"The Nutcracker" is so much more than a series of steps. It's about the dancing, sure. It's also children dressed in their holiday finest seeing ballet for the first time.
This new show is a smart, angry blast of Broadway talent. It abandons caution to the winds and really, really goes there, meaning wherever the heck Jordan E. Cooper wants.
The annual production of the Chicago favorite opens Saturday at the Lyric Opera House and runs through late December.
The nonprofit Make Believe Association asks: Can the people of Chicago come together to save their city and each other in the year 2098?
Here are suburban Chicago productions of "The Nutcracker" happening this December.
It is a universal truth that mothers must meddle in their children's love lives, and the Syrian American family in Omer Abbas Salem's new play is no different.
The pandemic was not kind to "KPOP," the new Broadway show that aims to do for South Korean popular music much of what "Dreamgirls" did for Motown.
Traditional musicals like this one typically reflect people trying their best in difficult circumstances and strive to leave audiences with hope.
"The Island" is about a specific set of circumstances in the early 1970s, but its metaphors of inequity, power and oppression are timeless.
Despite being 25 years old on Broadway and outlasting the childhoods of my kids, "The Lion King" still manages to amaze adults and children with its level of spectacle.
William Shakespeare still occupies his storied place in high school English classes but the Elizabethan dude is under attack.
If your seasonal favorites run to classics like "A Christmas Carol" and "Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins" or something more like 93XRT'S Holiday Jam, we've got your list.
Maybe you want a big downtown musical ("Lion King") or you have your own annual favorite ("The Nutcracker"). But there are always new holiday shows to try (Manual Cinema). Read on.
At no moment do you feel truly transported to Northwest Indiana of the 1940s.
A new, off-Broadway play titled "Evanston Salt Costs Climbing" by The New Group is making winters in the Chicago suburb topical elsewhere.
Michael Curry designed part of the look of the original Broadway production with Julie Taymor. The touring show is in Chicago for the fifth time.
A new R&B musical with Broadway aspirations is headed to Chicago, titled "Personality: The Lloyd Price Musical."
Ménages à trois are rare sights at the Lyric, but one makes an appearance in this rather ribald comic opera from Gioachino Rossini.
The focus of the night, and of this production, is on an experienced actor who has had it up to her neck with the compromises needed to get and keep a job.
Chicago's Lyric marched to its own drumbeat for this French "Don Carlos." This is not the Italian "Don Carlo," as Giuseppe Verdi's opera is usually performed.
Some kids get called "old souls," a reference not just to surprising maturity but the hint of melancholy in their demeanor.
Accompanied by a live band, the cast performs with such charisma that many audience members were clapping along " and some were dancing.
Valdivia comes to CLATA from the National Museum of Mexican Art, where he served as the director of performing arts.
Choreographers Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Cathy Marston headline this Joffrey Ballet and Chicago Symphony Orchestra collaboration.
Mozart, Wagner and dancing frogs ahead at Orchestra Hall in rare Joffrey Ballet and Chicago Symphony Orchestra collaboration.