MORON THAT NOW One-man stage phenom John Leguizamo, who has popularized the stories of his Columbian/Puerto Rican/Bronx Ghetto peeps and their culture in semi-autobiographical shows Mambo Mo…
NOT DEAD YET It's at least a chuckle a minute. Half the hilarity is verbal sallies, half sight gags. This cheeky, subversive, and unashamedly sidesplitting Spamalot, described in the pres…
LOVE IN THE FAST LANE "Love will break your heart; sometimes you want it to." That curious contradiction is the opening shot in MIDSUMMER (A Play with Songs). This theatrical roller coast…
GET SKINNED Joshua Harmon's new play Skintight assays the nature of love, the power of attraction, and the ways in which a superficial culture persists in teaching its children that all that…
A PITCH FOR THIS RICH WITCH Written by Jen Silverman and directed by Marti Lyons, Witch is inspired by William Rowley's Jacobian 1621 play Witch of Edmonton. The classic story follows Eli…
HOT, HOT, HOT I'm guessing most of you have not seen David H. Bell's rousing Hot Mikado, a swing-era adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's beloved 1885 operetta, The Mikado. It may be the fun…
MAY HOWARDS END NEVER END "Only connect..! Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer." Seldom h…
THE SON ALSO RISES It's always fascinating to be present at the creation of a crucial writer. Like James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's J…
THE WRONG WARDROBE? Clothes make the man " even if he dresses as a woman. An entire individuality, it seems, can hang in a closet, as transvestites have proven across the centuries. Casa Val…
FRIENDLY FEMINIST FIRE Fefu and Her Friends is one of the most famous plays by the recently deceased feminist avant-garde playwright MarÃa Irene Fornés, a Cuban American who has won nine…
ENDURING THE MONSTER Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) wrote her famous "ghost story," Frankenstein, in 1818, while on a vacation on Lake Geneva with her husband, the poet Percy Shelle…
EARLY BIRDS GETS THE BIRD The phrase "early bird" generally denotes someone who is an early-morning riser or who shows up anywhere early, words usually attributed to the elderly. In Dana Sch…
TRIBUTE TO THE HITS FROM GOLD STAR Gold Star Recording Studio might not be a household name, but the musicians they recorded for certainly are: Tina Turner, Sonny and Cher, and the Beach Boy…
A SERMON IN FLESH WOWÂ spelled backwards! In almost forty seasons it's their biggest show, with full orchestra and a cast of over 40, including a seated choir. It sprawls with spectacle bu…
ALL QUIET MAKES A BIG NOISE One of the saddest truths about humanity is that we always need to be warned against war, so tempting is its license to kill. All Quiet on the Western Front, E…
MEMORIES IN MUSIC FORGE A GREATER WHOLE We're witnesses to an aftermath and its collateral healing, the unsought legacy of a gay guy who died too soon: Newly revised after its 1993 inception…
SHREK IS A SHRUG OF A MUSICAL; BUT THIS PRODUCTION IS SURE AND SHARP Shrek The Musical is a mystifying experience. The whole thing is rather inane, versus the sophisticated silliness of Funn…
COLLATERAL HEALING It's a justified transfer. A very enterprising theater called none too fragile from Akron, Ohio has come to Chicago (and later to New York City) to offer a pretty powerful…
GIVE US A SECOND ACT WE DESERVE; ALL WE END UP WITH IS SCRAPS The angry young man syndrome is nothing new " think Protestant reformer Martin Luther! " but it sure found a home in the theater…
A RESONATING STORY It rarely happens. "The Broadway Chill" I call it. That moment when an already amazing show is given the perfect and unexpected staging which heightens emotion, inducing m…
PUTTING THE FUN IN FUNK Taking us as far from death as is humanly possible, some shows just reward you for being alive. In perhaps their most joyous musical celebration yet, the 43-year-old …
THRIVING WOODS Somewhere between "Once Upon a Time" and "Happily Ever After" there is a very adult world of tests, losses, disappointments, and grief. Despite this, we assert our agency; or …
LESSER LOESSER Well, here's a jukebox musical just bursting at the seams with promise. And North Coast Rep's production of Another Roll of the Dice is definitely kinda cute, a far cry from t…
CHANCE THEATER'S RAGTIME EXTENDS TO AUGUST 11 The critically-acclaimed intimate reimagining of the epic musical will be adding ten performances over the course of a two-week extension. Chanc…
SEEING RIGHT THROUGH THIS MACABRE MASHUP It's a roller coaster journey to the dark side of almost everything:Â Ghost Quartet, now haunting Stage 773 in a Chicago premiere from Black Button…