Thursday, February 1, 2024
What if you took Winnie and Willie from Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and ran them through a blender with a Neil Simon midlife urban comedy, like The Prisoner of Second Avenue, tossing in a …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:43AMTuesday, January 30, 2024
Seventeen blows in seven seconds. That’s what it took to end Benny Paret’s life, and forever change Emile Griffith’s. The two men met for the third and final time in the ring on Marc…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:14PMWednesday, January 17, 2024
I’ve been seeing Beau O’Reilly’s plays for over 30 years. But somehow it never occurred to me until taking in the current revival of O’Reilly’s 2003 play, Hit Me Like a Flower, how…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:39AMTuesday, December 12, 2023
Gregory Stewart’s tribute to Nat King Cole doesn’t break the predictable mold of biographical concerts/plays, but in the cozy environment of the Venus Cabaret space at Mercury Theater Ch…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:45AMAs small miracles go, American Blues Theater opening their lovely new two-theater venue on North Lincoln just in time for their annual presentation of It’s a Wonderful Life: Live in Chicag…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:27AMOriginally a 1952 teleplay, Frederick Knott’s thriller hit the West End before being turned into a 1954 film by Alfred Hitchcock. Dial M for Murder got another theatrical makeover from Jef…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:03AMThursday, December 7, 2023
Don’t ask me how many times I’ve seen Billy Wilder’s Academy Award-winning 1960 film The Apartment. I honestly couldn’t tell you. I can tell you it’s my favorite movie, and it shou…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:58AMIt’s been a minute since I’ve visited the Kingdom of Other: 13 years, to be precise. The last time I saw Jackie Taylor’s The Other Cinderella was in 2010, before Black Ensemble Theater…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:38AMIf Laurie Anderson had done a mash-up of Scott O’Dell’s young adult classic Island of the Blue Dolphins and the 1994 John Sayles Celtic magic realist film, The Secret of Roan Inish, the …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:26AMThursday, November 30, 2023
Whether you’re waiting anxiously to see Timothée Chalamet in Wonka (the musical prequel to Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), or are rolling your eyes in anticipatory disg…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:18PMWednesday, November 22, 2023
If you want a charming and heartwarming family show for the holidays, look no further than Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, now bringing all the sweet quiet magic of the Jim Henson 1977 t…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:20AMFriday, November 17, 2023
There’s a memorable moment in an episode of Mad Men between office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) and copywriter Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss). The former, fed up with the cons…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:26AMThursday, November 16, 2023
The complicated backstory of the play The Lifespan of a Fact, now in its local premiere at TimeLine, reads like a series of “begats” out of the book of Genesis. Ready? Here goes. John …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:42PMWednesday, November 15, 2023
Leave it to Factory Theater to come up with a twist on the story of the Magi that’s smart-assed and sincere at the same time. In Chase Wheaton-Werle’s Wise Guys: The First Christmas Stor…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:00PMFeel like you’ve been living in hell the past several years? The Conspirators understand. In their latest offering, Commedia Divina: It’s Worse Than That, writer Sid Feldman concocts a D…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:16AMWednesday, November 8, 2023
They couldn’t be more different in tone and setting, but Tyrone Phillips’s current gorgeous staging of Twelfth Night at Chicago Shakespeare and Robert Falls’s brilliant 2013 reimaginin…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:03PMFriday, November 3, 2023
If you look at French-Canadian playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin’s Right Now with an eye toward finding narrative antecedents, you won’t be disappointed. There’s the young couple living…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:58AMDoing a gender reversal for Company, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1970 ironic comedy of marriage vs. singledom, is such a great idea it’s surprising that nobody thought to do it b…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:20AMThursday, October 26, 2023
Plays about the relationships between caregivers and their clients aren’t new. The late Chicago playwright, actor, and disability rights activist Susan Nussbaumʼs well-received No One as …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:29PMOn a clear day in Brigadoon, you can see Oklahoma. Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner’s 1947 Scottish romantic fantasia is set in a far more mystical and picturesque realm than the Oklaho…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:42AMFriday, October 20, 2023
There’s a long tradition of Black American playwrights and filmmakers subverting the tropes of vaudeville and other popular entertainments to critique white supremacy and its violent power…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:14PMThursday, October 19, 2023
Now in a short run with Broadway in Chicago before a hoped-for New York production, A Wonderful World still has a ways to go before it feels like a fully realized portrait of Louis Armstrong…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:48PMLast year for the Destinos festival and Teatro Vista, Georgette Verdin directed Paloma Nozicka’s haunting Enough to Let the Light In, which amply demonstrated her ability to create chillin…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:20PMNestled in a strip of storefronts in Marquette Park, Teatro Tariakuri (led by founder and artistic director Karla Galván) has been offering Spanish-language comedies and family shows for 20…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:54AMTuesday, October 10, 2023
Because we live in stupid times, Barbara Park’s Junie B. Jones series of kids’ books about an enthusiastic first-grader ended up at number 71 on the American Library Association’s list…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:58PMFor the third year running, Theatre Above the Law in Rogers Park presents a cornucopia of fairy tales by and about the Brothers Grimm, concocted by Michael Dalberg and directed by Tony Lawry…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:50PMWednesday, October 4, 2023
The Impostors have only been producing since 2018, and (like every other company) were on a hiatus from live production from March 2020 to fall of 2021. But they’ve already carved out a di…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:53PMLast year for the Halloween season, Kokandy Productions presented Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. Now they’re back with another slasher songfest: American Psycho: The Musical, adapted f…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:13PMFriday, September 29, 2023
Before Martyna Majok won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for her drama Cost of Living (which was planned for this season at Victory Gardens before the board decided to close up shop at the Tony A…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:42PMThursday, September 28, 2023
Pearl Cleage isn’t from Chicago, but she’s been produced enough here that she feels like an adopted playwright at least. Now-defunct Eclipse Theatre Company (dedicated to the one playwri…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:42AMThere’s a great show about a Founding Father onstage right now in Chicago who is not named Alexander Hamilton. And while it doesn’t feature an award-winning score by Lin-Manuel Miranda, …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:07AM 
