4,000 stories from Newcity Stage
"A song is something with a beginning, middle and an end," Berry Gordy (Clifton Oliver) advises Smokey Robinson (Nicholas Christopher) early on in "Motown the Musical." It is not only the de…
RECOMMENDED Just like they sing it in the title song, "Hair" is indeed "fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, … bangled, tangled and spaghettied." But for all of its loose-jointed, self-ind…
RECOMMENDED Quiche is a pretty funny word. It's funny enough when it's just used to represent the quaint egg-pie dish that it is, but once it starts getting thrown around as a euphemism for …
RECOMMENDED There’s an abundance of kitschy romps through pop culture landscapes on today's Chicago stage. Such presentations are often unimaginative and charmless. Â “Attack A…
RECOMMENDED The eternal story of love grasped for and lost, lost forever or regained resounds all the way back to Eve and that snake's apple, and goes down easiest with musical accompaniment…
RECOMMENDED The second collaboration between choreographer Julia Rhoads and Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, co-founder of 500 Clown, earned the creative duo another National Dance Project award. The …
Like the 1981 movie starring married couple Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, Rebekah Theatre Project's production of playwright D. L. Coburn's first play also stars a husband and wife team, Pa…
RECOMMENDED A historical reenactment "is an educational or entertainment activity in which people follow a plan to recreate aspects of a historical event or period." Critics of previous moun…
By Sean Kelley In a city with such an established and vibrant theater scene, there are many institutions that could easily make the case that the beating heart of Chicago theater lies within…
RECOMMENDED Seven Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama celebrated the first production of this Frank Loesser-musicalized story about an ambitious young man who stumbles upon a book wit…
RECOMMENDED French choreographer Maud Le Pladec makes her North American debut at the MCA with "Democracy," an experimental exploration of discourse, collective action and resistance via …
RECOMMENDED The second entry in Lyric Opera's five year traversal of the blockbuster entries of the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon fares far better than last year's inaugural entry "Oklahoma!…
RECOMMENDED "Avenue Q," originally conceived as a television series, developed as a stage production in 2002, moved Off-Broadway and then to Broadway in 2003, and garnered three Tony Awards.…
RECOMMENDED Sex, violence, murder, revenge, high fashion. Angelin Preljocaj's vision of Snow White delivers the most visceral elements of the Grimm Brothers' tale with delicious aplomb. The …
RECOMMENDED Marriage is challenging; a marriage between two people whose belief systems are fundamentally different might be doomed. Yet Charles Darwin and his wife Emma managed to overcome …
We're not too far into "Lay Me Down Softly" before we learn that the carnival where the play takes place isn't the sort of traveling sideshow that features freaks; if there were any freaks, …
RECOMMENDED Placing Shakespeare’s plays in different historical contexts is a longstanding tradition for theater companies and filmmakers: modern dress and settings are used to both il…
RECOMMENDED From the very beginning of Arthur Miller's "A View from the Bridge," you know there's a train coming, but you can't get off the track. All you can do is watch as the train moves …
RECOMMENDED Having spent time in the mid-1880s dipped in some sort of madness reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's Hatter, August Strindberg dug himself out of his personal rabbit hole and continu…
By Aaron Hunt In her autobiography, "The Story of the Trapp Family Singers," Maria von Trapp wrote of her confusion when the Mother Abbess of Nonnberg Abbey encouraged her to forsake her asp…
Route 66 Theatre Company introduced itself to the Chicago and national scene with total transparency, both in name and in mission statement, undertaking to introduce, develop, produce and "e…
RECOMMENDED Where are you now? Where are you going? What lies between those spaces? "From Here to There" invites us into a literal and metaphoric journey into these questions. The collaborat…
RECOMMENDEDÂ What gives a life meaning? This may be the question, lying at the root of the human heart. Brave and Barefoot Dance Troupe prompts us to ask this question of ourselves in the…
RECOMMENDED Flashing lights, club music, alcoholic beverages, a coat rack, wristbands and people mingling seem more like traits of a party than a play. However, this is what audience members…
RECOMMENDED Images from the early days of mass airline travel, the “Mad Men” years, depict the life of a flight attendant (then called stewardesses) as one of high-flying youth a…
