Veteran director Chuck Smith, our foremost August Wilson interpreter, has crafted an emotionally highly charged, exuberant, well-paced production. But even with Smith's steady hand on the he…
Izzard's dazzling performance holds up a mirror not just to nature, but to ourselves.
With its engaging characters, pointed and fast-paced dialogue, unpredictable but logical storyline and luminous poetic flourishes, "Love Song" is a show that will charm the pants off even th…
"End Days" reminds us that the overtones of strangeness, precariousness and disequilibrium that define reality these days began exactly at the moment when the American public lost its sense …
It's solid, gripping writing, delivered with crystalline sincerity, and it hits like a sledge hammer.
The Joffrey Ballet's current"and spectacular"evening of dance is a modern-day rhapsody in blue, exploring with skill and sensitivity the range of moods and meanings associated with that most…
Its message about the need to stand and fight against a rigged system is as relevant as ever. The work itself, though, has not aged well.
"This is one of the finest productions of a Brecht play I've seen in Chicago, or anywhere else for that matter."
The theme of budget-busting inflation is all too relevant right now in the United States. That said, it's no easy task updating and transposing Fo's almost fifty-year-old tale of the inside-…
Visually scintillating, musically varied and appealing, animated by the shamanic, shape-shifting energy of its griot/narrator, "AmericanMYTH: Crossroads" has a hell of a lot going for it: a …
Gwydion Theatre, a company making its local debut, has chosen its first Chicago play well and executed even better.
"The Nacirema Society" could have been an edifying experience for viewers, as well as an entertaining one. That road hasn't been taken, and the result is a comedy whose laughs lack deeper re…
More ominous and socially observant than a typical melodrama, Arthur Miller's "A View from the Bridge" is hard to categorize. It's its own thing"call it a classic American Millerdrama.
Harold Pinter's "No Man's Land""the Nobel Prize-winning writer's 1975 play, masterfully revived at Steppenwolf"is a rich and strange theater experience.
The personal good intentions and grandiose philosophizing offered here might distract us, but they won't do much to save us.
The play is a real-time portrayal of an audition, that lonely, scary ordeal for actors.
Eli is a TV writer who has become sick of writing fictional stories about fantasy heroes, and instead decides to speak only hard, personal truths designed to free himself and others from the…
The minimum-wage workplace as depicted in this world premiere drama is a nightmare of tedious toil, endless surveillance and absolute disrespect.
The five lead dancers skillfully meld precise, athletic movement"in a contemporary ballet mode"with expressive theatricality.
The plot concerns two couples"one lesbian, the other heterosexual"who wish to have a baby in a society where childbearing is treated as a highly regulated privilege, available only to litera…
There's nothing "nice" about "Threepenny," a no-holds-barred assault on every aspect of bourgeois existence, from religion to marriage and family to the military to law and order.
British writer Simon Stephens' 2015 two-hander references physicist Werner Heisenberg's 1927 discovery that it is impossible for an observer to precisely discern both the position and veloci…
In Nilo Cruz' Pulitzer Prize-winning 2003 play, cigars symbolize all kinds of things, from capitalist commodity to an older, slower lifestyle to religious burnt offering, like smoke through …
Joffrey Ballet's magnificent revival, an adaptation of Tolstoy's vast novel of illicit love among the nobility of Czarist Russia, captures the book's tragic, inexorable power.
A set of nine love-themed comic vignettes presented in time for Hallmark's and Fannie May's favorite holiday, Valentine's Day.