1,038 stories by "Johnny Oleksinski"
By Johnny Oleksinski “I never thought I’d go back to this play. Ever, ever,” emphatically states PJ Paparelli, artistic director of American Theater Company. He’s tal…
Throughout Reginald Edmund’s “Southbridge,” which opened in a world premiere on Saturday night at Chicago Dramatists, my mind repeatedly wandered to author Toni Morrison. M…
RECOMMENDED With "Phantom of the Opera" having celebrated the all-time record of twenty-five years on Broadway last week and two local venues going head-to-head with Andrew Lloyd Webber offe…
Even the best political satire has its limits. A constantly shifting Second City revue or a four-minute cold open on “Saturday Night Live” hits the spot like little else. But bri…
RECOMMENDED “Sweet Charity” is the pet name neurotic accountant Oscar Lindquist (Jarrod Zimmerman) gives Charity Hope Valentine (Tiffany Topol), a dance-hall hostess he’s f…
RECOMMENDED “You can’t put your hands together in Minsk. You can’t drum.” How can that be true? The element that most bores into the audience at Chicago Shakespeare T…
Playwright Ruth Margraff’s “Stadium Devildare” is a caffeinated dystopian fiction wherein politics, sport and theater have become indistinguishable from one another. Corpor…
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…
