LIKE KISSING AN ASHTRAY The chirpy puppet-style musical is no longer a novelty but a genre; shows with lyric-dense, upbeat, simple-rhyme songs performed in rapid-fire succession are the 21st…
SMART FOOLERY A young-audience offshoot of the Troubadour Theater Company, the Funky Punks seem dedicated to kiboshing the notion that a clown’s function is to scare children. At t…
DIS HERE’S A DIFF’RENT KIND OF HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL There is something very sweet going on in Eric Dodson's and Alan Ross Fleishman's new musical A Ring in Brooklyn. The unusual p…
GOING UP Piper's Alley has long been a destination for Chicago comedy fans, with Second City bringing in sold out crowds for nearly every performance. Now you can get even more laughs under …
IRREVERENT IN TRANSLATION In the same way that many really awful movies are actually good in the sense of being funny to laugh at (rather than laugh with), so the screenplays chosen by the M…
A GREAT KNIGHT, BUT JUST A GOOD NIGHT When a show comes back time and again, the review question is two-fold:  (1) Is it worth reviving? and (2) Does this production offer a re…
IT COULD HAVE BEEN WONDERFUL Attendees who had never seen Stephen Sondheim being interviewed in person must have been licking their chops with every juicy morsel that the legend said about h…
A VERY COLD WAR BETWEEN THE SEXES I was a huge fan of Peter Lefcourt's 1999-2001 Showtime series Beggars & Choosers. It was something of a bomb financially but a great favorite of those …
HISTORICAL FIGURES FOR DUMMIES As the audience settled in and Stephen Bradbury, who plays the waiter and also serves as a partial narrator in Otho Eskin's new play Final Analysis, came out o…
DEAD WRITER'S PRODUCES DEAD THEATRE I'll admit, I was skeptical from the start walking into the Greenhouse Theatre's production of Noel Coward's The Vortex, the inaugural production of the D…
IT’SÂ ABSURD HOW AMAZING TRAP DOOR THEATRE IS…OR IS IT THE OTHER WAY AROUND? For those of you skeptical of avant-garde theatre, I'd like to kindly direct your attention over to…
RICE MILK Vassily Sigarev's powerful play Black Milk takes place in a remote train station in the hinterlands of Russia, where a couple of young con artists, having just swindled the local y…
SOMETIMES YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN Playwright John Godber grew up in a Yorkshire mining town before going off to college to become a writer. It gives Salt of the Earth, which follows 40 years i…
FINDING YOUR TRIBE Theatre of Identity is a fascinating phenomenon: this genre promotes a particular people’s cultural identity and invites members of that culture and other cultures t…
ANTAEUS’ MACBETH ISN’T DREADFUL, BUT IT DIDN’T FILL ME WITH DREAD The Antaeus Company is not known for shying away from difficult material, especially when it comes to clas…
CAMPY BUT ARTISTIC Take a handful of world class circus acts, add a bit of cabaret and burlesque, and you have La Soiree, the entirely enjoyable show in town for two weeks at the Riverfront …
ALL YOUR HARD WORK NEEDS MORE HARD WORK It’s safe to say that no writer sets out to pen an unexceptional play, but despite all of his hard work, the end result falls short. Such is the…
GREEK TRAGEDY IN THE 'HOOD Luis Alfaro's slant on the Oedipus myth is at no point more transparent than the opening of his play, when several Latinos in orange jumpsuits sit behind bars, nod…
DRAT THAT UNAPPRECIATIVE 99% For a good marriage of politics and theatre " pure melodrama, bull’s-eye political satire, a live band and zapping social commentary all served up by amazi…
FUGEDDABOUDIT! To use a slightly modified quote from a certain NYU professor notorious for his directness (which was misinterpreted by many sensitive arts students as brutality), here is the…
SEX, LIES, AND ELEPHANTS There's an elephant in the room in Miss Lilly Gets Boned and it's not just the sexuality of the eponymous Sunday school teacher. It's an extraordinary hulking beast …
ALL FOR ONE Commonalities of the human experience take center stage in Mental Creatures: An Original Play With Music currently making its world premiere at the Lounge Theatre 2 in Hollywood.…
"TONGUES IN TREES, BOOKS IN THE RUNNING BROOKS" In order to make me laugh, a Shakespeare comedy must be well-cast. This man’s musings on the darker territories of the heart have ne…
REEFER MADNESS IS SUCH A HIGH THAT YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE STONED TO ENJOY IT In 1936, a church group sponsored a motion picture aimed at warning young people about the dangers of marijuana. Th…
FRANKENSTEIN REVISITED Neal Bell's play Monster dramatizes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, keeping the basic story points of the novel intact: Victor Frankenstein (Joe Varca), a brilliant young…