RETRO GERSHWIN STILL BESTS TODAY'S STANDARDS Like the unsurpassable Crazy for You, My One and Only is more than more than a dozen recycled Gershwin tunes. In the spirit of those daffy Jazz A…
MINING MEMORIES Adam Guettel's Floyd Collins remains the ultimate spelunking musical as it depicts a cave explorer entrapped by both hard rock and a media spectacle. The Burnt Part Boys, a 9…
TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE PLAY Developed by Raven Theatre's Workshop Series, these ten hit-and-run "playlettes" by John Weagly take only 52 minutes to rearrange reality into quirky juxtaposit…
THE FRAMEWORK IS A BIT ODD, BUT THE MOVEMENT IS GLORIOUS Not to be confused with the frenetic film starring Nicole Kidman or the older Oscar winner with Jose Ferrer as Toulouse Lautrec, this…
KINETIC COOL IN MILLENNIUM PARK As evidenced at last night's opening, Giordano Dance Chicago's Fall Engagement"a two-night gig at the Harris Theater"is a major installment in the company's v…
A RUSH TO DOOM As the breathless title suggests, there's nothing placid or contained about Liz Duffy Adams' hyper-poetic hybrid of interior monologues and frantic dialogue. The metaphorical/…
LATE NIGHT CHUB THAT'S HARD TO SWALLOW The only excuse for reviewing this 70-minute trifle is that they're charging $20 to see it when it would be worth twice as much to pay to get out. Mire…
TRYOUT SHOULD GET THE BOOT UNTIL IT WORKS OUT THE KINKS Prepare yourself for some disparate reviews of Kinky Boots, which had its pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago's Bank of America Theater las…
INTO THE TOILET The 1996 film Trainspotting was notorious for its spare-no-sensitivity, take-no-prisoners look at Edinburgh heroin addicts. Based on Irvine Welsh's bottom-feeding novel, it t…
EVIL WILL TRAVEL In his great works, like Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and even in his lesser efforts, such as Broken Glass, Arthur Miller forces us to confess a greater loyalty …
THE FORCE OF FAMILY Looming over this long multi-generational family epic by Adrianna Sevahn Nicholas is the shadow of genocide"the 1915 slaughter by Turks of 1.5 million Armenians, a precur…
KILLER'S REMORSE It's a bit haunting that Black Watch is performed in a National Guard armory where soldiers, like the Scottish laddies depicted in Gregory Burke's combat pageant, trained be…
PASSION IN A POOL It took Ovidius Naso, a 1st century Roman poet, to do full justice to Greek myths. Metamorphoses assembled a panoply of gods, heroes and mortals into 15 books of Latin hexa…
A PUB CRAWL FROM FOLKLORE INTO FANTASY The black-box stage on the sixth floor of Chicago Shakespeare Theater's Navy Pier complex is now a Scottish pub. In these still-dark confines beneath t…
David Cromer directs the Goodman Theater's revival. Though one of Tennessee Williams' lesser works. Still, even when he goes overboard, Williams dives deeper into our desperation--daily, mon…
A BIG KNIFE THAT ISN’T VERY SHARP Clifford Odets is justly famed for his agit-prop Depression-era New York-based protest plays (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Golden Boy), but The…
SEE SCAPE A wonderfully questioning work from 1975, Edward Albee's whimsical, Pulitzer-winning domestic drama literally reflects our world as seen by diametrical couples. Seascape meets land…
THE PLOT THAT WOULD NOT DIE Doggedly dedicated but exhausting at nearly three hours, Robert Kauzlaric's adaptation of Wilkie Collins' mystery thriller The Woman in White is, to quote another…
A perfect play for Pride Month, this labor of love by Paul Oakley Stovall examines, raucously and gently, the challenge of how one minority learns to cherish another. Phylicial Rashad direct…
Frank Galati's epic adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's novel at Steppenwolf.
Playwright Enda Walsh seems to be all over the place -- musical theater librettist, solo play in Brooklyn. . .and this at Chicago's Steppenwolf Downstairs Theater. . .
World premiere of David Henry Hwang's play which is headed for Broadway this fall