OPERA'S FUTURE UNVEILED: A DAZZLING GRAND FINALE The San Francisco Opera capped its summer season with the annual Merola Grand Finale, a glittering showcase of the next generation of opera s…
YOU WILL ABSOLUTELY WHAT YOU WILL While we are still grappling with questions of gender, identity, and societal roles like troglodytes, we need to remember that Shakespeare was exploring the…
A FIELD OF PUNS IN FULL BLOOM Corn puns are like tequila shots. A few will make you smile and loosen you up, but by the time you are ten or twelve deep you start to wonder how you got here a…
MUFFLE THIS MUFFED; IT'S COMEDY LOST IN THE NOISE The films of Christopher Guest are sui generis. From hundreds of hours of improvisation, his talented troupe of actors create memorable char…
REWIND FIVE DECADES AND STIR THE MEMORIES On an August night at a nightclub in Manhattan, in a concert focused on musicals from 1975, Robert Cuccioli revealed that "the seed was planted" in …
Redtwist's Smashing New Play Rattles the Status Quo with Laughter and Wisdom Are there limits to happiness? Can any one of us remotely comprehend the countless forms it can take? Those two q…
JOIN THIS TOP BANANA FOR THE RIDE OF THE SUMMER If you're heading to the Nederlander Theatre expecting Jeff Ross to come out swinging with savage roasts about Charlie Sheen's liver or Elon M…
POLLUTION ISN'T THE ONLY PROBLEM IN SULFUR BOTTOM Playwright Rishi Varma sets out with noble intentions in Sulfur Bottom"to shine a light on environmental racism and the communities whose li…
In the 1940s, Hollywood seemed awash in films that can be grouped as psychological thrillers. There were variations on the plot, but essentially the films all portrayed a sheltered and sensi…
SHAKESPEARE, INTERRUPTED About five minutes into & Juliet, Juliet belts "…Baby One More Time" with such raw confusion you half-believe Britney's lyrics might hold the secrets of the un…
THE LEFT BEHIND Frankly, I was in theater hell this Saturday afternoon. Two women on one side of me were whispering to one another throughout the first 10 minutes of the show; a man on the o…
A BEWITCHING WIZ Director Schele Williams's touring adaptation of The Wiz touches down in Boston like a technicolor cyclone and lifts its audience up with a storm of funk, gospel, and unapol…
CORN-FED HUMOR LEAVES A SWEET TASTE I entered the Civic Theatre braced for a two-hour version of Hee Haw (not a compliment) and wondered if I'd be checking my watch by halfway through Act I …
A MASTERPIECE OF MUSICAL MISCHIEF In 1911, the Louvre was the largest building in the world, containing more than a thousand rooms, spread out over 45 acres and housing over a quarter millio…
MOTHERFUCKER! WHAT A COLOSSAL MISSED OPPORTUNITY With heightened and relentless dialog, Stephen Adly Guirgis's The Motherfucker with the Hat follows Jackie, a recently paroled ex-con and rec…
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME A friend warned me that The Heidi Chronicles might feel dated"after all, Wendy Wasserstein's Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play ends in 1987.…
COMING HOME When Fiddler on the Roof opened on Broadway in 1964, it collected nine Tony Awards and captured the universality about families weathering change. But backstage, Zero Mostel a…
AMAZE TURNS SLEIGHT OF HAND INTO SLEIGHT OF HEART; THE MOST DAZZLING TRICK IS MAKING YOU CARE Jamie Allan, the UK's original technology magician, brings his new work Amaze to New York's New …
GO-GO SEE THIS SHOW-SHOW The jukebox musical Head Over Heels is a mash-up of Sir Philip Sidney's long 1590s poem Arcadia and the songs of the iconic 1980s' female rock band The Go-Go's, t…
TIME IS OUR FRIEND A Victorian inventor travels thousands of years into the future, only to discover that humanity has evolved"and devolved"into two radically different species. The 14/48 Ho…
Half an hour before opening, crowds gathered at the entrance of Parque del Oeste in Málaga, Spain. Children stood on tiptoes, eagerly looking at the dazzling lights inside the park, where…
ANIMATION, POLITICS, AND THE ART OF BEING HUMAN Cameron Darwin Bossert's The Animals Speak closes his Disney-centered trilogy A Venomous Color (produced by Thirdwing) which began with The Fa…
13,000 SHOWS LATER, FILICHIA STILL DRAWS A CROWD: THIS TIME, THE STARS CAME OUT FOR THE GUY WHO'S SEEN IT ALL 13,000 Shows Later, Filichia Still Draws a Crowd The number in the next sentence…
RIDE THIS TRAIN TO THE END OF THE LINE One of Chicago's oldest store-front theaters, City Lit, opens its 45th season with a production of Pulitzer winner, Stephen Adly Gurgis' Jesus Hopped T…
SHANKS FOR THE MEMORIES Currently packing in audiences"and now extended"at The Independent Theater, Luigi: The Musical is a sharp, clever, and gloriously irreverent parody of pop culture and…