How we relay history has been forever changed by photography and video. Walk into any American classroom today, collegiate or otherwise, and you’ll doubtlessly find projected YouTube c…
By Johnny Oleksinski "It's both sides of the spectrum: drunk college kids and very serious politicians, all mixing together on the streets,” says Paloma Nozicka, a recent graduate of t…
RECOMMENDED Given that it was 1972 when Pier Luigi Pizzi's sumptuous production of Puccini's "La bohème" was first presented at Lyric Opera, few would argue that, after countless regular re…
RECOMMENDED An onstage door left ajar has an unusual way of commanding an audience’s attention. Unspoken judgement accompanies gawking at the unattended entranceway as though a charact…
RECOMMENDED No one ever told Deanna Dunagan “those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Just examine some of the actress' most recent characters. At the weakes…
A night of tumult and passion or an average evening at home, lounging on the settee? In the case of “Skylight,” which opened at Court Theatre on Saturday night, the jury’s …
Do not go into "Lady M." expecting a dramatically re-imagined "Macbeth.” "Lady M." is, as a script, a rearrangement of the original text, a reprise without many new chords. Director La…
RECOMMENDED Nearly a year after the controversy surrounding monologuist Mike Daisey’s “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” reached its pinnacle"a stormy timeline inclu…
There comes a moment in a treasure trove of films starring the likes of Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts when a depressed, frazzled character wallowing in her own complacency, willingly or by …
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” not to mention the much less holy head that governs in the name of the crown. I believe that little piece of Shakespearean wisdom sits …
Fresh on the heels of the positively seismic “Good People,” a masterfully rendered class commentary that took a company on Halsted back to its gritty roots, Steppenwolf Theatre e…
RECOMMENDED TurnAround Theatre’s acclaimed production of Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer” has been remounted by The Den Theatre"that is, if you can call this somber, inti…
Has ever a writer loved a character quite so much as Tennessee Williams loved Laura Wingfield? Love is an impossible quality to quantify, try though eHarmony might, but as anyone who’s…
The stage version of author Michael Morpurgo’s children’s novel, “War Horse,” was met with mostly yawns and complaints about the show’s length on Tuesday night …
RECOMMENDED Near the end of American Blues Theater’s “It’s A Wonderful Life: Live at The Biograph!” one of two annual radio-play renditions of the Frank Capra film cu…
RECOMMENDED “Society’s nothing but a school for lies. This city’s built on them. And may it wilt on them.” You’ve got to hand it to playwright David Ives. For h…
RECOMMENDED The holidays in Chicago are rife with theater traditions. Scrooges, Pirates, Klingons, George Baileys: creative clashes of humor, popular culture and nostalgia that pack in the c…
RECOMMENDED “It’s Liza!” sings, who else, but the unshakable Ms. Liza Minnelli, the irreverent Broadway songstress whose status as a gay icon, by now, may very well have su…
So many people die in “Failure: A Love Story,” a new play by Philip Dawkins that opened on Monday night at Victory Gardens Theater. In 1928, the three Fail sisters, Nelly (Baize …
Author O. Henry’s Christmastime short story, “The Gifts of the Magi,” gets its power from an abbreviated length. The modern parable about a strapped-for-cash married couple…
Is Bollywood just another performance style or a integral part of India’s cultural identity? If Circle Theatre’s new revival of Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson’s ̶…
By Johnny Oleksinski I arrived in New York City to an unexpectedly premature November blizzard, the biggest effect of an ill-timed nor'easter. But I couldn’t and wouldn’t complai…
RECOMMENDED The holidays are for many the most miserable time of the year, in contrast with their expressed wonderfulness. As family gathers together, so too do our painful memories and sham…
The swarm of musicals coal-mining the depths of folk Americana flys ever onward with “The Burnt Part Boys,” a blue collar comedy tour de bluegrass, receiving its Midwest premiere…
While Michigan Avenue shops exchange the jack-o-lanterns and ghoulish cutouts of their window displays for fluffy cotton balls and cinnamon yuletide ornament, a far more pessimistic and unab…