The premise of Kevin Douglas's "Plantation," now at the Lookingglass Theatre in downtown Chicago under the direction of David Schwimmer, is a doozy. A modern-day Texas matriarch comes to rea…
At the Lifeline Theatre, the soon-to-be-departing artistic director Dorothy A. Milne gave the usual little curtain speech about cellphones and emergency exits, winding up to her climax: "And…
Friedrich Schiller was once a really big deal in Chicago: You still can see his statuesque likeness in Lincoln Park or even live on his street. For a price. But we rarely get to see the dram…
Northlight Theatre of Skokie is walking away from a plan to build a new theater inside a larger mixed-use development in the 1700 block of Sherman Avenue in downtown Evanston. In a statement…
Steppenwolf Theatre Company will join with the National Theatre of Great Britain to stage a major world premiere by the oft-controversial author Bruce Norris, Steppenwolf announced Wednesday…
Ike Holter has written a major, seven-play series about the strife and humanity to be found in his home city of Chicago. You may have even seen some of them. You just likely didn't have the …
A house has been built inside the Windy City Playhouse on Irving Park Road. I speak not of a conventional setting nor the usual stage facsimile of a house. As you walk into the theater for t…
Are cops a force for good? In his three compelling mystery plays about the Chicago Police Department " "A Steady Rain" in 2008, "The Detective's Wife" in 2011 and, here in 2018, "Six Corners…
First you walk into the laundromat. Someone hits the spin-cyle button, a panel gives way and then you head into the room for the magic. A very nice 1930s-style, 120-seat salon. Replete with …
"Diet Coke Ginger Lime," says the red-headed guy on the low-rent couch, taking a swig on his beverage of choice as he stares into a camera that feels not unlike the one in your cracked smart…
At the end of last year, 20 Chicago theater companies received a seasonal surprise: quiet $10,000 checks from the newly formed Bayless Family Foundation. The only significant condition? A wi…
The Wolves are players on a fictional, under-17 girls soccer team, the scourge of their suburban league. But the play by Sarah DeLappe that created them isn't so much a work about the world'…
Sometime in the mid-1980s, writer Keith Huff found himself at what is now the Brown Line station near Lawrence and Western avenues. As he was walking up the stairs to the platform, he heard …
The American playwright Antoinette Nwandu made such extraordinary progress between "Breach," which is the kind of predictably self-questioning play most writers get out of their systems in s…
Most shows save their full-throated power ballads for late in the night. But at "Love Never Dies," the sequel to Andrew Lloyd Webber's mega-smash "The Phantom of Opera," the lush strings are…
The NBC police drama "Chicago P.D." was "slammed," the Tribune reported in a Wednesday headline, for filming too close to the Thompson Center in Chicago's Loop, where Chicago police Cmdr. Pa…
"There is no present or future," says the character James Tyrone in "A Moon for the Misbegotten," "only the past happening over and over again " now. You can't get away from it." Sitting the…
Remember those old commercials for Milwaukee's General Mitchell International Airport? "Forty-five minutes from the Lake Forest Oasis" was the tagline, trying to tempt residents of Chicago's…
"The Sting," the musical, has found its Henry Gondorff. Harry Connick Jr. will play the role made famous by Paul Newman. The crooner will star in the upcoming musical version of the Chicago-…
From the moment he first met her behind a potted plant in 1975, Alan Zweibel loved Gilda Radner. Despite the unwieldy and inaccurate subtitle, "A Sort of Love Story," the play "Bunny Bunny,"…
Kelly Felthous, who plays Sally Bowles in the Paramount Theatre production of "Cabaret" did not get a lick of applause Saturday at the end of the show's famous title number, despite this bei…
"You Got Older," a play by Clare Barron about losing someone you love to cancer, was slated to open at the Steppenwolf Theatre last Monday, on the evening that news came of the death of one …
When Claudia Cassidy, this newspaper's chief arts critic for the mid-section of the 20th century, and arguably the most powerful female employee of the paper's Colonel McCormick era, died in…
Hershey Felder, the writer-actor-pianist whose biographies of composers have a broad following in Chicago, is returning to town. But he's not coming to his usual haunt, the Royal George Thea…
Wanna see "Love Never Dies," Andrew Lloyd Webber's throbbing sequel to "The Phantom of the Opera"? It opens Wednesday, you know. Right here at the Cadillac Palace Theatre in Chicago. On Vale…