32 stories by "Rick Kogan"
"People get funny in their old age. It turns out this is a great town to be old and funny in," Dana Olsen said of Practical Theatre's return.
It has been the annual December tradition for Tribune critics and writers to mark the places and people and things that have departed.
In person, on stage or on the page, Susan Nussbaum was a delight, a ferociously talented actor, writer and passionate disability rights activist.
The campus contains a teaching kitchen and a wood shop, a live fire cooking station, a member's lounge with a cafe and bar, co-working spaces, a small library and event spaces.
It's tough to laugh right now, and it's essential to laugh right now. But how and at what? Zanies in Chicago takes steps to reopen, and I'm reminded of advice from Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and…
Bert Haas has arguable heard more jokes than anyone on this planet. Since 1980, with only a reluctant interlude of a few years when he unsatisfactorily tested other careers, he has worked at…
Once more unto the breach we go, with the fourth installment of "Ask Rick," the experiment intended as a way for readers to ask me questions that they might have about the place we all call …
Ginger Reiter lost power in her house when Hurricane Irma visited her in Florida a couple of weeks ago, but that was nothing compared to what happened four decades ago when that human hurric…
There are 29 miles of Chicago lakefront, a strand of sand and concrete and grass and trees that hug the shore so stylishly that seen from afar it appears to be some abstract necklace. Not lo…
Rahm Emanuel needed a desk. His predecessor, Richard M. Daley, took his desk with him when he left office after his 22-year tenure, and the new mayor's fifth-floor office at City Hall was de…
While Brigid Murphy was talking with typical enthusiasm about the many people with whom she has shared a stage over the decades " the fire eaters, singers, dancers, rope-twirlers, storytelle…
The first time I saw Joe Mantegna in the flesh he was in the flesh, naked as a newborn baby on stage at the Shubert Theatre in a 1969 production of "Hair." It was his first professional acti…
The first years of his life spent in the company of an ice-skating chimpanzee named Spanky, Jonathan Pitts has spent the last two decades of his 57 years in the company of a vast array of ta…
And so, sitting with 15 or so other people on Saturday afternoon in a small theater inside the Stage 773 complex at 1225 W. Belmont Ave., there was a great deal of laughter during the show t…
Tania Castroverde Moskalenko has yet to find a favorite seat in the Auditorium Theatre. "I am still trying them all out," she said, smiling as she stood in the majestic theater, which was ro…
Saturday was the first night of the two-week celebration of the Chinese New Year. It is, by that country's calendar, year 4,715 (Year of the Rooster), and all that 11 young men from Beijing …
Irvine Welsh, the prolific Scottish author, became famous and successful in 1993 with the publication of his first novel, a rough-and-tumble tale of a group of heroin addicts and thieves in …
It came out of nowhere, really: a few seemingly harmless snowflakes drifting down in the early Thursday morning hours of Jan. 26, 1967. Few noticed. Few worried. This was Chicago in winter, …
Jeremy McCarter moved here from Brooklyn three years ago with his wife and their baby girl. His wife, a journalist, had taken a new job, and her parents lived close enough to Chicago for the…
It is impossible for people of a certain age to walk down Wells Street in the vicinity of North Avenue and not be transported to a bygone time. This sort of thing can happen in a lot of diff…
Michael Jordan was not born here.
Neither was Oprah Winfrey, political corruption, Mike Ditka, Al Capone, potholes, Carl Sandburg or many other people and things we often claim as our own. …
Michael Jordan was not born here. Neither was Oprah Winfrey, political corruption, Mike Ditka, Al Capone, potholes, Carl Sandburg or many other people and things we often claim as our own. B…
The taverns that line the stretch of Western Avenue that slices through the charming and historically significant neighborhood of Beverly on the Far South Side are lively and essential place…
There was, of course, the inevitable sorrow that came with the news of the deaths of Roberta Custer (June 8) and Richard Fire (July 8). But then - Isn't the mind a remarkable thing? - came m…
Inside the sumptuous and stylish living room of a downtown apartment with a spectacular view east to the lake, two people sit on a bench in front of a shimmering black grand piano.
