ALL TOO HUMAN Stephen Karam's remarkable new play The Humans begins with Erik Blake (the excellent Reed Birney) standing on the upper level of a shabby, half-dark basement/ground-floor tenem…
THE WIZARD OF NOTES For half a century Harold Arlen did to notes what Monet made with colors: He found ways to make them make us very happy, equally sad, and never bored. A warm new offering…
BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE Grim gray barracks, fortress walls topped with razor wire, smart salutes from sentry towers, cut-away trailers deployed as offices and housing, fluorescent ligh…
SHAW FRACTURES A FAMILY In 1896 George Bernard Shaw wrote You Never Can Tell (the title suggests a plot packed with surprise), his answer to the recently successful The Importance of Being E…
UNEVEN PRODUCTION COMBINES CARNIVAL AND ROMANCE As part of Chicago's yearlong celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death, Lyric Opera has mounted a production …
THE PRICE OF POPULARITY Westerberg High is pretty low. This Reagan-era preparatory school in Sherwood, Ohio is a cesspool of snobbish belittlement. The Buckeye hellhole includes a witches' t…
A NEW BIRTH FOR LIBERTY Adapted from the short story by Dorothy M. Johnson that also inspired the legendary John Ford 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a classic tale of love, h…
NEW ON NEW The debut of a quartet of new dance pieces was not without some unanticipated excitement. A patron managed to sneak two non-service dogs into the Museum of Contemporary Art's thea…
QUITE A VIEUX Tennessee Williams deserves the credit he gets for a few outstanding texts, but for my money much of his oeuvre has been falsely enriched, and the late, long Vieux Carré (1977…
THERE WILL BE BUZZ ABOUT THIS PLAY, BUT IT’S ALL STING AND NO HONEY As honey bees gather pollen and nectar for their survival, they pollinate crops such as cranberries, melons and broc…
THE LAND OF 10,000 TAPS Call us saps or suckers but we can’t, it seems, get enough of "The Understudy Who Becomes A Star." Not when the sweet and satisfying story is stuffed with thril…
A TOO-CASUAL CRUELTY Macbeth, Claudius, Goneril, and Iago were monsters–horrible but not actual. Richard III, however, is Shakespeare's vilest historical villain. In his short, ugly re…
TAKE-OUT THEATER "This is not how I thought my future would be." Bittersweet, broken-spirited, resigned to mediocrity, that lament fits all the characters in David Jacobi's inexplicably name…
LORCA'S RUNAWAY BRIDE Elemental, darkly poetic, driven by death, Federico Garcia Lorca's domestic tragedy Blood Wedding is the 1932 installment of his peasant-primitive "Rural Trilogy." (The…
PHONYÂ PONY TALE There exists a type of small theater production in which a lack of resources"material ones and, sometimes, those less tangible"is made up for by the show's intimacy and in…
LET’S GET PHYSICS ALL For parents who recall Professor Julius Sumner Miller's television programs with nostalgia, who wish the Science Channel had more science shows, and for whom qual…
THIS LOSS IS OUR GAIN William Inge knew the human heart better than a surgeon. In Bus Stop, Picnic, Come Back, Little Sheba, and Dark at the Top of the Stairs, this closeted author exposes o…
TOWARD A SAFE THEATER In 2015 Bathsheba Doran’s The Mystery of Love & Sex opened to mixed notices Off Broadway, which seems to be the exact pipeline for shows to get produced at…
CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE STAGE Every time I see Leon Russom I wish I had his body. Lean like a dancer, he uses the solidity of his shoulders, the slimness of his hips to create character and emp…
MEETING IN MUSIC In the basement of the Chicago Temple, playwright/actor/musician Ronnie Malley displays his electric affinity for and considerable fluency in a dozen musical tongues. In 75 …
WHOOSH! "All the world's a stage," Shakespeare memorably said. "And all the men and women merely players." In a world premiere at the Old Globe, Anna Ziegler's new play The Last Match suc…
PLAY CONTROL A clumsy comedy about our gun-crazed nation, Cocked packs heat but no warmth. Glib, slick and slippery, Sarah Gubbins' world premiere from Victory Gardens Theater proves there a…
TAKE A TRIP TO POCATELLO Since this is a Samuel D. Hunter play, its setting is a nondescript town in Idaho whose business district is beseiged by big-box stores and chain restaurants R…
LIFE IS TOO SHORT WHEN ART IS THIS LONG A dozen years ago, dying at 50, Roberto Bolano left his unfinished 2666 as his valedictory. It was, quite simply, the swan song of a spellbinding crea…
BURIED BETWEEN THE LINES In Scott Elliott's surefooted staging of Sam Shepard's imperfect Buried Child, watching Ed Harris sitting on a raggedy couch under an old blanket in front of a littl…