THE ROYALE PACKS A PUNCH SLAP There are many things to recommend about The Royale, currently making its World Premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. The staging is brilliant, the fight choreo…
NOW THIS YOU GOTTA SEE Of the 32 shows I attended in Chicago recently, the most charming experiences were with four musical revivals, three from Broadway's heyday — the 1930s through t…
THE MOTHER OF CHICAGO THEATER Workers and theatergoers of Chicago unite! Oracle Theatre is mounting a rousing defense of Karl Marx and the Bolsheviks, and demands your undivided attention. T…
A PLAY CANNOT LIVE ON CONCEPT ALONE Works of art in themselves " namely Nicole Pearce's lighting and Katie Down's sound design and musical compositions — go a long way in helping make …
WHAT MAKES A FAMILY What makes a family? What keeps one together? And what do you do when you're stuck in one that doesn't fit in with how you want yourself or your life to be? These are the…
AÂ PLAY WHICHÂ FALLS ON ITS FAITH Faith is one of the most prevalent themes in David Rambo's God's Man in Texas, and very likely where you place your faith or where you spend your Sunday m…
YOU MIGHT ENJOY THEÂ ACTING, BUT WILL YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC? It's not easy to believe in magic watching Phylicia Rashad's direction of Joe Turner's Come and Gone. While Rashad has a knack f…
A fascinating phenomenon is occurring in the theater, one which was elucidated by many shows that I saw in Chicago over the past couple of weeks. As the art of playwriting (to wit: storytell…
THE PLAY’S NOT REALLY THE THING, THE PRODUCTION IS Further earning a proud name, Chicago Shakespeare Theater has produced Henry VIII for the first time in professional Chicago theater …
SECONDS WHICH SHOULD BE SKIPPED, NOT SPLIT Within the messy, overwritten and frustrating new script, If You Split A Second, is a potentially interesting premise: In an instant of unthinking …
I REMEMBER THE AMUSEMENT PARK BUT FORGOT WHAT THE RIDE WAS ABOUT The more I think about the Hypocrites' latest theater spectacle, Ivywild, the more entranced I feel about the imaginative pro…
A CAT IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a tricky play even before it leaves the page. Nearly sixty years after its first performance, Williams' brilliant poetic language and th…
CORNOGRAPHY It's been 70 years since Rodgers and Hammerstein ushered in the "golden era" of Broadway musicals with Oklahoma! and some dust has settled on the green corn of the 40s. Well, an …
PLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MOOR Alas, this is mainly a review of record: This is the final weekend to savor the triumphant revival of the Joffrey Ballet's Othello. Originally given its world p…
THE RIGHT GIRL IN THE WRONG VENUE Created by Neil Bartlett and Jessica Walker, The Girl I Left Behind Me " which is part of the Brits Off Broadway festival " is a tribute to British and Amer…
DYING TO DIRECT It turns out that a career as a top literary agent at William Morris and CAA served as a solid stepping-stone for Michael Peretzian's dream job: directing in theater. As an a…
PERFECTED STORIES Ever since Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories premiered at South Coast Rep in 1996, and especially after it hit the Broadway boards starring Linda Lavin in 2010, the…
WHITE-COLLAR BULLYING Mike Bartlett's play Bull begins with a team of three white-collar salespeople, Tony (Adam James), Isobel (Eleanor Matsuura) and Thomas (Sam Throughton) awaiting the ar…
LEAVE IT TO CHILDREN’S THEATER TO MAKE THE BIGGEST STATEMENT OF ALL The biggest opening in Chicago last week was the behemoth pre-Broadway spectacle Big Fish, but right across to…
THE NEVERLAND AFTER DARK This ain't Mary Martin's Peter Pan. Or Walt Disney's. Or Stephen Spielberg's. With Peter Pan: The Boy Who Hated Mothers, playwright Michael Lluberes' has his own tak…
BLIZZARD TALE In meteorology, the phenomena known as Lake Effect occurs when a cold system glides over the warmer water of a large lake and dumps huge amounts of precipitation, usually snow,…
BEWITCHED, BEGUILED AND THRILLED Mark Saltzman is one smart cookie. He approaches his new bio-musical of the legendary Lorenz Hart with a passionate curiosity about the great man's life and …
PLOUGHED UNDER BYÂ GOOD INTENTIONS AND BADÂ SONGWRITING What a great idea: Create modern folk songs to represent Americans whose voices have been given short shrift (or ploughed under) b…
FAUST IN SPACE Just because I recommend Trap Door's latest production doesn't mean that I understand it. Core of the PUDEL (pronounced "poodle") is an Avant Garde/Experimental/Movement Theat…
A ROCKY ROCKY MOUNTAIN ROMANCE In mountaineering lingo, "committing" refers to forcing yourself into a place of no return leaving nowhere to go but forward; and so it is with life, loss and …