4,000 stories from Newcity Stage
RECOMMENDED Michael Estanich's newest creation for RE|Dance glides on gentle waves of sweet nostalgia and romance, ruffled at points by eddies of humor and the chop of desire. Dancers c…
RECOMMENDED David Greig's "Dunsinane" is a play playing three different games at once. The first game is that the play is a kinda-sorta sequel to Shakespeare's "Macbeth." The second game is …
The legacy of the 1981 film version of "On Golden Pond," with iconic, Oscar-winning performances by Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, weighs heavily on the heads of the actors who take on t…
RECOMMENDED The power, reedy elegance and remarkable precision of LINES Ballet returns to the Harris in two weeknight programs. On Wednesday, the San Francisco-based company participates in …
Christopher Shinn's "Four" first premiered in 2001 and over a decade later it seems very much a product of its times. First of all there's the setting: Hartford, 1996, the Fourth of July. Bu…
RECOMMENDED After a successful run at Mary's Attic, Pride Films and Plays has relocated "The Book of Merman" to the Apollo Theater Studio. The extremely intimate space is terrific for a show…
RECOMMENDED "Vandals cover Art Institute of Chicago's wall with graffiti," the headlines read in February 2010. Yet again five of this city's degenerates decided to add to the already five m…
The threadbare line between cynicism and sentimentality gets even thinner at Christmas. TV and movies would have you believe that the world is divided between smoldering Scrooges and gee-whi…
RECOMMENDED Before the production leaves for New York City, TUTA Theatre Chicago's "Music Hall" is a show that you should make special effort to get to. Zeljko Djukic's interpretation of the…
RECOMMENDED The plays of Samuel Beckett are self-contained worlds. They are shorn of history, context and anything resembling realism: life boiled down to its bone-broth essence. So when dir…
RECOMMENDED The question on my mind as I listened to the second act of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's opera "The Passenger" at the Lyric Opera Tuesday night was: Am I listening to great musical art? …
Check out what audiences are saying about Steppenwolf’s production of Marie Antoinette, written by David Adjmi and directed by Robert O’Hara. The play features ensemble members A…
RECOMMENDED The theme of familial loss, with the potential for reconnection and affirmation, is universal, crossing boundaries of place and creed. As Lyric Opera of Chicago presents the holo…
RECOMMENDED Decades ago when the Neo-Futurists were new at what they do here, I once duplicated scripts or some such documents for them in my arduous and artless role at the Kinko’s of…
RECOMMENDED American Theater Company's production of Marco Ramirez's "The Royale" has as much heart as its title character Jay Jackson (Jerod Haynes). Inspired by the life of Jack Johnson, t…
We savor our mysteries for that flashpoint moment when all the pieces of the puzzle interlock perfectly. Red herrings can show up to dinner, as long as they make sense in the final analysis.…
RECOMMENDED Describing what Paul Downs Calaizzo’s “Really Really” is really about is not easy. The play is a Molotov kegger of sex, class, politics and violence. It’s…
RECOMMENDED Sharr White’s “The Other Place” begins as something like a memoir. Julianna, a successful scientist turned big pharma pitch woman (played with equal measures of…
The adaption of a novel into a stage play is as delicate a proposition as the spinning of a spider's web. Novels written in the first person may not be as dialogue-driven as those of Jane Au…
I try to accentuate the positive in even my most negative reviews, but seeing as how playwright Marc Camoletti is long dead and likely buried far from Newcity's target readership, I'm going …
RECOMMENDED Brazil's Grupo Corpo visits Chicago for the first time, adding some welcome fire to our cold winter months. The brothers Rodrigo and Paulo Pederneiras have created a muscular mov…
RECOMMENDED In 2012 the Chicago Teacher's Union went on strike for a slew of reasons, including objecting to teacher evaluations based on student performance, teacher and school staff layoff…
RECOMMENDED Chicago Opera Theater's "Thérèse Raquin" is the all-around finest production I have had the pleasure to enjoy in any 2014/2015 season, including those at The Met and Lyric Oper…
The four characters that make up the entire cast of Ryan Cunningham's and Joshua Salzman's "Next Thing You Know" are all coming to the end of their days as twenty-something New Yorkers. And,…
RECOMMENDED It is hard to imagine a theatrical world devoid of Sondheim's immense talent. Over the past fifty years he has earned eight Tony awards, in large part due to elevating the expect…
