6,591 stories from Stage and Cinema
A TREASURE TROVATORE There's nothing subtle about Verdi's ambitiously conceived Il Trovatore (The Troubadour). Grandly realized and magnificently staged by Lyric Opera, it is one of the thre…
I'M NOT SAYING YOU SHOULD BE SKIPPIN' PIPPIN, BUT… Prepare yourself. After all the rave reviews and buzz from New York, Diane Paulus's Tony-winning revival hits the road filled with enough…
NUDITY IS AS NUDITY DOES For the sake of argument ("arguendo"), let us consider G-strings as tools of oppression, and pasties as violations of our First Amendment rights. This was the perspe…
BETTER CROSS THIS OFF YOUR LIFT Nothing quite fits together in Walter Mosley's flat, agenda-heavy and undisciplined Lift, about a young black man and woman who find themselves trapped in a s…
PRIDE COMETH BEFORE AN ICEBERG Griffin Theatre Company's total triumph is a strange success. It's odd that a more intimate version of a musical called Titanic can so succeed. The cast is red…
EXCELLENT BY ALL APPEARANCES It is rare enough to find early operas staged in the U.S., so to find a whole company devoted to their performance is truly extraordinary. Haymarket Opera Compan…
FACELESS FOLLOWERS OF TWITTER AND MAO There's a fascinating paradigm shift in the middle of The Hundred Flowers Project, Christopher Chen's cautionary stage and video thriller. Whether you c…
WHAT INDEED The title of MarÃa Irene Fornés’ 1989 quartet of one-acts recalls a two-verse Old Testament passage in Isaiah. The wandering Jews cry out from the midst of war, famine,…
LEAPING BIPEDS! There's one more chance"tonight"to see five intriguing dances on display at the Harris Theater, exciting work from the reliable 52-year-old Giordano Dance Chicago troupe. Kin…
STAY FOR DINNER, WON’T YOU? She's an ancient crone who lives in a tiny cottage deep in the forest, feared by those near and far. She brews strange elixirs and ointments, and is rum…
KOSKY'S QUEEN AND CASTLE On the surface, there isn't much that unites Henry Purcell's 1688 Dido and Aeneas and Béla Bartók’s 1918 Bluebeard's Castle, except perhaps that men are no…
WHERE BLACK BOX EQUALS COFFIN Just in time for Halloween, The Chicago Mammals are performing their All Girl Edgar Allan Poe. Apart from the original source material, most everything about th…
SEE THE MOVIE Imagine John Boorman's film Deliverance staged, "panties" scene and all, as a piece of dinner theater, with all the performers looking very serious and projecting their voices,…
GRACEFULLY AMAZING John Newton (1725-1807) was many things: a slave trader, a sailor and a clergyman. Yet today he is chiefly remembered as the author of "Amazing Grace," perhaps the most we…
IN SOME WAYS, THIS PARADE PASSED ITSELFÂ BY First performed in Chicago by Bailiwick Repertory, now dutifully revived by BoHo Theatre, the potentially pile-driving Parade by bookwriter Alfr…
THE FARM-TO-FABLE REVOLUTION IS HERE One of the most extraordinary things about George Orwell's novels is their prophetic power; they are perhaps even more relevant now than when he wrote th…
LEAPS AND LAUGHS: A STRANGE AMALGAM It's a worthy experiment, even if the eclectic results seem maddeningly inconclusive. For three more performances, two very different Chicago arts troupes…
A DREAM WITHIN A DANCE Borrowed from the Pennsylvania Ballet, Joffrey Ballet's latest offering (running through Oct. 26 at the Auditorium Theatre) is not your usual Swan Lake. Not to be comp…
ORLANDERSMITH CAN SEEÂ FOREVER There is a timeless quality to stories about families, particularly families riddled with alcoholism, drug addiction, bitterness, hatred, sadness, and lost d…
STEALING CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE The Submission is a devious, double-edged title for Jeff Talbott's equally transgressive play. It refers both to the cold (as in out-of-nowhere) entry of a scr…
WARM TUB The lights come up on a couple, Helene (Hannah Bos) and Derek (Paul Thureen), reading in a Jacuzzi, inside a cozy Colorado skiing cabin one cold winter evening sometimes in the 1980…
FOR BETTER OR WORSE Based on her own experience with a dying father and marital breakup with playwright Hamish Linklater (whose The Vandal is currently running in Chicago), Jessica Goldbe…
A CONFESSION ABOUT SWEENEY TODD Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been four days since my last confession. I saw Porchlight Music Theatre's production of Sweeney Todd at Stage 773……
MISSING MECHE Although Nobel Prize-winning writer Vargas Llosa is known primarily as a novelist, he has also written nine plays spanning a period of sixty years. La Chunga,written in 1986, i…
GODDESS OF LOVE THAT YOU AREN’T David Ives’ two-character adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel Venus in Furs wowed New York in 2010, largely for its star tu…
