CLOCKS ARE COLD COMFORT Call it the ultimate disruption of sexual security/certainty, a double life lived, as La Cage put it, "at an angle." As the title suggests, I Am My Own Wife is a subv…
SO"JUST EXACTLY WHEN WILL THE SUN COME UP? (Hint: 2020) The first Christmas special came early this year: Martin Charnin and Charles Strouse's industrial-strength 1977 heart-warmer, Annie. R…
BOYS WILL BE BOYS Musical Theatre West's (MTW) Reiner Reading Series begins its 2016-17 season with a musical from the beginning of the second decade of the Broadway Musical's Golden A…
AGITPOOP When Urinetown opened up Off-Broadway in 2001, then splashed all over Broadway just after 9/11, the show was hailed as a Brechtian revamp of musical theater. About an overpopulat…
THE LEGEND THAT GOT AWAY No, this show isn't how fans want to remember Judy Garland at the bittersweet end. End of the Rainbow, Peter Quilter's sardonic salute to a star on the skids, is a s…
A MOVING PORTRAIT OF A SMALLER SAINT A show doesn't"can't"get truer or richer than this current 140-minute gem at the Athenaeum Theatre. Perfectly concluding an all-Stephen Adly Guirgis seas…
FAIRY TALE THEATER Debbie Devine and Jay McAdams are a theater couple. They’ve been putting up shows for a long time. If you and your love dream of having your own space and staging yo…
BAROQUE AND BURLESQUE"A TOXIC MIX What happens when a so-called revival needs resuscitation? That's the D.O.A. problem with this perverse collaboration between Chicago Opera Theater and Cult…
LEARNING TO LOVE FROM WHAT DAD DIDN'T DO Dedicated memory-mongering, the 2013 chamber musical Fun Home–based on Alison Bechdel's 2006 semiautobiographical graphic novel–is a wort…
THE WINNER BY AN INCH Not long into its original run at Jane Street Theatre Off-Broadway in 1998, a cult following had already been firmly entrenched for Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It was th…
PERFECT PRECIPITATION Of all the legendary Oscar-winning films destined to become stage musicals (42nd Street, Grand Hotel, Fame), Singin' in the Rain, the 1952 MGM movie musical starring Ge…
UNBOUND FOR GLORY It takes talent to juggle political activism, sexual tension, and a highly suspenseful thriller plot, but playwright D.G. Watson has done it. His compelling drama hits an a…
ADDING DEATH TO LIFE, CHICAGO SINFONIETTA CREATES A GREATER WHOLE Halloween night at Chicago's Orchestra Hall: This year it meant alternately sinister or soaring sounds worthy of its title D…
TWO HOURS HATE While getting fitted for a hundred-thousand dollar suit, a gross presidential-candidate billionaire argues politics with his immigrant tailor. Several monologues inform the bi…
A TILT-A-WHIRL AT THE HARRIS THEATER FUNHOUSE The big news from this weekend's two-night showcase for the jazz-stepping Giordano Dance Chicago is the world premiere of Peter Chu's roiling ne…
MEMPHIS SOARS The most entertaining musical of the year is not a great musical. Here is a show with a predictable, synthetic feeling book and 19 songs which only emulate the m…
BRING ON THE TEARS Orlande de Lassus, Europe's most famous musician during his lifetime, created nothing finer than the Lagrime di San Pietro, (Tears of St. Peter) a collection of twenty spi…
MAKING FUN OF OPERA FUN AGAIN This mostly satirical Lyric Opera/Second City co-production contains little irony apart from the title. For while it definitely IS about Wagner, it most certain…
COMMUTING TO KILL In The Right Stuff Tom Wolfe described a huge "sea change" when the space race went from fighter test pilots to astronauts. In the 1920s through 1950s, high-altitude record…
INCONVENIENT TRUTH A show as good as Blueberry Toast should be a city-wide phenomenon but it’s going up in Atwater Village, so not a lot of people from the West Side are going to see i…
STILL SEARCHING Is there life after Lily Tomlin? Producer Jon Imparato is attempting to find out: under his auspice, the Los Angeles LGBT Center is reviving The Search for Signs of Intellige…
O’HARA SALON Broadway icon Kelli O'Hara ventured far west of the Great White Way Friday night to perform Broadway favorites and a few originals to a well-sold house at V…
OUR FUNKY FOUNDING FATHERS A hip-hop Alexander Hamilton? A beat-box Father of His Country? A jumping James Madison and a jiveass Jefferson who disses bigtime in a poetry slam? The ten-dollar…
DEFICIENT DRAMA DILUTES DELUSION In 2011, writer/director Jon Braver created Delusion, a new kind of haunted house. In the ensuing years (except last year, 2015, which was dark), with a diff…
A POLITICAL PROKOFIEV BRINGS R & J CLOSER TO HOME It's been over two years since its Joffrey Ballet"and U.S.–premiere. The Chicago troupe's updated version of Prokofiev's Romeo …