118 stories by "Francis"
As I've always said all these years on this blog, theater is ultimately for me a writer's medium. Â You can have all the life-sized war horses, swinging chandeliers, flying helicopters, an…
I've been flying to Charlotte a couple of times a month since the beginning of the year for my day job. Sometimes I'd scan the performing arts listings of Creative Loafing, their equival…
As I've previously mentioned on this blog, I saw my first play at 10 years old when I was growing up in Manila, thanks to my mom who loved musical theater with a passion. Since then I've…
A couple of weeks ago I was at a party with my dear friend Jonathan (who has traipsed through these blog pages before) and after several gushy mentions of shows currently playing, he (cattil…
During the Middle Ages (actually 2003), I rushed back to Chicago from wherever I was commuting to at that time for work (New Jersey, which was and continues to be seemingly stuck in the Midd…
There was a brief tease earlier this week that this winter of 2014, the harshest one I've experienced in my 16 years of living in Chicago, would finally leave us alone. As I write this blog …
Of course, I would never miss the chance of seeing a play called Cock. So when I was in New York on business in the summer of 2012, I snuck away after interminable day-long discussions o…
For us true-blue, hardcore musical theater aficionados, there is no show greater and more iconic than Gypsy, the sharply-drawn showbiz backstage musical based on the memoirs of stripper Gyps…
I don't normally make it a point to return to a show twice (if I did that in a city like Chicago with its buzzing theater scene, I'd never get to see as much theater as I would want to), but…
Over the years I've had a rollercoaster relationship with the plays of Rebecca Gilman. As an avid fan and advocate of Chicago theater, I'm thrilled that despite her national renown and h…
Chicago has been repeatedly plagued by the Polar Vortex, but the city's winter theater season is undeniably sizzling. Â I was very disappointed by last fall's lackluster theatrical offerin…
In the monster 1980s pop hit "One Night in Bangkok" (which came from the equally monster Broadway musical flop Chess), Murray Head sings "One night in Bangkok makes the hard man humble." Â�…
I slowed down writing on this blog this year. I started a new job, I travelled a lot more for leisure rather than business, and decided, after six years, that I just wanted to write if somet…
After skipping a year, I'm glad to be back with my list of best dining experiences of the year. And of course the definition of "best" for me is different from that of the myriad of food…
As a gay man who grew up in the 1980s, there are very few theatrical works, heck, cultural pieces as a whole, that are as important and as resonant to me as Larry Kramer's 1985 call to arms …
When I started going to the Chicago film festival in the late 1990s, the child prodigy Mark Zuckerberg was just learning computer programming via Atari software (does anyone even remember th…
If you've been reading my blog from the beginning, you know that by the time the second week of the Chicago International Film Festival comes along, I've turned into a cantankerous, bleary-e…
There's been such a sea change in moviegoing since I first started attending the Chicago International Film Festival in 1999:Â you can now watch movies on streaming NetFlix anywhere as lo…
It has been quite the busy Chicago fall theater season so far; I saw eight shows over a two week period during the last week of September and the first week of October. Yes, yes, I say t…
It's already October (although you wouldn't know it from the still-green foliage and the humid 80 degree temperature over the weekend). Where did this year go? I like October though …
Admittedly, I was a little skeptical about going to another Bill Cain play. The last one I saw was Victory Gardens' 2012 fall season opener Equivocation, which I thought needed drastic amoun…
You would think that with my day job which entails crisscrossing the country racking up both air mileage and time zone discombobulation, there would be few places in the US that I would not …
Really, it's already September? The Chicago summer, so mercurial this year on how warm or not-warm it wanted to be, zoomed by like a Japanese bullet train. Between being busier than usual at…
Last year in early February, while my colleague and I were sitting in our Pittsburgh hotel lobby preparing for a client presentation, an older white gentleman came up to us and stared direct…
As I said in my previous post, Chicago's summer stages are as hot and sizzling as the 104 degree heat index we've been experiencing this past week. And of course, it's just about the time th…
