ALL KINDS OF ADMISSIONS A peculiarly persuasive puzzle play, Daniel Pearle's resonant A Kid Like Jake strategically omits the title character from the cast of characters. That's very right: …
A REALLY REALLY TIMELY PLAY 29-year old playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo's Really Really premiered at Virginia's Signature Theatre in 2012 before heading to Off-Broadway, where it was helmed b…
VOGUEING IT AT VERSAILLES The putative appeal of David Adjmi's Marie Antoinette is that everyone likes to watch a train wreck. Now exfoliating in Steppenwolf's upper stage in a dispensable C…
EVERYTHING A FIRST DATE SHOULD BE First Date, an enjoyable new musical comedy that opened on Broadway in 2013, should really be called Blind Date. Its two principal protagonists, awkward Aar…
BEING ALIVE"AND SONDHEIM Way overdue and instantly invaluable, Porchlight Music Theatre's Sondheim on Sondheim delivers the inside look on Broadway's brightest. Rich with new arrangements fo…
SHOW BIZ KIDS Cineastas at least doubles the self-reflexion of your average REDCAT show. In this new Argentinian play, written and directed by Mariano Penzotti, you watch no fewer than four …
GAGA FOR GANESHA Now in residence at Victory Gardens Theater, the newly minted Rasaka Theatre Company is in hot pursuit of more diversity on Chicago stages. Their mission: to share the tales…
ALL IS REALLY WELL In playwright Stephen Karam's touching and funny drama, characters are frequently spotted quoting the great Lebanese poet-philosopher Khalil Gabran. "All is well," the…
VERY FINE FRENZIES Winter can be wonderful in Chicago"well, if you're safe inside the Auditorium Theatre for the ten performances of Unique Voices. The Joffrey Ballet's three-work showcase o…
LOVE THAT GOES BUMP IN THE NIGHT Conor McPherson's plays are so rooted in the characters that plot is really revelation. With unforced warmth, he captures loneliness in the act of self-effac…
TANNHÄUSER TIES TOSCA IN TERMS OF SIMILARLY SHODDY DIRECTION From the highpoint of Mozart's Don Giovanni, Lyric Opera's 60th anniversary season has been on a slow downward arc. That i…
IT'S ALL FOR THE WORST…IN A GOOD WAY With his typical topsy-turvy perversity, Charles Francis Addams might have been happy had the 2009 musical inspired by his sardonic New Yorke…
THE MANE EVENT Watching writer/performer Benjamin Scheuer's one-man show The Lion, directed by Sean Daniels, the element I am most taken with is Mr. Scheuer's radiant charisma. His earnestne…
ELEVATING THE SUBWAY There's a very specific springboard for Redlined: A Chicago Lyric, 75 minutes of slam protest poetry: It's the elevated transit line that runs through the Windy City's N…
A RIDE YOU WON’T FIND IN ANAHEIM Any neighborhood with the elevated name of Silver Lake should have freshwater dolphins and interesting old hotels and a disfigured serial killer who st…
TITS AND ASSHOLES Gay activists who deride this delight forget just how radical the musical was in 1983 (the original film even more so in 1973). A third of a century later, it's still a mer…
A FAMOUS LITERARY FEUD MAKES GREAT DRAMA In a 1980 television interview with Dick Cavett, novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy made an especially biting comment about her longtime adve…
WILL OF FOOLS You can't take it with you"but that doesn't mean you go gently into that good night. Dividing the Estate, Raven Theatre's latest offering, is the late Horton (The Trip to Bount…
UP THE RABBIT HOLE There’s been a good deal of speculation over the last hundred-and-something years regarding the sexuality of Charles Dodgson, an Oxford professor of mathematics more…
UNWIELDY BUT SOULFUL Tom Diggs's allegorical fable Kind Souls attempts to examine how two loving individuals behave when forced to choose between losing their lives and losing their souls. W…
THEATRICAL TRICKERY TRUMPS A TRAGIC TALE Cheeky, goofy and sassy, Tristan & Yseult at South Coast Rep affectionately mocks and contemporizes a classic love tragedy and literary legend wh…
PASSIVE APPROACH MAKES FOR SUPERFICIAL DOCUMENTARY We are a fly on the wall in Jody Lee Lipes' documentary Ballet 422, which follows 25-year-old New York City Ballet (NYCB) dancer and emergi…
ROUGH STEPS FOR A TEAM OF TEN It was worth the wait. It's been way overdue for Giordano Dance Chicago to finally play the Auditorium Theatre, part of the treasure house's ongoing 125th an…
NO ONE BUT US CHICKENS At intermission, following the first act of Ross Howard's black comedy satire No One Loves Us Here, my companion expressed to me, in a whirlwind of expletives, her bel…
BECKETT'S RIDDLE CONTINUES TO CONFOUND Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is not an easy play to write about, let alone produce, act, or even watch. It's challenging, opaque, and ambiguous. …