EVERYTHING IS HAPPY INDEED In Jesse Eisenberg's very funny and poignant one-act Happy Talk the excellent Susan Sarandon plays Lorraine, an amateur actress whose rosy, self-serving delusions …
CAESING THE MOMENT What do you get when you mix Shakespeare's beloved tragedy Julius Caesar with the hard-driving rock band Weezer? Adapter, director and choreographer Matt Walker, who also …
A FRACTURED FAIRY TALE Shakespeare's strange romance, which begins with gratuitous jealousy and ends with gratuitous forgiveness, is best savored as a fairy tale for grownups: A virtuous que…
WELL DONE HAVING FUN ON THE RUN AS A NUN Don't you just hate it when your boyfriend turns out to be a mobster and murders someone right in front of you, forcing you to flee and hide " all wh…
TAKE TO THE ROAD Walt Whitman may have patented the "song of the open road," but the Beat Generation gave it their own course correction and made it into a map. These writers of the Eisenhow…
KEEPING ROCK REAL Letting a good thing go is a hard fate: Change is always constant but it's never guaranteed to be good. A tough transition in Chicago's indie rock scene is feelingly chroni…
ANOTHER DREAM DEFERRED The price of progress is no abstraction, not during the fully-freighted 160 minutes of Jiréh Breon Holder's civil rights drama Too Heavy for Your Pocket. A TimeLine T…
THE PLAY THAT GOT AWAY I don't know the exact play Michael McKeever was writing prior to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in favor of federal marriage equality, but I suspect it worked much mor…
A FLOWERING PRODUCTION The Secret Garden, the hauntingly romantic musical by Marsha Norman (book and lyrics) and Lucy Simon (music) opened on Broadway 1991 and ran 709 performances. The show…
 THE PARENTS CRUSADE The setting is the story in The Children, Steppenwolf Theatre Company's Chicago premiere. Set designer Chelsea M. Warren depicts a cluttered seaside cottage …
TOOT-TOOT-TOOTSIE, HELLO! I'm here to sing the praises of all those musical comedy freaks who have been jonesing for a contemporary musical that will bring back, in some new form, the golden…
OH MY STAR! Bright Star is a heartwarming musical written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell inspired by their 2013 bluegrass album Love Has Come for You. The show had a Broadway run in the s…
SO WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE? As Shakespeare said, "Good wine needs no bush." Thus, there is no need to add to what New Yorkers have already discovered, that no matter how many productions of Fiddl…
SEND IN THE CLOWNS A bloody war is ended. The bodies pile up. Who will clean up the mess? What to do? What to do? Oh, yes. Send in the clowns. On this note, Taylor Mac, the certified genius …
THE PARALYZED PRINCE Century after century, thespian tyro after marquee headliner, something remains rotten in the state of Denmark. A defining challenge for thousands of careers, Hamlet …
TEMPUS FUGIT There are great performance artists and, rarer still, there are great artists who perform. John Kelly is both. His Time No Line is a quietly breathtaking meditation on his life …
THE WHALE WINS There's only one more performance " on Sunday at 3 at the Harris Theatre " of Chicago Opera Theater's awesomely ambitious Moby-Dick, a nearly-three-hour 2010 epic with music b…
IT'S A JUNGLE IN HERE From 2015 to 2016, The Jungle was a makeshift camp in a landfill site in Calais, France, the port city where the Channel Tunnel to the UK begins. Inhabited by refugees …
SHE'S BA-A-A-CK AND SHE'S FA-A-A-ABULOUS Charles Busch's play Die, Mommie, Die! is equal parts Greek comic-tragedy and Hollywood kitsch " a melodramatic campy cult classic in the vein of 196…
BRITAIN'S BALLET FINDS CHICAGO Springing into the season, the Joffrey Ballet's current visit to the Auditorium Theatre delivers very welcome art " two world premieres and a Chicago first. Ac…
TWIN TRAVESTIES (OF JUSTICE) ARE DOUBLE THE FUN Order in the court! Closing its season with dueling gavels, City Lit Theater offers Two Days in Court in only 90 minutes. Merrily combining…
BEST WHEN IT'S GRIM GRIMM Born in Austin and now living in New York City, artist Natalie Frank created 75 works based on the stories of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Using gouache and chalk paste…
THE VOICE BEHIND THE VOICES Ventre Loqui: To speak from the belly. This is the etymology of the word ventriloquism, an art as old as … well, it depends who you ask. For some, there is no o…
SOC ON THIS Perhaps one of the reasons Socrates has become a god-like figure in the world of philosophy is that we know very little about the actual man who existed during the dawn of writin…
NOT ONE FALSE NOTE The musical masterpiece Falsettos follows Marvin, an appealing, brainy, anxious, obsessive, wealthy Jewish gay man who struggles to create a tight-knit family out of hi…