AN UNCONVENTIONAL ROMANCE Meet Max, a celebrity novelist who is single, and Trudy, a happily married woman who is working on a new novel. They meet in a writer's room and form a fast friends…
MORE LIKE ONE STARRY STARRY STARRY NIGHT If anybody knows how to put together a night of eclectic songs and singers, it's Bruce Kimmel. While he has created some terrific revues, this prolif…
CONSPIRACY THEORISTS AND THEATER LOVERS, UNITE! Remember E. Howard Hunt? This intelligence officer was one of Nixon's White House Plumbers, that clandestine band of operatives who were assig…
I AM EXHILARATED In 1978, on the night of Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone's assassinations, an unprecedented candlelight march brought mourners to San Francisco's City Hall. The newly f…
CABARET SAUVIGNON She received a Tony nomination for both the Broadway revue Swing! and for playing Cinderella in the revival of Into the Woods. She won a Tony for portraying Louise in the P…
DIME STORE PROPAGANDA One of the problems with watching a play that has an agenda, political or otherwise, is the difficulty of enjoying with a good conscience even those parts that work; kn…
MY FAVORITE NIGHTS Looking back over a year’s playgoing, it’s every bit as easy to be jaded about little broke theaters as it is about big grant-eaters. Little broke theaters…
ORACLE’S THE MOTHER GETS A WELL-DESERVED REMOUNT My annual theater sojourn to the Windy City this year was a bit of a let down. Spoiled by previous pilgrimages, in which no less than 5…
DRAGULOUS I love The Kinsey Sicks. Is it because I love barbershop quartets? Is it because I love drag queens? Is it because I love community activists? Is it because I love irreverent, chee…
PLEASE MAKE IT STOMP When I first saw the Blue Man Group at the Astor Place Theatre in 1991, it was performance art nirvana. Sadly, what started as a sweet and satisfying event became a corp…
NOW E.T. REALLY CAN GO HOME A justified hit, bright as any of the lights on Michigan Avenue, Lookingglass Theatre Company's exhilarating adaptation of Antoine de St-Exupery's classic and cau…
SPIRITS MATERIALIZE A SPIRITED CHRISTMAS IN SONG AND DANCE Anyone with a soft spot for holiday song and dance through history must attend the California Revels lofty production of The Christ…
ONCE AGAIN, ATTENTION MUST BE PAID British playwright Nina Raine's Tribes, which played Off-Broadway last year and has been produced regionally, depicts an oppressively intellectual British …
ROYAL SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD II COMES TO WESTWOOD Brits had already heard about Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Richard II, directed by Gregory Doran and starring former Docto…
WINTER HIGH, WINTER LOW The Troubadour Theater Company opened a self-congratulatory love story Friday night, blowing a kiss to its own repertoire with its tenth annual holiday song-and-dance…
WAY BETTER THAN A PARTRIDGE IN A PEAR TREE Redmoon's seasonal performances are not events or even experiences, but passages to a fleeting world of contemporary fable, complete with masks, mu…
A WAY TO GOOSE UP YOUR HOLIDAYS There’s not much of a mystery in Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Goose. Michael Menendian and John Weagly’s adaptation of Arthur Con…
THEATRICALIZING AN ARTIST'S WORLD The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, a biography or perhaps an imagined eulogy of performance artist Marina Abramović, the show's still living co…
LIGHT BECOMES MOVEMENT: THE AMERICA WINDOWS BURST INTO BEING Following its world debut last October as a "gift to the city" (gratefully accepted by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, also in attendance for…
THE DEW ON THE GORSE In the 1960s, Beckett and Pinter started a vogue of shabby-old-man-reminiscing plays so influential that as late as 1995, Sebastian Barry went ahead and wrote one too.Â…
OLD LECHERS GET NO RESPECT Merrily set at Christmastide at the height of the swing era, Barbara Gaines' sumptuous Navy Pier staging of Shakespeare's slightest comedy is hilarious, certainly …
A HIT-AND-MISS HOLIDAY HYBRID IS AT LEAST MORE HO HO THAN HO HUM Silliness and charm reign supreme in The Actors' Gang's original Christmas show, The Queen Family’s Very Special Holida…
FROM THE DECK OF THE H.M.S. CYNIC Remember when George Lucas took the awesome, mystical enigma of The Force and shrank it to the antiseptic science of midi-chlorians, essentially just a kind…
CONSCIENCE KEEPING IN A CRACKLING PLOT Taut, true and richly wrought, this 1945 potboiler by unashamed socialist playwright J.B. Priestley remains, three generations later, a clarion call to…
JOCKEY-SIZED JORDAN REMAINS A COMICAL CLYDESDALE Have you ever been to a sultry party that has the oppressive feel of a languid, humid day in the Deep South, only to have the energy shift dr…