6,591 stories from Stage and Cinema
A VICTIM'S IMPACT STATEMENT Critics always worry about giving away too much — in spoilers and such. And, yes, at first that fear seemed real with hang by U.K. playwright debbie t…
WOULD SHAKESPEARE BY ANY OTHER PLAYWRIGHT SMELL AS SWEET? If the title King Charles III sounds rather Shakespearean, yet you cannot recall a “Charles” among all his Henrys …
CERRUDO'S SPRING FLING It's now dance history but, performed last weekend at the Auditorium Theatre, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's annual Spring Series, An Evening of Alejandro Cerrudo, …
DANCE DELIRIUM As jukebox musicals go, On Your Feet! really earns its exclamation point. No question, the music alone, which won 26 Grammy Awards, would justify this 2015 tribute to th…
CAGE-MATCH COMBAT: IBSEN VS. TRUMP Right now, the biggest prize fight in Chicago is at Randolph and Dearborn. More polemically urgent than psychologically penetrating, a new treatment of Hen…
A JEWISH JOKE WAS NO LAUGHING MATTER IN THE 1950s When the nation went into Commie panic in the '40s and '50s, one of the first places to get hard hit was Hollywood. In 1947, Congress's Hous…
CYGNET DIDN’T SEND IN ANY CLOWNS ON THIS ONE Much like modern art, Steven Sondheim musicals aren’t for everyone. They are purposefully discordant in places, often dark in ton…
WELL WORTH A VISIT Perhaps composer/lyricist David Yazbek (The Full Monty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) was inspired by one of our best new playwrights, Itamar Moses, and his adaptation of the t…
57 CHEVY: THE ANTI-IMMIGRANT ANTIDOTE, OR HOW BROWN WAS MY VALLEY? There's palpable excitement surrounding the upcoming West Los Angeles engagement of Cris Franco's autobiographical comedy, …
REPRISE REPRISED It’s a strange sort of serendipity. Just when Musical Theatre Guild announced its final season after eight glorious years presenting rarely produced musicals, along co…
WELL-PLANNED IRONIES Facebook and LinkedIn have illuminated the error in the supposed six degrees of separation theory, which asserts that all living things and everything else in the world …
SUCH SWEET SORROW FOR THE WRONG REASONS It's as if choreographer Krzysztof Pastor, director of the Polish National Ballet, gave Prokofiev the opportunity to protest Stalin's tyranny that he …
DON’T MYTH OUT, OR DANCING THAT’S ORPH THE CHARTS LA Opera’s gorgeous production of Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice (Orphée et Eurydice), featuring a welc…
DIFFICULT TO PICTURE The Picture of Dorian Gray is its author's self-portrait — perversely paradoxical, sardonically aesthetic, and (necessarily) obsessed with concealment. First pu…
WHO NOSE BEST? Edmond Rostand's timeless love story celebrates the one-sided love between the famous 17th-century swordsman and poet — disfigured with a humongous schnoz — and hi…
SEX WORK/#METOO/FUTURE TENSE Sarah Jones is a prescient writer and an actor of rare gifts and remarkable range. It's no wonder that an early patron and supporter was Meryl Streep, for like S…
THE LUCK OF THE IRISH AMBASSADOR Pat Kinevane, 51, is a native of rural Ireland — specifically County Cork — now living and working in Dublin, the capitol of Eire. A qualified sp…
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST I'm actually happy I didn't see this musical live on stage. It makes for a wonderful original cast recording, but what seems like a giant heart on this CD, out…
UNLOCKING WHAT WAS NEVER HIDDEN At least Time Is On Our Side is more sex-affirmative and upbeat than Significant Other, About Face Theatre's last offering. A Midwest premiere devote…
THE MUSICAL THAT KEEPS ON WORKING Was 2017 really the European premiere of this oft-produced musical? Yep. 40 years since the Broadway opening of Working, and we’re just getting the Or…
A FAUSTIAN BARGAIN OF SORTS Bold, eclectic and experimental, Lyric Opera's new production (co-produced with Portland Opera) of Gounod's Faust comes across as rather jumbled, a mishmash, a ho…
RIDICULOUS REVENGE It's so well-intentioned that the results are doubly deplorable. Lookingglass Theatre Company’s Plantation!, a world premiere by ensemble member Kevin Douglas staged…
LITERAL LEAPS INTO THE FUTURE It's all over — but this review of record is as much a promissory note as a remembrance. Worth noting as much as seeing, Winning Works, the Joffrey Bal…
A ROYAL CATFIGHT GETS A ROYAL PRODUCTION Coulda, woulda, shoulda: It's the greatest confrontation between rival monarchs that never happened — the 1586 face-off between the "Virgin" Qu…
A MODERNIZED STREETCAR Since struggle for power among the classes is one of the main themes in Tennessee Williams' still-shocking A Streetcar Named Desire, it makes perfect sense that direct…
