JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR RISES AGAIN, BUT ONLY PARTIALLY TO THE HEAVENS Not nearly as powerful and raw as it could have been, NBC's live telecast "event" of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's …
A GLOBAL FLASHPOINT BECOMES A THEATRICAL FLASHFLOOD Until the Flood lasts only 70 minutes. But its concentrated running time delivers a devastating drama. A ton of truth-telling now on to…
"KICK ME" CHARACTERS Born to be bad, Nicky Silver is an acerbic gay playwright who has employed his outsider status to skewer the American family (Pterodactyls), relationships (The Food Chai…
JOFFREY STEPS OUT OF A DREAM, OR DELUSIONS OF A SCANDINAVIAN SOLSTICE First, a necessary clarification for A Midsummer Night's Dream: The title and the setting could easily confuse lovers…
NO MUSICAL IS AN ISLAND Whenever it's revived, it's hard to imagine a more necessary musical than this 1949 Pulitzer Prize winner. 72 years after the Japanese surrender, it remains a healing…
O, BEAUTYFUL AMERYKA After a successful run in 2016, Ameryka has arrived for a short run at the Kirk Douglas Theatre as part of CTG’s Block Party. It’s a testament to writer/dire…
ONE COULD GO ON AND ON FOR OFF Half the fun of theater is in the performance; the other half is in the rehearsal. Rehearsal is the time for experimenting, bonding, and watching everything co…
It’s 1979 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where people are disappearing right off the street. The so-called “Dirty War” waged by the military Junta against its own people is in…
JUBILATION! It promises to be one of the most enchanting nights of theater in a long time. On Saturday April 28 at 8:00, some of London and Hollywood's greatest names will gather at The Wall…
A ROYAL TREAT For almost 40 years, The Groundlings has proved itself to be one of the premiere comedy troupes in the nation, creating more stars than the Big Bang (and creating more Big Bang…
REVOLVING FATES — AIN’T IT GRAND? Like the chandelier in Phantom of the Opera or the helicopter in Miss Saigon, a revolving door is the all-purpose metaphor for Berlin's…
GO-GO SEE THIS SHOW Head Over Heels is an exhilarating and seemingly improbable musical mash-up of Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century work The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadi…
BLINDING SON I'm half Latino, half Eastern-European Jew, and I'm gay. But I know nothing of what it means to be African-American in a country founded on hating the color of your skin"a count…
CHRISTMAS CAN BE CRUEL More than most, life's victims need their storytellers. William Inge (1913-1973) wrote his characters from the inside out — theirs and his. A heart surgeon witho…
DOUBLE VISION, OR LOST IN THE LAFFS Can a forced farce make a theater audience howl with laughter, never realizing until the very end that the joke is on them? That's almost a rhetorical …
JUST WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED: A JOYFUL MESSAGE There is an ancient Chinese proverb: "The wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water molds itself to the pitcher." In the musical Soul Do…
MY FAIR SIGNORA, OR DONIZETTI, SOUP TO NUTS He didn't just write Lucia di Lammermoor, Don Pasquale, L'Elisir d'Amore, Poliuto, The Daughter of the Regiment, Maria Stuarda, Robert Devereux…
A CON IS NEVER "EX" The nickname Lettie comes from the Greek term "Letitia" or "joy.” That's one of many bleak ironies that stalk the anti-heroine of Boo Killebrew's survival saga, a w…
TOGETHER ALONE Keilly McQuail and Will Von Vogt are absolutely riveting in Significant Other, Joshua Harmon's mostly funny, sometimes sad take on the pitfalls of being the GBF (gay best frie…
WILIES AT THE WALLIS First staged in 1841, Giselle is one of the oldest surviving ballets still in the international repertory, especially because the lead role is a showcase for the w…
SCATTERSHOT SATIRE AIMS AT MOVING TARGETS It's easy to think that humor is subjective — until an entire audience's spontaneous guffaw undermines any such abstraction. Often enough, tha…
SAVING FAITH Even with a few blemishes, Bedlam's revival of George Bernard Shaw's 1923 masterpiece Saint Joan is an immersive and ultimately gratifying theatrical experience. The story…
A PRINCIPLED PRODUCTION Director Hal Brooks delivers a remarkably authentic and poignant tale with A.C.T.'s production of Heisenberg, a short play based on a rather unremarkable human relati…
SWEET BIRD OF TRUTH The Gentleman Caller was the original name for a breakthrough "memory play" that, opening at Chicago's Civic Theatre in late 1944, made Tom "Tennessee" Williams famous…
PRETTY UNLIKELY WOMAN When worlds collide: A celluloid fantasy about an L.A. call girl suddenly thrust into affluence, the much-loved 1990 film Pretty Woman starred a suave, salt-and-p…