Thursday, October 19, 2023
Nestled 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 09:07AMThursday, September 21, 2023
“Well, look who’s come to dinner!” bellows Gerald (Ronald L. Conner) to the neighbors he and wife Patricia (Sydney Charles) have invited to their home in Inda Craig-Galván’s WELCOME…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMChicago playwright Brett Neveu is so good at writing about the darker side of life (as in his 2002 play Eric LaRue, now a film directed by Michael Shannon, his fellow ensemble member at A Re…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMI don’t know who came up with the idea of a Pearl Cleage festival for Chicago theater, but based on Mikael Burke’s gorgeous production of the Atlanta poet laureate’s 1995 drama, Blues …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMAt this point, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is beyond critic-proof. (Once you’ve had an entire episode of Drunk History dedicated to your recap of the events in your musical, what else …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMThough it’s based loosely on a real story, John Webster’s Jacobean revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi plays like a cross between torture porn and Shakespeare, what with the piling up o…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMThursday, September 14, 2023
When The Beauty Queen of Leenane first premiered with Galway’s Druid Theatre in 1996, it marked its author, Martin McDonagh (then just shy of age 26) as an exhilarating new voice in Celtic…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:08PMWater People Theater’s last full-length production was The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon, presented in September 2019 as part of the Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Fest…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:25AMSeveral years before they struck Disney gold with Beauty and the Beast, the musical team of composer Alan Menken and book writer and lyricist Howard Ashman stuck their toes into campy cult w…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:10AMFriday, September 8, 2023
The play about lucha libre is hoping to bring in new audiences to the Chicago theatre.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:25PMWednesday, September 6, 2023
It’s beginning to feel like we’re having a mini festival this year of plays about the romantic and professional conflicts facing artist (or academic) couples, between First Floor’s Hat…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:49PMFriday, August 18, 2023
Last summer, Hell in a Handbag presented A Fine Feathered Murder: A Miss Marbled Mystery, a spoof of Agatha Christie’s famous spinster detective, Miss Marple. Now, they’re putting Angela…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:54AMWednesday, August 16, 2023
Seeing “Springtime for Hitler” in all its bad-taste glory hits a little differently when it’s staged in Skokie in 2023. The suburb is of course the home of the Illinois Holocaust Museu…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:54AMThursday, August 10, 2023
Loy Webb’s professional playwriting debut, The Light, caused quite a stir in its 2018 world premiere with New Colony (later renamed the New Coordinates, who are now defunct). The onetime c…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:32AMTuesday, August 1, 2023
Long recognized as Chicago’s most diverse neighborhood, Albany Park has also served for generations as the destination for immigrant families. As the University of Chicago’s Chicago Stud…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:23PMWednesday, July 26, 2023
Harold Pinter’s 1974 play No Man’s Land occupies the territory between his earlier “comedies of menace,” such as The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, and the more overtly political …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:26PMThe description for Henok Negash’s Meant to Be at the Chicago Magic Lounge makes it sound a little like a navel-gazing self-actualization exercise. Negash, we’re told, “specializes in …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:52PMThere are days I don’t think I can handle one more essay on the precarious state of the American theater. It’s not that I’m in denial about the existential threats facing so many insti…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:05PMWednesday, July 19, 2023
George Brant’s Marie and Rosetta, now at Northlight in a production directed by E. Faye Butler, is a tribute to the contributions of Black women in gospel, rhythm and blues, and rock, as e…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:54AMDorothy Parker once famously observed, “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:28AMWednesday, July 12, 2023
The SpongeBob Musical had its pre-Broadway run here in 2016. I missed that, but I can’t imagine it was any more delightful than what Kokandy Productions has concocted in the basement at th…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:57PMFriday, July 7, 2023
Taken alone, political thrillers and farce can be tricky beasts to pull off. Put them together and you really have to have everything honed to the sharpest point possible for the laughs to l…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:31AMThursday, June 29, 2023
During the years that I’ve seen Kate Arrington onstage at Steppenwolf, “chameleonic” is the adjective that most often comes to mind. From show to show, she never seems to play the same…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:55AMPete Townshend wasn’t able to make it to Chicago for Monday night’s opening of The Who’s Tommy at the Goodman. But there was plenty of star power onstage already, particularly in Ali L…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:43AM 
