FIRST CLASS Directed by Cosmin Chivu, the staged reading of Tadeusz SÅ‚obodzianek's play Our Class at the Skirball Center is everything one would expect from such an enterprise when put t…
PUTA TO THE TEST Inspired by the Ancient Greek drama surrounding Hippolytus, and set in a present-day South Bronx bodega, Desi Moreno-Penson's new play Comida De Puta attempts to combine Nuy…
MAKING HEAVY OF LIFE "Can you see magic?" That's both process and purpose in Jordan Harrison's deliberately dazzling 75-minute bravura piece The Grown-Up, now strutting its precious stuff…
CONDITIONAL LOVE AND EARLY DEATH The perils of parenting are center stage in Steppenwolf Theatre Company's truth-teller. British playwright Rory Kinnear's strangely named The Herd (…
CAROUSEL COMES TO LYRIC OPERA Lyric Opera of Chicago's stunning new production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel opens tonight and runs through May 3, 2015 at the Civic Opera House in Ch…
BEFORE IT WAS TOO LATE Six symbolic lives get ruthlessly entangled in this blast from the past. The world is pre-independent Virginia circa 1676 and the outcome is today in Marcus Gardley's�…
A GOOD BÊTE Even though it's written in mostly rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter, David Hirson's 1991 play, La Bête, is by far the least avant-garde presentation at Trap Door I h…
MY FAIR SONGBIRD They were the proverbial strange bedfellows who forged a classic Vegas act. The template for Sonny and Cher, they also held a mirror up to a misfit marriage. But Louis &#…
ENERGY IS NEVER ENOUGH Nothing is sadder than a forced farce. Or phonier than chases without consequences. Famed for his frenetic The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity (a comedy about w…
IT IS A FARCE FARCE BETTER THING THEY DO… Boeing-Boeing — the delicious comedic confection currently gracing the Coronado Playhouse stage — soars to hilarious heights as it…
ON THE HORNS OF HISTORY Imagine history as a roller coaster–more specifically, Oscar Wide's masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest transmogrified into cerebral vaudeville. E…
OK KILLS In Tom Diriwachter's Great Kills, Tim, an overeducated 40-year-old loser who still lives in his father's house on State Island, invites his successful childhood friend Robert over t…
GOOD BOOKS? The world premiere production of a new play about the Bible by Denis O'Hare and Lisa Peterson, The Good Book is impressive, complex, informative, and entertaining, perhaps even p…
IN DEED HE DOESN’T Will Eno's 2012 solo script, now in a Midwest premiere, represents quite a departure (almost a repudiation) of Lookingglass Theatre Company's vintage style. Here be …
LIVING ROOM THEATER Not long ago a frequent theater companion commented to me about a production we had just seen: "So many of these shows, if (the performers) had put them on at home for ju…
ON HENRYÂ AND HISTORY Henry IV Part 1 opens with a lengthy speech delivered by King Henry IV himself: "So shaken are we, so wan with care…" begins James Sutorius, one of the double-cast …
MALE DISBONDING Friendship tests us in ways we never signed up for: Plays about it task us by making us measure what we would do when the characters' choices come too close for comfort…
UNLEASHING THE BEAST River North Dance Chicago (RNDC) is blasting into The Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University as part of the "Made in Chicago" Series on Saturday, March 28, 2015 at 7…
"FEELIN' GOOD SWEET," INDEED! Giordano Dance Chicago (GDC), America's original jazz dance company, returns to the Harris Theater for Music and Dance for its spring engagement, March 27-29, 2…
HEALING BY THE NUMBERS It cost over a million dollars to launch the Windy City Playhouse, a beautiful new 149-seat theater on Chicago's Northwest Side (3014 W. Irving Park Road). Designed by…
THEATER'S TALKING CURE AT WORK AND PLAY The first theater to perform all ten dramas of the late August Wilson's 20th century chronicle, Goodman Theatre just staked a new claim to a lastin…
HAYMARKET TRIUMPHS WITH TELEMANN RARITY Closing out their fourth season with Georg Philipp Telemann's Don Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Camacho (Don Quixote at the Wedding of Camacho), Haym…
STRIPPING DOWN TO BASICS Charged with unforced sympathy and unpolemical solidarity for plucky underdogs, The Full Monty, like the Fox movie that inspired this musical make-over, fits the …
JUDGMENT ON A GRAY BEACH PROCESS Elia K. Schneider stages an engaging spectacle with her Judgment on a Gray Beach, Your Process Has Begun, a dialogue-free experimental piece that imagines th…
LITERAL LEVITY On display through this weekend at Millennium Park's Harris Theater for Music and Dance, the Spring Series from Hubbard Street Dance Chicago consists of five offerings t…