6,591 stories from Stage and Cinema
TO HAVE AND HAVE NUT After 28 years the Joffrey Ballet is ending Robert Joffrey's The Nutcracker. All good things, it seems, must come to an end. Next year Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's belo…
ALL DOLLED UP AND READY TO GO, GUYS It’s a new tradition that I could get used to. The season of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is practically year-round. Performances begin in Ashlan…
CREATING A NEW CAROL While Michigan-born illustrator Haddon Sundblom developed the popular image of Santa Claus for Coca Cola advertising in the 1930s, it was the Victorian era which intr…
OUR ANIMAL FELLOWS The always energized and entertaining Bedlam theater company opens their current season with New York Animals, Steven Sater's musical play about New York City life in the …
APOLLO EARTHBOUND; SHOSTAKOVICH SOARS Rollicking, mysterious, and adventurous may be attributes of Britten’s Young Apollo,but these adjectives also describe the outcome, respecti…
NEITHER NORA Nora, Ingmar Bergman's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, centers on its titular character, a beautiful young wife and mother, whose cozy life at her husband's bosom i…
DUMBING DOWN DICKENS It doesn't matter that A Christmas Carol has drifted from Dickens: Goodman Theatre will never slaughter its sacred (cash) cow. For 38 years now, playing three venu…
SHOWS THAT TELL, SHOWS THAT SHOW A list of the most popular investigative themes for artistic works in 2015 would certainly include (1) art itself, particularly within the same medium, and (…
AN ABORTED AFFAIR The "Maui Pipeline," it seems, has run out of waves. This "co-world premiere" from Boise Contemporary Theater and Chicago's Sideshow Theatre Company offers an unedifying lo…
TMI I'm a librarian during the day, and one thing I remember from back in Library School (because you have to go to Library School to become a librarian, you know) is that there are many dis…
QUIT WHILE YOU'RE BEHIND Some absurdities are just too stupid for satire. Transparently ridiculous, they automatically self-indict, hanging themselves on their own petard. Such is the object…
A MERRY WIDOW MAKES FOR A MERRY AUDIENCE After the unbearable ugliness of Berg's Wozzeck, Lyric Opera's beautiful production of Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow (Die Lustige Witwe) comes as …
DO I FEAR A WALTZ? Musicals are generally "lost" for any one of a number of reasons: the libretto may be filled with once topical socio-political humor now meaningless to contemporary audien…
IF STORYTELLING’S YOUR THING, SKIP SCOTCH French poet and essayist Charles Pierre Péguy wrote, “It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas.” Yuval Sharo…
HURRAH FOR HAYMARKET'S HANDELIAN HERO Appropriately enough, Haymarket Opera Company (HOC) is kicking off its fifth season with a Handel opera that premiered on London's Haymarket Street 300 …
COALS IN EVERYONE'S STOCKINGS Sometimes an entire life can crystallize around a seminal recollection. It can freeze a moment of time into a measure of what did and didn't come true, what mig…
WHEN LIFE IMITATES OPERA Life imitates opera: Concluding Eclipse Theatre Company's season-long retrospective of oeuvres by Terrence McNally (Lips Together, Teeth Apart and A Perfect Ga…
FALLING IN LOVE WITH LAUGHS AND LEAPS Sadly a review of record, but this experimental, eclectic mash-up from Chicago looks to have a life beyond its short runs in the cities of wind and ange…
VIVA LA POP’S MAMMA Bringing opera to a wider audience is the noble goal of many a musical entrepreneur, but few succeed as well as Josh Shaw (stage direction and production design) an…
A HALF CENTURY OF HOOFING After 50 years of high-impact dancing, it's worth taking a five-city victory lap. Twyla Tharp's troupe, featured at Chicago's Auditorium Theatre this weekend, is of…
WHAT'S UP WITH WOZZECK? Alban Berg's Wozzeck must have been quite shocking in 1925 at its first public performance in Berlin. Why? Musically, it's regarded as the first opera in the 20th-cen…
A ROM-COM TO RELISH AND REGRET Taking a chance at love–that's the germ and gist of Neil Simon's mating comedy. Chapter Two remains a quasi-autobiographical depiction of the natio…
I DID, TEN MINUTES IN Ike Holter's play Hit the Wall, a historical "remix" about June 27 and 28, 1969 in New York City, went up first at the Steppenwolf in Chicago in 2012. The next year it …
HOW BROWN WAS MY VALLEY? The San Fernando Valley has always creeped me out. My family moved from Anaheim to Canoga Park (now West Hills) in 1971 (two weeks before the earthquake, thank you).…
A HOMECOMING In last season's Failure: A Love Story, Joseph V. Calarco played a veterinarian who at one point had to euthanize his good friend, a dog played by Gregory Nabours. The staged mo…
