4,000 stories from Newcity Stage
RECOMMENDED Dream Theatre Company has made a name for itself putting on unique performances that list strongly to the sardonic side, and “Alligator” is no different. Jeremy Menek…
I went to Palatine Friday night to hear Rossini's "Barber of Seville." Telling myself I had no expectations, I had been hoping for at least a fifteen-piece orchestra of solid musicians. That…
RECOMMENDED If a joke is clever and a scene is comedic then by what name do you call an entire production that assumes, with winking sincerity, a conceit so potentially dubious that one migh…
Having first been groomed in Chicago, "Kinky Boots" won the 2013 Tony Award for Best Musical. Rock icon Cyndi Lauper finagled Best Score, despite its jumps from song to song without connecti…
RECOMMENDED Despite being set thousands of miles"and possibly many years"away, I was unsurprised by director Robin Witt's reference to Baltimore in her notes on "Brilliant Adventures," which…
Polarity Ensemble Theatre's eighth Dionysos Cup Festival of New Plays, featuring four plays written by local playwrights, began last night at the Greenhouse Theater Center. Originated in 200…
RECOMMENDED If I were asked to describe Cock And Bull Theatre's "Voyage" in one word, that word would be "Ridiculous." But I don't mean that strictly as a negative. The piece is indeed ludic…
By Dennis Polkow "You know, you should start thinking about symphonic suites from your shows because you're going to need them someday," conductor and longtime Stephen Sondheim collaborator …
By Sharon Hoyer Ahmad Simmons and Kacie Smith are the recipients of the Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Grant. Their project, "THEM" is a dance theater exploration of fear, love and the barrie…
RECOMMENDED I wonder what it would have been like to watch "Bent" in a parallel universe where Obergefell v. Hodges went the other way. It's not an easy play to experience under any circumst…
How To Run For Mayor The Chicago Musical Theatre Festival provides an important birthing-space for Chicago-connected, nascent musical theater to access our city's storefront-ethos, where new…
The Gift Theatre announced Monday the addition of nine new playwrights, directors and actors to their ensemble, expanding the group to thirty-one full-fledged members. The new ensemble membe…
RECOMMENDED The opening moments of “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” are pure Chekhov. A brother and sister sit in their country home staring at a pond, hoping to see a blue …
RECOMMENDED There is something magical about sitting in an audience and witnessing the moment that a piece of theater officially becomes dated. Despite being twenty years old, Guillermo Reye…
Dear theater-goer, as "The Titus Andronicus Project" at The Public House Theatre demonstrates, never pay good money to see any theatrical production with the word "project" in its title. Tha…
"If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will." Or so the song says. If you were to apply that wisdom to "Matawan," the latest from The Ruckus, you might throw in germs, poverty, lon…
RECOMMENDED One might think that Sean Graney's title for his play/adaptation/mashup/opus "All Our Tragic" is a bit of playful hyperbole. But nope. It's all in there. From Prometheus on the r…
RECOMMENDED Still going strong after more than three years (and, in fact, expanded to multiple nights a week since opening), this sixty-minute showcase of Second City's improvisational skill…
As the lights come up on the first scene of "Black River Falls," a refreshing bit of father-son banter places us firmly in 1978. Dad (Matt Rieger) sits on the couch watching football as his …
RECOMMENDED "Moby Dick" is the leviathan of American literature, diving deeper than any other work into the mysteries of human nature and destiny. Shakespearean in scope, biblical in flavor,…
When characters clash in Ayad Akhtar's "The Who & The What," they do so under a number of different banners. The play, receiving its Midwest premiere at Victory Gardens, has conflicts in…
There could be many reasons to entitle a play "A Work of Art," but by doing so the author is either telling you that the play is about a piece of art, whether real or figurative, or the auth…
Early in their studies, young actors often run into what are called A/B Scenes or contentless scenes. These are back-and-forth bits of dialogue that leave everything so undefined that the wo…
RECOMMENDED At first, given the emphasis on magic and the dirgey, chant-oriented music, one could be forgiven for thinking "Storm," a collaboration between international collective Moon Fool…
RECOMMENDED I thought a show where the colorful people stayed on one side of the stage while the colorless people stayed on the other, plot lines fizzled, and the leading players were a scre…
