At the posh Lincoln Center, the young Cockney woman that professor Henry Higgins finds in Covent Garden is not the usual chipper and cheerily comprehensible flower girl you find in Alan Jay …
In 2013, the entrepreneurial pianist and actor Hershey Felder received a letter from Russian authorities. Felder, who has many fans in Chicago, is well known for his solo shows focused on th…
"Jesus Christ Superstar," which is close to half a century old and the only show ever to contain such a gloriously ridiculous lyric as "Hosanna Hey Sanna Sanna Sanna Ho" is having a heck of …
Playwright Boo Killebrew's "Lettie" begins with a woman staring at her half-sister, who just got out of jail. "This wasn't supposed to happen for two or three years," the woman says, annoyed…
Can you combine the post-colonial atrocities, the internal corruption, the ceaseless profiteering that still afflicts Africa, the mother continent of humanity, with the rubric of a knockdown…
Tracy Letts' "The Minutes," a play about an incendiary council meeting in a small American city, was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in drama. The designation was announced Monday aft…
Through no fault of its own, Philip Dawkins' "The Burn" has not turned out to be well-timed. Set in a Chicago public high school and focused on a well-meaning teacher (Erik Hellman) and four…
If you are playing Nellie Forbush in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's "South Pacific," which opened Thursday night at the Drury Lane Theatre under the open-hearted direction of Victor…
God is in "Carousel." So is human love and sexual desire, but let's leave that aside for a moment. In 1945, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II created the greatest musical ever written…
In its marketing materials, director Kenny Leon's complicated new Broadway revival of "Children of a Lesser God," which opened Wednesday night at Studio 54, justly describes itself as "the m…
Harmony France, the artistic director of the feisty Firebrand Theatre, is a fountain of fabulous ideas. Her latest? Take the flop Broadway show known as "9 to 5 the Musical" and stage it in …
Elaine May " the iconic actress, comedian, writer and director who first emerged in Chicago in the 1950s alongside her partner Mike Nichols " is to return to Broadway next season. May, 85, w…
A former Tribune colleague of mine sent me a note with a question this week. He'd been with his wife to see the Steep Theatre production of Simon Stephens' "Birdland," a fantastic show that …
Over the years, Second City has thrown some material into its revues that is just not funny at all. I've always loved the awkward silence that then descends on the room " the way the party-m…
"Sometimes I feel like an iPhone without a case," muses one of the teens in the new Broadway musical "Mean Girls," written by Tina Fey and set among the cliques and geeks of what now is a ca…
They're nocturnal creatures. Their natural habitat is posh hotels " although, like me, you might have glimpsed the odd one preening through a casino or scurrying in their sunglasses through …
Does intelligence make a white person any less inherently racist? How about a white neurologist who actually does research into his own racism? Those questions " which are interesting ones t…
Taking a cue from the hit musical "Hamilton," the Chicago Cubs are offering the team's first-ever lottery for the upcoming baseball season at Wrigley Field: 60 seats in the terrace reserved …
It's New Year's Eve, 1944. Three days earlier, this newspaper had published a review by Claudia Cassidy admonishing each and every Chicagoan not to miss a play called "The Glass Menagerie" w…
Rainn Wilson, best known for playing the mercurial character of Dwight Schrute on "The Office" (U.S. version on NBC) and intern Arthur Martin on HBO's "Six Feet Under," is playing the lead i…
Remy Bumppo is hanging in there. This midsize Chicago theater " its budget hovers around $1 million " is in the riskiest sector of the Chicago theater, as we all learned with the loss of Ame…
Should children be taught of the imminence of their own death in much the same way that they are taught their ABCs? Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women" " now on Broadway in an extraordinarily …
In 1967, actress Katharine Houghton was cast by director Stanley Kramer in the role of Joanna in a movie called "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." She was to play the scion of a newspaper edito…
As the movie "Pretty Woman" made a star of a young Julia Roberts, so "Pretty Woman The Musical," likely will do the same for the sensational 27-year-old Manx actress Samantha Barks. She's gr…
Act 1 of the new musical at the Broadway Playhouse, "A Taste of Things to Come," is set in a Winnetka kitchen in 1957, amid women bonding over (and singing about) pregnancy, cooking, thwarte…