SUICIDE ISN’T PAINLESS My dad had a great record collection. At 16, I would drive over after school to smoke cigarettes and listen to Stan Getz. One afternoon I found Pop putting his a…
TO SIR MA’AM WITH LOVE It's an irresistible setting seen in many successful films and plays: When an underdog teacher shapes her troubled teenaged students, she is rewarded by bucking …
WHITE TRASH DIRTY LAUNDRY Scarcity is a fine title for a play that lacks a lot. Ugly is as ugly does: Lucy Thurber's bottom-feeding modern melodrama, a Redtwist Theatre Chicago premiere, wor…
SELF-RACIAL PROFILING FOR FUN AND PROFIT Reviewing stand-up comedy, as opposed to dramatic monologues or one-man shows, is not my forte. But occasionally a mind-opener like Ultra American: A…
A PLACE CALLED CARIBOU COFFEE INHABITED BYÂ A HUMAN HERD In Mat Smart's decisively named Naperville the setting is the story. We're eavesdroppers, listening in Joe Schermoly's awesomely ac…
THESE BOOTS ARE MEANT FOR WALKING Oscar Wilde supposedly said, "Be yourself. All the other lives are taken." That's defiantly the gospel credo of Kinky Boots, a musical movie spin-off that p…
THERE’S GOOD NEWSIES AND BAD NEWSIES Winner of two 2012 Tonys for best score and choreography, the rampaging romp called Newsies is mediocre material wrapped up in a special delivery. …
THE FIRST"AND BEST"NOËL A bravely Noël Coward musical retrospective set in an intimate Art Deco cabaret"what could be more intrinsically suave and sophisticated, equally knowing and f…
THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING AND THE VALUE OF NOTHING Given the amount of sheer transience in 2016, authenticity (as in a lack of fakery) has never seemed more needed–or endangered. Ever se…
ROSE KENNEDY: A PROFILE IN MOTHER COURAGE A catholic confession (in the larger sense), Laurence Leamer's Rose portrays the matriarch of America's most political dynasty"a family as cursed as…
DIAMOND LI’L Musical Theatre West's Reiner Reading Series wraps up its amazing season with a musical from smack dab in the middle of Broadway's golden age. Given the terrific score …
TAME MAME STILL GETS ACCLAIM Few nicknames carry the impact of “Mame,” the free-spirited super-aunt. Appearing first in gay author Patrick Dennis’s best-selling 1954 novel,…
DANCERS DO GOOD BY MAKING ART For a quarter century"since 1991"one summer night of nights in Chicago has raised funds to fight HIV, assist the AIDS Foundation of Chicago and 30 other service…
THEATER NOIR EXPOSES A COLLABORATIVE CRIME WAVE Making its U.S. debut at the Greenhouse Theater Center, the solo saga Bloodshot, by Chicago native Douglas Post, feels as world weary and visc…
BRECHT FORCES YIN ONTO YANG A strong, often infuriating, truth about the protest plays of Bertolt Brecht is how much the socialist playwright pushes the plot beyond the ending: He ends up ac…
BRINGING BERNSTEIN TO LIFE Older spectators will remember Leonard Bernstein not just as a conductor, composer, and pianist, but as one of the most vivid personalities and astonishingly effec…
HIS HEART IS CRYING, CRYING The latest rouser in Black Ensemble Theater's 40th anniversary celebration/season, The Jackie Wilson Story, a retrospective on an R&B Legend, showcases terrif…
THE GLOBE’SÂ STUNNING PRODUCTION HIGHLIGHTSÂ SHAKESPEARE'S PLEA FOR DIGNITYÂ AS MUCH AS MERCY A decade ago a Chicago critic notoriously concluded his review of The Merchant of Ve…
JAMES CAMERON MEETS CIRQUE DU SOLEIL Cirque du Soleil writes a new chapter in make-believe with Toruk " The First Flight, a not so typical two-hour fantasy inspired (but not based on) James …
NEW BALLET PREMIERES IN L.A. It is said that American novelist James T. Farrell regretted writing the Studs Lonigan trilogy, novels that were so iconic that fellow Chicagoan "Studs" Terkel a…
SHAKESPEARE UNDER ATTACK A comedy's brewing up in Santa Monica. Soon, winds will whip, distressed voices will call out and a ship's timbers will be shivering, cracking, and smashing against …
A SCALED-DOWN GYPSY NONETHELESS GOESÂ OFF THE SCALE Gypsy, the musical theater biography of striptease performer Gypsy Rose Lee, is really about Gypsy's mother, Mama Rose, immortalized by …
A MASON/DIXON CATHARSIS REPRISES ITS SUCCESS Can white trash/peckerwood/country cracker/Dixie doodles rise above their rotten roots? Byhalia, Mississippi is not just a place or a title but a…
AN EX-SLAVE BREAKS NEW CHAINS Eager to be relevant but not quite succeeding, Thomas Klingenstein's Douglass, a world premiere by the american vicarious at Theater Wit, is nonetheless a valua…
HERE’S A PLACE FOR US When I first heard West Side Story, it was the original Broadway cast recording on my parents’ mono Magnavox console. Without the Jerome Robbins’ dire…