AIDS crisis that plagued America in the waning years of the 20t…
"We will never," said Cameron Mackintosh, sounding unusually wistful, "be all together doing this again." Mackintosh " often known by the sobriquet "Mister Producer" and the most successful …
After 92 years, the name of the Oriental Theatre is going to disappear. Early next year, the venerable, historic venue built in Chicago at 24 W. Randolph St. in 1926 on the site of the Iroqu…
The long-awaited, $75 million restoration of the 93-year-old Uptown Theatre " among the highest profile historic rehabs in the city's history " will begin next summer, Chicago's Community De…
In the summer of 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted, weirdly causing a stormy following summer in Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary Godwin was chilling with her lover (and soon to be her…
In the most powerful moment in "Bitter Earth," a new two-character play by Harrison David Rivers, we see a young white man berating his African-American lover for what he sees as shameful po…
Stare hard into the gorgeous eyes of that gigantic gorilla, people: they're like deep emotional pools, transfixing in their moist, needy intensity. If they gave out Tony Awards for the peepe…
Sometimes, kind readers will write to thank me for pointing me toward a show they really liked. Other times, they'll ask me, usually in upper-case, some variation on the theme of: what was I…
The following is excerpted from "Rise Up!: Broadway and American Society from 'Angels in America' to 'Hamilton.'" The book about theater and social progress is by the Tribune's Chris Jones a…
"American Son" is a tense, didactic Broadway play for our age of racially charged mistrust. In its best moments " all of which involve the star Kerry Washington " this work by lawyer-playwri…
For some younger audience members inside the Helen Hayes Theatre, Harvey Fierstein's "Torch Song" must seem like a weird relic from another time " a 1982 experience, meaning a trip back to w…
Every great playwright is a Cassandra " willing and able to warn of future disaster, should certain human tendencies go unchecked. But few relished that role with the intensity and complexit…
Those of us who long ago hitched our covered wagons to the talent train that is Calamity West have been waiting for that play. You know, the one that propels her toward what her talent deser…
Despite the title, Bess Wohl's "Small Mouth Sounds" is fundamentally a play about silence. To experience the work at Chicago's A Red Orchid Theatre, where the show opened this past weekend, …
Come March, Berwyn's much-loved 16th Street Theater will no longer have an address on the leafy suburban street from which it took its name. It's moving west to spiffier new digs on Harlem A…
Billie Holiday was dead at the age of 44. Had Lady Day moved to Europe like Nina Simone, Dexter Gordon and so many of her other peers, would her life story have had a different ending? That'…
When the great American playwright Terrence McNally wrote "Master Class" in 1995, it was generally accepted that studying the arts with a famously tempestuous diva " like, say, the late Mari…
Now a hipster highway, Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago was known in the first decades of the 20th century as Dinner Pail Avenue " it was so named for the legions of workers carrying their food a…
Here's why you need to get out more and see international artists' perspectives on our riven America and its fraught democratic processes. You will encounter things that no U.S. company woul…
The 86-year-old Elaine May " who last appeared on Broadway 52 years ago in a show that ran for about 30 seconds " is gifted with a face formed in the shape of a smile. And anyone who remembe…
Before we get into Betty Buckley as compared with Bette Midler, trains and parades passing by, Sunday clothes to be put on, galloping waiters and all the rest of that glorious Broadway mishe…
Whatever day you might have, the evening will be improved by a visit to a Colombian circus. Just such a troupe, Circolombia, has arrived at Chicago Shakespeare Theater's fabulous new Navy Pi…
Behold the brand-new Green Line Performing Arts Center. As of Nov. 10, Chicago will have a well-equipped, 100-seat, $5.5 million, storefront-style theater, replete with separate rehearsal sp…