The Goodman Theatre's gripping and highly stylized production of Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge" and American Blues Theater's lively staging of "Buddy " The Buddy Holly Story" were …
During World War I, many British soldiers, which is to say many young men of 16 or 17 years old, were court martialed and then shot, proverbially at dawn, by a firing squad made up of combat…
Jez Butterworth's "The Ferryman," which opened with a howling roar of cacophonous humanity on Sunday night on Broadway, packs more juicy and prophetic Anglo-Irish storytelling into a fantast…
Aged out of haunted houses, prefer cocktails to punch, like puzzles and intimate conversation and yet still craving a seasonal scare? "Masque Macabre" is here to serve your lingering date-ni…
"Truth isn't truth," Rudy Giuliani famously spluttered on "Meet the Press" last summer, trumping even presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway's much-derided coinage of the phrase "alternative …
"Truth isn't truth," Rudy Giuliani famously spluttered on "Meet the Press" last summer, trumping even presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway's much-derided coinage of the phrase "alternative …
The Chicago actor Fredric Stone spelled his first name in such a way as to confound careless critics and curse copy editors. "I used to tease him about that," said Chuck Stransky, a friend o…
If you doubt that the ferocious passion of one gifted performer for one iconic role can propel an entire young cast to raise its game to the rafters, then you have not seen E. Faye Butler at…
When the national tour of Jerry Zaks' hit Broadway revival of "Hello, Dolly!" arrives in Chicago next week, Betty Buckley will play the starring role of Dolly Gallagher Levi, the matchmaker …
With "Avenue Q" going gangbusters on his main stage, L. Walter Stearns of the Mercury Theater is stuffing a full-blown, surround-sound "Pippin" inside his spiffy new cabaret-and-cocktails sp…
As 50 percent of the Weather Girls, Martha Wash is a platinum-selling recording artist responsible not only for the iconic disco anthem "It's Raining Men" but also for many of the potent sou…
I first saw Pearl Cleage's "Flyin' West," a potboiler of a show set in an all-black frontier town in 1898, in Montgomery, Ala. It was 1998 and Cleage " a prolific novelist as well as a playw…
The U.S. airline industry " essentially an oligarchy " has come to love the word "discipline." Abandoning its past practice of adding competitive routes and bigger planes on a whim, the like…
Chicago's fall theater season opened in a flurry of activity in recent days. Before I talk you through what I think you should see, let me start by saying this has been a golden fall for can…
The Faustian myth " wherein some ambitious dude sells his soul to the devil to score some instant gratification " is one of literature's most popular themes. There's Christopher Marlowe's "T…
Ah, Switzerland. Home of chocolate, cleanliness, secret bank accounts, beautiful scenery, lonely wanderers, studied neutrality and a carefully veiled past. What might it be like to stare int…
"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" is an atypical project for the Steppenwolf for Young Adults program, which for years has produced either original, socially conscious work…
When a furious Brett Kavanaugh decried his United States Supreme Court confirmation history as a "circus," he was using the word as a pejorative: He was describing what he believed to be a c…
Noah Weisberg, the fine young actor playing Willy Wonka in the musical version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," has a tough gig. He has to follow the late Gene Wilder, whose twinkle-e…
On Tuesday night, the Chicago Cubs learned a tough lesson from "Macbeth": "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.…
Anyone who works in the theater is familiar with struggle. But the Polish-Jewish novelist Sholem Asch had so much strife with his 1907 play, "God of Vengeance," that he surely must have felt…
Drag queens are coming to Motor Row. And they will be serving you dinner. "Lips," a for-profit, dinner-theater concept that has lasted 22 years in New York, is expected to open in March in t…
The best moment in "Tootsie," which opened its pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago on Sunday night, is not when the remarkable Santino Fontana first appears in a dress as Dorothy, the ill-advised…
As the nonprofit American theater has primarily become a gathering place for educated, like-minded progressives, those who provide its content have a sacred moral and artistic duty not just …
A charming courtesan is plucked from her former milieu by a rich and powerful patron. Although initially reluctant, she moves into his rooms, relieving his boredom and even helping him, in h…