4,886 stories by "Chris Jones"
It was an accountant's bad handoff that created the jaw-dropping chaos of the final moments of the Academy Awards on Sunday, a moment when you could see, laid bare, all of America's fissures…
"Gotta Dance," the musical about the real-life NBA half-time stunt involving a company of senior hip-hop dancers, is not going directly to Broadway after its 2015 Chicago tryout. Now retitle…
Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater has added a new ensemble member: the Chicago-based actor Namir Smallwood is the latest to be given the prestigious nod. Originally from Newark, New Jersey, S…
In 1957, a prominent syndicated political columnist named Joseph W. Alsop Jr. " a powerful journalist who spent his life hobnobbing with, and successfully influencing, the political elite " …
The Broadway director Liesl Tommy will direct the summer world premiere of "Pass Over" by Antoinette Nwandu, Steppenwolf Theatre announced Friday. Tommy is the Tony Award-nominated director …
In Ang Lee's unforgettable movie "Brokeback Mountain," a young actor named Jake Gyllenhaal played a cowboy who falls in love with another cowboy not out of any desire the men could define, b…
If the predictions of much political speechifying hold true, the words Amazon, Netflix, Google and Facebook won't be heard anywhere near as often as the name of President Donald Trump at the…
Most playwrights reach the point in their career when they want to write something that people actually are going to want to come and see. By "people," I don't mean the theater insiders so i…
Annie Baker's terrific translation of "Uncle Vanya" begins like this. Marina, an old nurse who does not move much, pours a cup of tea. "You should eat something," she says to Mikhail Lvovich…
Before he died in 2014, the fine young-adult novelist Walter Dean Myers wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times; the essay was a reaction to a University of Wisconsin study that found t…
Gwendolyn Brooks. Carol Moseley Braun. Mavis Staples. Michelle Obama. All, we are told, have been gussied up at the oldest black-owned beauty shop in Chicago, the life's work of two women fr…
"Mamma Mia!," the much-loved and now ubiquitous ABBA musical, is one of the few West End and Broadway shows that you could say work better in the round. That's the takeaway, at least, from d…
Circus people in America have not had not enjoyed these past four months. The bad news began in November when the Big Apple Circus, a beloved and mission-centered American circus known for i…
What is the hardest of all the plays by William Shakespeare to produce today? You'd probably wager the deep-thought tragic masterpieces, or the problematic dramas like "Othello," "The Mercha…
The Steppenwolf Theatre Company will have the world premiere next fall of a new play by Tracy Letts, which will then move to Broadway. The new, ensemble-driven play "The Minutes" was penned …
At one point in "Bootycandy," the scathingly funny and wildly eclectic satire by Robert O'Hara about growing up gay and black in the Buckeye State " or somewhere like that " we are taken to …
"Gloria" and "Straight White Men" represent something new and interesting in the ever-morphing theatrical interchange between Chicago and New York " two productions that originated at off-Br…
Many Chicagoans of color report feeling uneasy around Chicago police officers. That is a fact, supported by ample data. There's also hard evidence that white Chicagoans do not fully understa…
In Chicago and New York, "Sweeney Todd " the Demon Barber of Fleet Street" generally has devolved into a close shave. The reasons are partly canonical. Ghosts of past productions now loom ov…
Consider, dear reader, this paradoxical truth from the restless mind of the auteur artist Young Jean Lee, currently accessible in Chicago through the Steppenwolf Theatre Company: "There is n…
"Blue Man Group" has been running at the Briar Street Theatre in Chicago since 1997, a run of almost 20 years. In this city, in any city, that's a remarkable achievement. But here's what is …
On the day following her stellar halftime performance at the Super Bowl, Lady Gaga, announced a new world tour, dubbed "Joanne," including an August date at Wrigley Field. Her ladyship will …
When Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version of "Sunset Boulevard" first opened at London's Adelphi Theatre in 1993, audiences were dazzled by John Napier's gilded re-creation of Norma Desmond…
Mike Myers, the actor who starred in "Wayne's World," "Austin Powers" and on "Saturday Night Live!" and whose career began at Second City, will play the role of the real-life improv guru Del…
Between the Broadway opening of John Kander and Fred Ebb's "The Scottsboro Boys," and Tuesday night's Chicago premiere from Porchlight Music Theatre, more than six years have elapsed. This h…
