At first glance, it's hard to imagine two more different musicals than "Fun Home" and "An American in Paris," the shows that have the best chance of winning the coveted Tony Award for best n…
Last week, Spike Lee was around town filming his movie about violence in Chicago, provisionally titled "Chiraq," or maybe "Chi-raq." And Chicago's politicians, opinion leaders and many citiz…
In 2006 on Chicago's Near West Side, the director Chuck Smith staged the premiere of a play called "Stick Fly" by a very promising Chicago playwright named Lydia R. Diamond. It was the work …
In 2012, Chicago's American Theater Company programmed a play called "Disgraced," penned by a first-generation Pakistani-American writer named Ayad Akhtar. Akhtar, who grew up in suburban Mi…
If you are convinced your once-lovely teenager has been taken over by an alien invader, then you may find yourself sympathizing with Maggie, the beleaguered mom in Walt McGough's new play, "…
The burly and otherwise taciturn gent in the seat next to me at the Cadillac Palace Theatre on Wednesday night was wiping away tears half the night at the musical "Once," which has returned …
Be they book publishers, journalists or academics, communication professionals of a certain age have much to fear from the ongoing digital revolution. It is not a fear expressed openly in of…
Be they book publishers, journalists or academics, communication professionals of a certain age have much to fear from the ongoing digital revolution. It is not a fear expressed openly in of…
When director Charles Newell and his musical director Doug Peck create Court Theatre versions of Broadway musicals " such as of Lucy Simon and Marsha Norman's "The Secret Garden" " they tend…
When director Charles Newell and his musical director Doug Peck create Court Theatre versions of Broadway musicals - such as of Lucy Simon and Marsha Norman's "The Secret Garden" - they tend…
American Theater Company is to announce Monday that is has hired Bonnie Metzgar, the artistic director of About Face Theatre from 2008-2013, as its interim artistic director. Â
American Theater Company is to announce Monday that is has hired Bonnie Metzgar, the artistic director of About Face Theatre from 2008-2013, as its interim artistic director. Metzgar rep…
You will be shocked " shocked " to know that the great city of Chicago and has a long and distinctive history of grifters, tricksters, bamboozlers, fakers and specialists of the great and al…
You will be shocked - shocked - to know that the great city of Chicago and has a long and distinctive history of grifters, tricksters, bamboozlers, fakers and specialists of the great and al…
The first time Collaboraction staged "Crime Scene," its original, ensemble-driven, heartfelt response to the scourge of gun violence in Chicago, it came at the height of a 2013 epidemic of m…
Doreen Ambrose-Van Lee was born in 1969 in the Cabrini-Green housing project. She became a poet and, sometime later, found publishers and an audience. Her story is central to "The Project(s)…
What's worth a rush-hour drive to Indiana? I'll nominate Colette Todd singing Andrew Lippa's "I Don't Need a Roof," the gorgeous Act 2 ballad that is the highlight of "Big Fish" and a song a…