1,044 stories by "Kerry Reid"
Wendy Kesselman's 1997 adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank did some things that original adapters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett didn't back in 1955 (slightly more than ten years afte…
I spent a semester studying in London in the winter of 1985, and one of the first concerts I attended was a benefit at Brixton Academy for the striking coal miners, featuring Aztec Camera an…
Scheduled long before the current conflagration in the Middle East, Writers Theatre's lovely, intimate staging of The Band's Visit, the multiple Tony Award"winning musical, which premiered o…
Conor McPherson's Girl From the North Country draws on some of the same narrative tropes that the Irish playwright has used in the past in plays like The Weir and The Seafarer. A group of pe…
Gwydion Theatre Company is a relatively new addition to the Chicago storefront scene (they moved here from Los Angeles last year), but their current revival of Clifford Odets's Waiting for L…
The night before seeing Edward Hall's stylish, arresting"but not totally convincing"production of Richard III at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, I finally caught up with Danai Gurira's turn as …
Back in college, when I mentioned I was writing a paper on Antigone as presented in both the Sophoclean original and in Jean Anouilh's 1944 French Resistance"era update, a dorm friend rolled…
Anna Ouyang Moench is having a moment on Chicago stages right now; her play In Quietness, about women at an evangelical Homemaking House, is playing at A Red Orchid Theatre. Now Gift Theatre…
Dav Pilkey's popular series of kids' books about a crime-fighting superhero mutant dog form the basis for this touring TheaterWorks USA musical production, which has settled in at the Studeb…
The deepfake AI-generated images of Taylor Swift swirling around the Internet inevitably came to mind on opening night of Goodman's Highway Patrol"if only to make me think that, all things c…
What if you took Winnie and Willie from Samuel Beckett's Happy Days and ran them through a blender with a Neil Simon midlife urban comedy, like The Prisoner of Second Avenue, tossing in a ca…
Seventeen blows in seven seconds. That's what it took to end Benny Paret's life, and forever change Emile Griffith's. The two men met for the third and final time in the ring on March 24…
I've been seeing Beau O'Reilly's plays for over 30 years. But somehow it never occurred to me until taking in the current revival of O'Reilly's 2003 play, Hit Me Like a Flower, how much this…
Gregory Stewart's tribute to Nat King Cole doesn't break the predictable mold of biographical concerts/plays, but in the cozy environment of the Venus Cabaret space at Mercury Theater Chicag…
As small miracles go, American Blues Theater opening their lovely new two-theater venue on North Lincoln just in time for their annual presentation of It's a Wonderful Life: Live in Chicago!…
Originally a 1952 teleplay, Frederick Knott's thriller hit the West End before being turned into a 1954 film by Alfred Hitchcock. Dial M for Murder got another theatrical makeover from Jeffr…
Don't ask me how many times I've seen Billy Wilder's Academy Award-winning 1960 film The Apartment. I honestly couldn't tell you. I can tell you it's my favorite movie, and it should certain…
It's been a minute since I've visited the Kingdom of Other: 13 years, to be precise. The last time I saw Jackie Taylor's The Other Cinderella was in 2010, before Black Ensemble Theater moved…
If Laurie Anderson had done a mash-up of Scott O'Dell's young adult classic Island of the Blue Dolphins and the 1994 John Sayles Celtic magic realist film, The Secret of Roan Inish, the resu…
Whether you're waiting anxiously to see Timothée Chalamet in Wonka (the musical prequel to Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), or are rolling your eyes in anticipatory disgust …
If you want a charming and heartwarming family show for the holidays, look no further than Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, now bringing all the sweet quiet magic of the Jim Henson 1977 tel…
There's a memorable moment in an episode of Mad Men between office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) and copywriter Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss). The former, fed up with the consta…
The complicated backstory of the play The Lifespan of a Fact, now in its local premiere at TimeLine, reads like a series of "begats" out of the book of Genesis. Ready? Here goes. John D'…
Leave it to Factory Theater to come up with a twist on the story of the Magi that's smart-assed and sincere at the same time. In Chase Wheaton-Werle's Wise Guys: The First Christmas Story, n…
Feel like you've been living in hell the past several years? The Conspirators understand. In their latest offering, Commedia Divina: It's Worse Than That, writer Sid Feldman concocts a Dante…
