It's beginning to feel like we're having a mini festival this year of plays about the romantic and professional conflicts facing artist (or academic) couples, between First Floor's Hate Fuck…
Last summer, Hell in a Handbag presented A Fine Feathered Murder: A Miss Marbled Mystery, a spoof of Agatha Christie's famous spinster detective, Miss Marple. Now, they're putting Angela Lan…
Seeing "Springtime for Hitler" in all its bad-taste glory hits a little differently when it's staged in Skokie in 2023. The suburb is of course the home of the Illinois Holocaust Museum, whi…
Loy Webb's professional playwriting debut, The Light, caused quite a stir in its 2018 world premiere with New Colony (later renamed the New Coordinates, who are now defunct). The onetime cri…
Long recognized as Chicago's most diverse neighborhood, Albany Park has also served for generations as the destination for immigrant families. As the University of Chicago's Chicago Studies …
Harold Pinter's 1974 play No Man's Land occupies the territory between his earlier "comedies of menace," such as The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, and the more overtly political work he'…
The description for Henok Negash's Meant to Be at the Chicago Magic Lounge makes it sound a little like a navel-gazing self-actualization exercise. Negash, we're told, "specializes in offeri…
There are days I don't think I can handle one more essay on the precarious state of the American theater. It's not that I'm in denial about the existential threats facing so many institution…
George Brant's Marie and Rosetta, now at Northlight in a production directed by E. Faye Butler, is a tribute to the contributions of Black women in gospel, rhythm and blues, and rock, as emb…
Dorothy Parker once famously observed, "If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements o…
The SpongeBob Musical had its pre-Broadway run here in 2016. I missed that, but I can't imagine it was any more delightful than what Kokandy Productions has concocted in the basement at the …
Taken alone, political thrillers and farce can be tricky beasts to pull off. Put them together and you really have to have everything honed to the sharpest point possible for the laughs to l…
During the years that I've seen Kate Arrington onstage at Steppenwolf, "chameleonic" is the adjective that most often comes to mind. From show to show, she never seems to play the same type,…
Pete Townshend wasn't able to make it to Chicago for Monday night's opening of The Who's Tommy at the Goodman. But there was plenty of star power onstage already, particularly in Ali Louis B…
The venerable Studebaker Theater in the Fine Arts building opened its newly renovated auditorium last summer with the underwhelming musical Skates. This summer, it's rolling the dice on Pers…
Fifteen years after its Broadway debut, Passing Strange, Stew's bildungsroman set to rock and pop songs (Heidi Rodewald cowrote the music) still has the power to captivate. Tim Rhoze's produ…
Many decades ago, the late (and much missed) humor magazine Spy ran a feature entitled "Why Johnny Can't Act," outlining the bizarre techniques of acting teachers in New York. More recently,…
The less political Second City tries to be, the more effective they are. At least, that's the conclusion I've come to after seeing last year's stellar mainstage revue, Do the Right Thing, No…
Impostors Theatre Company closes out its season with an anthology of five short plays by local writers, all derived from the prompt of "trolley." It's a mixed bag, opening with the delightfu…
What is it that draws great writers to boxing as a subject? Is it an identification with the sport's pure brutal (yet calculated) physicality removed from the need for verbal acuity? A way t…
I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing that Theater Wit's local premiere of 2019's The Whistleblower by Itamar Moses is opening in the midst of the WGA strike. Certainly Eli (Ben F…
To say that Heidi Schreck's 2017 Pulitizer-and-Tony-nominated play What the Constitution Means to Me hits differently in a post-Roe v. Wade world is a huge understatement. TimeLine's current…
Lee Breuer's 1983 reimagining of Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus as a Black Pentecostal church service (featuring music by Bob Telson) didn't make it to Chicago until 1990. But that local pre…
You don't have to be a sucker for love-hate romances among the literati to fall in love with Rehana Lew Mirza's Hatefuck, but it helps. Then again, Lew Mirza's play, now in its local premier…
Imagine if Harper, the Valium-addicted Mormon wife in Angels in America who imagines herself in Antarctica, actually met famous explorer Ernest Shackleton through some rift in the time-space…