CORKING UP OR SELLING OUT? Living up to its title billing, Lookingglass Theatre Company's world premiere Thaddeus and Slocum: A Vaudeville Adventure is a rampage down Memory Lane. Their 135-…
SO BEYOND BAD THAT YOU’LL BE TAPPED OUT Half-baked, heavy-handed, overlong, poorly plotted, wretchedly sung, scenically sterile, contrived and clichéd, witless and mindless, and minus…
EV’RY MOUNTAIN GETS CLIMBED AGAIN It's fitting that Rodgers and Hammerstein's final collaboration is a tribute to the art and craft they served so well"music and singing. Like Mary Pop…
A BRILLIANT TRIFLE Watching members of the Stephen Joseph Theatre perform Alan Ayckbourn's Confusions under the playwright's helmsmanship, I found myself mentally comparing the troupe to a t…
THE LONE EAGLE VERSUS THE LONE WOLF 81 years ago, everything conspired to make the "trial of the century" engrossing entertainment. (Actually, it was the second trial of the century–af…
LOVERLY The most insidiously satirical moment in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore comes when a lowly sailor and his captain must instantly switch places when we learn that the latter w…
SUBVERSION, DISRUPTION"AND PRETENSION Caught is just what Gertrude Stein said of Oakland: "When you get there, there's no there there." A series of metaphysical jokes played on the audience,…
CAPTIVATING VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF LOVE What a feat happens seven times a week in Steppenwolf's upstairs theater! Usually critics tell you to take their words for what they saw–but t…
A RECIPE FOR BETTERÂ THEATER It's no accident that this bold play, the latest offering from Northwestern University professor Rebecca Gilman, happens in Wisconsin circa 1976. The story of …
GOING UNDERGROUND A Critics’ Pick by both The New York Times and Backstage, the passionate docudrama Home/Sick explores how idealism turns to radicalism, as a handful of leaders from t…
THE LITTLE MERMAID THAT COULD It is surprising that the stage adaptation of The Little Mermaid took until 2008 to hit Broadway. The 1989 film on which it’s based marked the be…
INTERROGATING AN AUDIENCE It's the afterschool special from hell: The North Pool is that rare you-can-hear-a-pin-drop play. In a mere 80 minutes, playwright Rajiv Joseph shrewdly and sharply…
SCREWBALL MUSICAL HEAVEN When it opened on Broadway in 1978, On the Twentieth Century achieved the impossible. Cy Coleman's clever score"a beautiful pastiche of turn-of-the-century operetta …
BINGEWATCHING THE BARD “Tug of war”–a child's game that mutates into an adult's nightmare; it's an apt title for Chicago Shakespeare Theater's marathon of Bard history p…
AN UNCRITICAL MATING COMEDY Familiar gay fare, The Boys Upstairs, a 2009 rouser by Jason Mitchell, revels in industrial-strength crowd-pleasing. Pride Films and Plays' two-hour funfest is cr…
HONKY IF YOU LIKE RACISM It's such a weird time in America. From talk shows to a speech from President Obama, it's clear that the racism remains a topical subject. But we don't actually t…
THE CITY COMES ALIVE The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is about to begin a new era under the leadership of its new Artistic Director Paul Crewes. Right out of the gate is a…
A DOCUMENTARY DRAMA DELIVERS Chicago is currently witnessing two productions about photojournalists haunted by their work. TimeLine Theatre's Chimerica offers a flawed but fascinating 180-mi…
GIRL-POWER PRINCESSES TAKE ON TROPES, BUT THIS REVUE COULD USE MORE WIT AND MAGIC If you were a mean girl, you might call Disenchanted! a feel-good pity party. More compassionate souls will …
THE FOGGIEST In a 2007 issue of Washington Post Magazine, Gene Weingarten recounts Joshua Bell’s 45 minutes busking in a D.C. Metro station. One of the world’s most famous violin…
A SEARCH FOR DOUBT BOTH TANTALIZES AND ENERVATES Speculation is just as tricky on the stage as on the stock market. Winner of the 2014 Laurence Olivier Award, Chimerica (its title suggesting…
LAMB’S SERVES UP A TASTY DINNER WITH MARLENE There’s an old parlor game of trying to decide:Â If you could attend a dinner party and choose any guests you wanted around the ta…
A FAIRY TALE LEAPS INTO LOVE Rossini, Walt Disney, Rodgers and Hammerstein"they all wanted a piece of Perrault's fairy tale. Cinderella has become Cendrillon, Cenerentola, and, by Jerry Lewi…
CORRUPTION: MORE FUN WHEN CHOREOGRAPHED Now in its twentieth year, this slimmed-down, near-concert version of Kander and Ebb's cynical and enthralling musical features, as the smoothly lying…
MINDING THE BODY When the lights come up on Body: Anatomies of Being, the nine cast members walk out and stand at the foot of the stage facing the audience, all of them naked save one, who i…