There's no sleeping in heavenly peace over at Studio BE where the New Millennium Theatre Company's Christmas zombie comedy "Silent Night of the Living Dead" is attempting to offer up some gr…
RECOMMENDED Sometimes the title of a show can give you some clear direction as to its content ("Death of a Salesman," "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," "Conversations on a Homecoming"). Other tim…
RECOMMENDED The devil sure knows his way around Chicago. Besides the usual mixture of gang violence and Rham-style politics, Satan has been a feature of many recent stage productions includi…
RECOMMENDED Here's a recipe for making your holiday season jolly and gay (listen, I knew there would have to be a gay pun in here somewhere so I figured I'd get it out of the way right at th…
RECOMMENDED Playing at the Black Ensemble Theater in Uptown, "Once Upon A People" is the perfect antidote to the same old same old that can plague the holiday season. No offense to the tradi…
RECOMMENDED "I am not David Sedaris," Mitchell Fain notifies his audience at the start of "The Santaland Diaries," the stage adaptation of the famed author's popular holiday essay. Fain then…
Christmas merriment is in full swing at the home of young Clara and her family in the fantastically staged opening scene of The House Theatre's musical retelling of "The Nutcracker." Twirlin…
By Mark Eleveld Chicago theater during the Christmas season is plentiful. Add to this growing list an "out-of-the-box, not your typical fare, wild, crazy, gay fantasia," as director Scott Fe…
RECOMMENDED This family-friendly 2010 Broadway adaptation of the 2003 film "Elf" is basically a high-octane song-and-dance version of the story of Buddy the Elf that has plenty to keep all a…
RECOMMENDED Since Charles Dickens' novella about the overnight transformation of the crotchety Ebeneezer Scrooge was first published in 1843 (right around Christmastime, natch) it has been s…
RECOMMENDED With Illinois signing gay marriage into law this month, the crumbling gay community at the center of Larry Kramer's 1985 play "The Normal Heart" is almost unrecognizable to a new…
For anyone who's ever pined for a movie star from a past era or maybe got a little too turned on by famous figures in history class, "The Dead Prince"A New Muzical" just might be the show fo…
RECOMMENDED The Verdi bicentennial celebration continues at Lyric Opera with a new production of "La traviata," Verdi's most popular middle-period work. As was the case with the new "Parsifa…
RECOMMENDED Despite the fact that it's been a Chicago holiday tradition for more than a decade (first produced in 2002) and its source material is a 1946 film, every moment of American Blues…
RECOMMENDED "You know how you go to most Christmas shows and you're sitting there and they don't catch you on fire?" one of the characters in "Burning Bluebeard" rhetorically asks the audien…
RECOMMENDED Cross-fertilize Julie Taymor with Rankin and Bass and the result is very much what you get in this live-action version of the famous red-nosed reindeer that actually began life i…
RECOMMENDED Religion, sex, gender roles, relationships, violence, murder, suffering, xenophobia, shame, war, self-loathing, capitalism; you know, all the best aspects of humanity. It's all o…
RECOMMENDED Marc Kelly Smith is one of the most natural, purely comfortable actors on the stage. It's a joy to see, and it comes across immediately, this intense ease that allows him to dip …
RECOMMENDED During last Sunday’s unseasonable tornado alert, The Hypocrites inaugurated their holiday season with a fittingly dramatic opening: the remount of their 2012 hit production…
By Mark Eleveld Chicago is notorious for big fires, big shows and lamentation at such horrific circumstances, all of which can be found in Jay Torrence's "Burning Bluebeard," which retells t…
RECOMMENDED Quite simply, this is one of the great one-man shows. The story is the greatest, oldest ever told"literally, the start of Western civilization is in "An Iliad." The Chicago actor…
By Zach Freeman As any denizen of the theater who's been in this town for any amount of time knows, Chicago DOES theater. With more than 250 active theater companies and a constantly growing…
RECOMMENDED Kudos to Lyric Opera for celebrating the Wagner bicentennial by bringing us Wagner's last, most glorious and perhaps most controversial work, "Parsifal," in an all-new production…
By Zach Freeman Written by Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project, "The Laramie Project" is based on a series of interviews surrounding the brutal murder of Matthew Shepa…
By Zach Freeman Noah Ginex loves puppets. To paraphrase the great poet Fifty Cent, he loves them like a fat kid loves cake. So it makes sense that for almost twenty years now, Ginex has been…