THE DUKE WHO WAS A KING A blast from the "big band" past, Queenie Pie is the great late Duke Ellington's sole–if unfinished"opera, recently revived in Los Angeles. On February 15, Chic…
FATS FOREVER "One never knows, do one?" That's the favorite catchphrase of Fats Waller (1904-1943), an irrepressible master of music. The 285-pound, cherubic-cheeked jokester genius is the p…
ENCHANTED FORGIVENESS When the sorcerer Prospero discards his magic staff and abjures his spellbinding ways, it is, of course, Shakespeare's swan song too. (The play will no longer be the th…
AN EVICTION NOTICE FOR THE 1% This is Brecht's real Mother Courage, not "Canteen Anna," the pointless survivor of the cautionary later play who thrives on war (which as, Brecht implies, capi…
PARENTAL RIGHTS, GRANDPARENTAL WRONGS As with her hit debut drama Spinning Into Butter (1999), Rebecca Gilman's newest agitation Luna Gale, directed by Robert Falls at Goodman Theatre, puts …
AN EXALTATION OF LARK We all know Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, and The Children's Hour, even the 1977 film Julia, based on her book Pentimento. But The Lar…
NO CLOSURE EVER A tangle of shifting sympathies and treacherous turns, Johnna Adams' spare 75-minute, two-hander one-act teeters on a knife edge during every burning second. Its setting and …
DONE TO DEATH A ton of fun gets dumped in this calculated musical spinoff from Mel Brooks' funniest film. As with The Producers, Brooks' expanded version of Young Frankenstein (with his own …
DO TELL MAMA TO COME TO THIS CABARET Just as Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show swallows Annie Get Your Gun, the Kit Kat Klub engulfs a backstage story that becomes a show within a show in Cabare…
A BARD OUT OF WATER Here's what we know for sure is the background for MadKap Production's Midwest premiere: In 1933 Nobel laureate and, in his own estimation, the greatest writer in the wor…
ANOTHER BRIDGE TOO FAR Solstice offers a disturbing look at a chaotic class-ridden conflict, and British playwright Zinnie Harris delivers some ugly goods: She imagines"and A Red Orchid Thea…
DISREGARD BEAUREGARD Much in the spirit of Ben Jonson's salacious Volpone and Giovanni Boccaccio's same-titled lascivious tale of irrepressible lust, Niccolò Machiavelli…
PARANORMAL PASSION Love can conquer death. That potent wishful thinking was why audiences gobbled up the popular 1990 film Ghost. It also explains why it was turned into a musical, which has…
NOW E.T. REALLY CAN GO HOME A justified hit, bright as any of the lights on Michigan Avenue, Lookingglass Theatre Company's exhilarating adaptation of Antoine de St-Exupery's classic and cau…
ONCE AGAIN, ATTENTION MUST BE PAID British playwright Nina Raine's Tribes, which played Off-Broadway last year and has been produced regionally, depicts an oppressively intellectual British …
LIGHT BECOMES MOVEMENT: THE AMERICA WINDOWS BURST INTO BEING Following its world debut last October as a "gift to the city" (gratefully accepted by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, also in attendance for…
OLD LECHERS GET NO RESPECT Merrily set at Christmastide at the height of the swing era, Barbara Gaines' sumptuous Navy Pier staging of Shakespeare's slightest comedy is hilarious, certainly …
CONSCIENCE KEEPING IN A CRACKLING PLOT Taut, true and richly wrought, this 1945 potboiler by unashamed socialist playwright J.B. Priestley remains, three generations later, a clarion call to…
JOFFREY’S JOYOUS JEWEL Now in its 26th annual presentation, the late Robert Joffrey's evergreen staging of Peter IlyichTchaikovsky's beloved Christmas ballet blesses both the Auditoriu…
A GAY CHRISTMAS ALL OVER CHICAGOLAND In a major first, the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus just performed its Christmas concert at the prestigious Harris Theatre at Millennium Park in downtown Chic…
SOME SOULS THWART SAVING We Three Lizas, last year's in-your-face gay holiday hit, is back with a purportedly new book and an expanded score. Relocated from the Steppenwolf Garage to Stage 7…
BURNING THE YULE LOG AT BOTH ENDS Striking a comfortable balance between sticky and sentimental, schmaltz and cynicism, five short plays by as many Chicago writers (and directed by another s…
A CATTY YULETIDE LAUGH RIOT Following the well-earned 15-year run of Rudolph the Red-Hosed Reindeer, Hell in a Handbag Productions replaces it with a worthy winner. David Cerda's wicked holi…
ASHES TO THEATER Now moving from Andersonville to Lakeview, the best production of 2011 is back to rival any currently playing: No longer sprawling the width of the Neo Futurarium's stretche…
LEGENDS OF THE HOMELESS As the title suggests, Naomi Iizuka’s uncompromising drama exposes snapshots of the urban underbelly. It focuses, so to speak, on homeless kids, prostitutes and…