"The Bardy Bunch," an Off-Broadway mash-up parody that imagines the Partridge Family and the Brady Bunch as Shakespearean feuding families in their own war of the sitcom roses, is headed to …
Now at TimeLine Theatre, Lucy Kirkwood's "Chimerica" is a sprawling epic drama that takes on the amorality of the atrophying media, the mutual hypocrisy informing U.S.-China relations and th…
So just how funny is the president of the United States? It's surely time for a critical assessment, given Barack Obama's extensive recent foray into the world of arts and entertainment. In …
A new dinner-theater show based on a happily sadistic and slapstick Japanese game show is coming to Chicago, offering Midwestern revelers the chance to eat Sushi in the company of a quartet …
Two fascinating new theater projects are taking shape in Chicagoland: one in Lake Forest and the other in the Edgewater neighborhood. Let's start in the north suburb, where a real estate ent…
So here comes an extraordinary play, a drama so infused with emotional intelligence, linguistic treasures and the human conditions of dread and longing that it keeps you bolt-upright in your…
So what would happen if George and Martha headed down to New Orleans and met Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski and Willy Loman? And if they did, would you care? The answer to that question mi…
A decade ago, intimate productions of Broadway musicals were rare in Chicago, the city's gritty storefront denizens mostly preferring to sink their teeth into edgier, riskier fare. But this …
In March 1959, Lorraine Hansberry, a graduate of Englewood High School in Chicago, became the first African-American woman to pen a play produced on Broadway. Less than six years later she d…
An interesting phenomenon hit my mailbox Tuesday, just a few minutes after the Tony Award nominations: People from New York started writing to tell me they were coming to Chicago to see a Br…
Chicago's storied Steppenwolf Theatre Company said on Wednesday that it has added two new acting members to its vaunted and ever-growing ensemble of actors. The new inductees are the Chicago…
The ten-dollar founding father stole the cannons of his Broadway rivals as Lin-Manuel Miranda's "Hamilton" dominated the 2016 Tony Award nominations. When the smoke had cleared from the dela…
The ten-dollar founding father stole the cannons of his Broadway rivals as Lin-Manuel Miranda's "Hamilton" dominated the 2016 Tony Award nominations. When the smoke had cleared from the dela…
Anna Leonowens arrives in Siam in widow's weeds, a bereaved colonialist determined to lose herself in her work. She is not yet old enough to abandon her sexual being, but it is just one of t…
The admirably fearless new revue at the Second City e.t.c., "A Red Line Runs Through It," mostly runs right through Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose outsized smiling visage is such a visual and the…
Are Michael Shannon and Jessie Mueller the best actors Chicago has ever produced? Watching them dominate their current new Broadway productions certainly leads one to wonder. Shannon laps th…
It is no mean feat to revive an archaic but seminal Broadway musical " in this case, the all-black musical comedy "Shuffle Along" of 1921 " and create an entertainment that not only celebrat…
Hits? The Chicago theater's got 'em. But as always in this town, where commercial enhancement money for local productions is very hard to find, it's tough to keep 'em open. Exhibit A is "Dre…
Between the scenes of Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical masterwork, scenes currently inhabited by such famous actors as Jessica Lange, Gabriel Byrne, Michael Shannon and John Gallagher, Jr.,…
The Joseph Jefferson Awards Committee loves the work of the little cabaret theater known for its excellence in the heart of Rogers Park: Theo Ubique Theatre emerged Tuesday night as the Chic…
The new Broadway musical version of "Tuck Everlasting" " a young person's novel by Natalie Babbitt that has justly been loved by at least three generations of kids, including mine " is deter…
All great bakers put a part of their souls in the mixing bowl, but Jenna, the small-town star of "Waitress," narrates her tough life using the titles of her daily specials: the Key Lime to H…
Matt Crowle may just be the definitive Leo Bloom, the very, very, very unhappy accountant whose life is transformed by shenanigans with Max Bialystock, regular sex at 11 with Ulla Inga Hanse…
Alexander Hamilton might have survived on the $10 bill, but the news here last week that the original "Hamilton" cast is to get a piece of the currency generated by the hit Broadway show sen…
It has " pinch me, Che Guevara " been 40 years since two pimply, pasty Brits, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, penned the songs to "Evita," which first emerged as a concept album that wore …