118 stories by "Francis"
After what I thought was a dismaying year in 2013, Chicago theater bounced back with impressive aplomb this year. There were a lot of world premieres (some much readier for primetime tha…
It's a big, tasty world out there. I know, I know, this sounds like quite the headscratchingly obvious statement, but sometimes, as I go through my daily perusal of online articles and s…
I'm back! And no, I wasn't cocooned inside Noma's Nordic Food Lab trying to make edible moss or permanently ensconced as family butler in the Dustin Lance Black-Tom Daley household for the p…
We're very fortunate that Chicago has become quite the incubator of new plays for the national theater scene. But that's a double-edged sword: as I've said on this blog over the years and ov…
If you've been around these blog parts for years, you'd know I've outed myself as an inveterate lover of Greek tragedies years ago. One of the most indelible and enriching cultural experienc…
If you've been hanging out in these blog woods for a while, you know I'm never one to shy away from a challenging theatrical experience. Over the years I've cheered and rabble-roused for pla…
Continuing my musical theater queen recertification process (not that I ever lost my designation as beloved BFFs and theater buddies can attest), the third musical I saw this past week was G…
When I first started seriously going to the theater in Chicago way back when in the late '90s/early '00s, full-blooded musical productions outside of the avowed musical theater specialists s…
The 50th edition of the Chicago International Film Festival ended last night with the screening of Reese Witherspoon's Oscar hopeful, Wild. With the marked improvement in both audience exper…
I've been derailed from posting on the films I've seen at the Chicago International Film Festival by a major customer proposal I've been working on in my day job. But rest assured though tha…
I just got through the first weekend of the 50th edition of the Chicago International Film Festival and I'm pleased to report that everything is running like a well-oiled, gently-humming mac…
Actually, I'm probably the mad man as I try to fit in as many theater and arts events before all of my waking time (well outside of working and eating) is taken up by the exciting 50th editi…
It is the first day of October, and other than wondering truly where the year had gone (it seemed just like yesterday that we were calling the Polar Vortex the worst thing that had happened …
In the May 2014 issue of Travel and Leisure magazine, one of my favorite writers Gary Shteyngart writes an astringent yet admiring profile of Beijing and says "This is where it's at. Beijing…
I'm back! It was a hectic summer where I was literally everywhere, from San Diego to Sao Paulo, from New York City to San Francisco. Â But I'm staying put in Chicago for the next several w…
Once a long, long time ago (well, the 1940s and the 1950s) the word musical theater didn't really mean a collection of jukebox hits that your parents listened to, or a musical version of eit…
With the number of nationally-anticipated/written-up/reviewed theater productions this summer in Chicago, you'd expect there to be more people coming into town to see a show than to go eat a…
It's been another hectic theatergoing weekend. Despite the maddening fluctuations of Chicago not-yet summer weather (alternating hot weather and thunderstorms), audiences continue to flock t…
For hard-core musical theater queens there are few shows that have the  same mesmerizing cult status pull as that of Side Show,  Harry Krieger's and Bill Russell's (of Dreamgirls fame)…
Chicago theater audiences are a lucky bunch. With the abundance of world premieres in this city, we are almost always able to say, "Yep, I saw that first."Â The Chicago Tribune just repor…
Every musical theater queen worth his or her salt talk about the dubiously legendary Carrie: The Musical in reverentially snarky tones usually reserved for mausoleums of dictators' wives.Â�…
I've been run ragged by my consecutive three-play weekends (hmm, dear readers, although it seems like I'm at a theater all the time, I do have a normal, regular day job to go to during the w…
A theater-lover just doesn't spring from the ground fully-formed reciting Shakespeare and high-kicking it to "Oklahoma". It takes years and years of watching and re-watching plays to ful…
I was in Portland last year for the first time and when I got back to Chicago some of my friends who've never been to the city asked, "Were there a lot of hippies?"Â I guess they were ask…
Most of the time when people talk to me about Filipino food, they start off with the question "Have you had balut?"Â I tend to shut down pretty quickly any talk about balut, the boiled du…
