4,886 stories by "Chris Jones"
So you watched the Tony Awards. Now you're wondering when you might get to see all those new shows in Chicago. I've talked to a few insiders on the matter, and here's my best analysis of the…
Oscar Lopez Rivera, the Puerto Rican nationalist whose prison sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama in January, told the Chicago public radio station WBEZ on Tuesday night that he …
The 2016-17 Broadway season produced one blockbuster revival, "Hello Dolly"Â starring Bette Midler, an eye-popping show so singularly retro, fresh, spectacular and joyous as to render its …
"Dear Evan Hansen," the emotionally charged and wholly original musical about a troubled high school student whose very human travails explode over the heartless channels of social media, em…
The Karen Zacarias play "Native Gardens," now at Victory Gardens Theater, is one of the very few contemporary comedies about racism, sexism, ageism and cultural privilege. It's a warm-center…
To your average absurdist of the mid-20th century, the act of waiting for nothing in particular, of pointlessly passing the time, was an apt metaphor for the misery of the human condition. B…
"Dear Evan Hansen," the emotionally charged and wholly original musical about a troubled high school student whose very human travails explode over the heartless channels of social media, em…
U.S. Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, a former comedy writer and performer, appears Saturday at the Tribune's Printers Row Lit Fest. We spoke by phone. The following is an edited transcript. Q:…
The 2016-17 Broadway season produced one blockbuster revival, "Hello Dolly"Â starring Bette Midler, an eye-popping show so singularly retro, fresh, spectacular and joyous as to render its …
"I felt," said Stacy Keach on Thursday morning, "like this great fog had come over me. It was the most bizarre moment of my entire career." That fog was, he said, an apparent onstage heart a…
In an emotional speech Wednesday night, Jason Palmquist, departing executive director of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, told a story about Hubbard Street's Parkinson's Project. Palmquist desc…
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote, inarguably, most of the great American musicals of the 20th century: titles such as "Oklahoma!," "Carousel," "South Pacific" and "The King and…
The actor Stacy Keach suffered a mild heart attack during the opening night performance of Jim McGrath's "Pamplona," Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls told the Tribune on Tuesda…
So there we all were at the Den Theatre on Sunday night, watching Denzel Tsopnang as Coalhouse Walker Jr., walk out with his hands above his head at the climax of "Ragtime," a musical about …
Rachel Kraft, the longtime executive director of the ensemble-based Lookingglass Theatre, is leaving her position at the end of the calendar year, Lookingglass announced Monday. Kraft, who i…
"SpongeBob SquarePants," the musical based on the Nickelodeon cartoon series with a cult following, will open on Broadway Dec. 4, Nickelodeon announced Monday. Director Tina Landau's product…
Broken Nose Theater, a new Chicago in its first year of eligibility for the Joseph Jefferson Awards, produced the edgy, gripping show that took home the most honors Monday night during the a…
Who has the most power in a romantic relationship at any given moment? The person who wants it the most. This is a paradox d'amour: the more you love another person, the more you have to los…
If you measure a theater by the size, scope and versatility of its physical buildings, then there can be no reasonable doubt that Chicago Shakespeare Theater has just vaulted to the summit o…
"The Confederacy," said the mayor of New Orleans in an extraordinary speech the other day, marking the removal of long-standing monuments to its cause, "was on the wrong side of history and …
In Samuel Beckett's absurdist classic "Waiting for Godot," the iconic characters Vladimir and Estragon pass their time in the great outdoors by waiting. Sure, the guy they are expecting neve…
On Wednesday, the Goodman Theatre canceled the evening's scheduled performance of "Pamplona," a new play by Jim McGrath about Ernest Hemingway. The cancellation followed a fraught and worris…
The Goodman Theatre took the extraordinary step of suspending the world premiere of "Pamplona," a new one-character play by Jim McGrath about Ernest Hemingway, after the star of the show, St…
In 1994, an American skater named Nancy Kerrigan was whacked on the thigh with a baton wielded by Shane Stant, a thug hired in part by Jeff Gillooly, the ex-husband of Kerrigan's fiercest do…
When the leading management consulting firms " the likes of McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group or Mercer " want to recruit top MBAs, their standard operating procedure is to wine an…
