118 stories from From the Ledge
When I was still joylessly participating in the gruelling gay dating circuit (oh so many years ago during the Paleolithic age), one of the criteria in my mental checklist for moving beyond a…
Sometimes, Chicago can be a city of theatrical size queens. And no, gutter-dwellers, it's not what you think. Over the past several years, the city has seen ambitious, grandiose, una…
I've seen some of the most memorable Chicago productions of Stephen Sondheim's masterpieces at Porchlight Music Theatre (Company in 2003, Sweeney Todd in 2004, Assassins in 2007) but I have …
When Stephen Sondheim, the mighty deity of the American musical theater, speaks (or writes a letter to the New York Times), the national theatrical eco-system of critics, practitioners, …
Where have I been? Looks like everywhere, except for this blog. August was a blur of 15 hour days for nearly two weeks straight in Arizona trying to get my client project…
This week, we've been bombarded by the horrifying images of the London riots but in the summer of 2005 we were also confronted by a different set of terrifying images from that city " the af…
No one with even a passing interest in food and restaurants could have missed Chicago's palpable, almost manic anticipation for the menu that would follow the highly-lauded "Paris 1906" open…
When I moved to the US from the Philippines for graduate school in the mid-1990s, I never thought I would end up living in Chicago. I've visited it before then since I had cousins who li…
The big theater news of the 2011 summer have centered around the critical and popular success of the world premieres of About Face's The Homosexuals and the Goodman's Broadway-bound Chinglis…
I can safely say that David Henry Hwang's Tony-winning M.Butterfly is one of the plays that shaped my love for theater. I saw several local productions when I was growing up in Manila in…
As a bona-fide, pink-union-card-emblazoned, goldstar gay, you'd think I would be rushing breathlessly to About Face Theatre's world premiere of Philip Dawkins' The Homosexuals. Well, I d…
I recently came back from Hong Kong, a city that in my and many of my travel-savvy friends' opinion is in the top five destinations in the world. It's a dazzling, vibrant, breathlessly f…
The one thing I clearly remember about going to see the Danish film The Celebration back in 1999 at the Music Box Theatre was that my friend Niels, who was originally from Copenhagen, kept b…
It's been quite the week since I got back from Hong Kong, jumping back into the corporate fray with the zeal of someone who didn’t just get back from a ten day vacation. I'm bac…
I'm writing this blog post half way around the world, in Hong Kong, mercifully away from the rain and cold that has caught Chicago in their grip. I don't get back to the US until after t…
I think it's fascinating that, unlike other conversations I have had about Chicago restaurants, whether it's The Girl and The Goat, or Hot Doug's, or Tac Quick, or Avenues at the Peninsula, …
My game-to-see-everything theater buddy Joel has told me that if there is one play he won't ever go to again, it's Georg Buchner's unfinished masterpiece of theatrical naturalism Woyzeck (he…
In November of last year, I came back to Manila, where I was born and lived till my early twenties, for the first time after 13 years of living in the United States. It was a joyous, hea…
