THE CORN IS HIGH INDEED Messrs. Rodgers and Hammerstein reinvented American Musical Theater for the ages when they created Oklahoma! in 1943, incorporating song and dance to tell their story…
RIPPED TO RAGS IN A BEAUTIFUL WAY John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize and National Book award-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath operates as both a harrowing portrait of the American struggle for…
THE PARADOX OF A CONTEMPTUOUS PLAY AND ITS AFTEREFFECTS Early in Act II of Paul Downs Colaizzo’s incisive new play Really Really, my theatergoing companion Liz let out an audible sigh …
CYBER SEEDINESS, FBI BUREAUCRACY, AND TABOO MONSTROSITY COME TO VIVID LIFE IN SEXSTING Written in collaboration with Internet crime attorney Susan Raffanti, Doris Baizley's boundary-blurring…
WINTER FLUFF "We're all in the gutter/But some of us have our ear to the ground." If you find this limp lyric endlessly repeated in this silly-ass, pun-crazed musical instantly amusing, read…
THE HORROR OF SELF-DENIAL FUELS INVENTIVE STAGING Chicago Opera Theater has teamed up with Long Beach Opera in California to produce a delightfully disturbing presentation of Philip Glass' a…
MUSIC'S MANY BRIDGES It's a proven power at the Black Ensemble Theater: No disease is so deadly, no crisis so catastrophic that a song can't cure it within twenty bars. Add 20 more songs tha…
WOODY LIGHT One iconic comic writer; eight monologues cut from the screen time of seven of his most memorable female characters; a six-person, all male cast: Those are the ingredients of Roy…
STORIES IN A SPIN CYCLE If ever the cliché "the plot thickens" justifies itself, it's in this relentlessly inventive 1996 work by Australian playwright Andrew Bovell; anacondas after their …
ON THE WAY TO PARADISE There is a telling item buried among the bric-a-brac of Stephanie Kerley Schwartz' detailed country set of an economically depressed, coal-mining, hillbilly burg named…
THE THEATER TAKES ONÂ CORPORATE AMERICA’SÂ EVILS After a flurry of controversy in 2012, Mike Daisey's provocative activism-cum-monologue work, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jo…
WAY TOO EARLY PLAYS Imagine you’d never heard of the Wooster Group, and that you knew nothing of the avant-garde theater’s storied history, or its origins in the downtown scene o…
25 SAINTS A 75-minute exercise in dead-end disaster tautly directed by Susan E. Bowen, this new work by Pine Box Theater ensemble member Joshua Rollins tightly fits the theater company's act…
THEATER FOR SOCIAL CHANGE With fifty-two murders to date in 2013 as I write this review " over a murder a day " the death toll in Chicago seems as ubiquitous as it is tragic. Collaboraction …
YOU CAN SKIP THESE SKETCHY SKETCHES Those of us who are of a certain age reverently remember the National Lampoon as being one of the great humor magazines of the 1970s and early 1980s. …
PARADOXICAL DUALITIES It's brainy almost beyond endurance and savvy in its approach/avoidance strategies of gaming love. Happily, Itamar Moses' Completeness at Theater Wit is also engrossing…
ALL YOUR WISHES ARE GRANTED The production values of MainStreet Theatre Company’s 70-minute performance of Aladdin's Luck at the Lewis Family Playhouse in Rancho Cucamonga were among t…
TWO BATTLES IN ONE WAR As sturdily written and swiftly moving as it was in 1982, Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Play remains an enduring testament to the homefront battles that African-America…
THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT Race and immigration are popular topics on the LA stage, at least when it comes to more serious theatre. And there is good reason for this. LA is an incredibl…
BRAWL IN THE FAMILY It's a funny thing about families. We didn't choose them, but they form the most important relationships in our lives. It's the luck of the draw and some of us get dealt …
MAY THE WONDERFUL FOURTH MESSENGER BE A HARBINGER OF GOOD THEATER TO COME Enter a flight of fancy and imagine the scenario if a deity on the scale of a Buddha were a woman living today, wher…
SPRINGING INTO SPRING In Chicago, spring can never come early enough. But, alas, it's February, so it has to be an indoor sport. Leave it to our homegrown dance company, the Joffrey Ballet,�…
FRINGE-O-SAUR Winner of the Best Musical title at the 2010 FringeNYC, with music by Marshall Pailet and book by Pailet, Bryce Norbitz and Steve Wargo, Triassic Parq: The Musical is a parody …
YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO LENDÂ THIS PRODUCTION YOUR EARS Brutal and relentless, Julius Caesar chronicles a fateful course of envy and revenge defeating idealism and loyalty: Brutus and C…
FEARFUL SYMMETRY In Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, inspired by an actual 2003 event involving occupying soldiers in Iraq, a slain tiger takes center stage and discusses from…