Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Written and directed by Grant Batdorff, this satire of spy thrillers for Two Chairs Theatre at the Annoyance begins with a bang: a wry, spot-on parody of those bombastic title sequences popu…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:31AMWednesday, March 27, 2024
Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire is an iconic play that lives up to its reputation. Solidly written, packed with vivid characters and terrific dialogue, the play may run nea…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:16PMWednesday, March 13, 2024
William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin’s 2005 musical about a swarm of blooming, buzzing tween-age lexophiles began life as a fully improvised play, C-R-E-P-U-S-C-U-L-E, created by Rebecca Feldm…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:42AMWednesday, March 6, 2024
The title of the show is an overstatement. Yes, the show does have west coast roots; the particular version of long-form used in the show was developed at the LA-based, Second City–influen…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:21AMWednesday, February 7, 2024
If you wanted an example of a pretty well-structured contemporary American play you could do worse than Bruce Graham’s drama The Outgoing Tide. Graham’s characters—an elderly man with …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:20PMThursday, November 9, 2023
Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1998 Tony Award-winning score for Ragtime (book by Terrence McNally) has many virtues—strong songs, strong characters, moments of great drama—but for…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:35AMThursday, October 19, 2023
There is something about Anton Chekhov’s first successful full-length play, The Seagull, that attracts playwrights to try their hand at creating their own adaptations—faithful or otherwi…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:29PMThursday, September 21, 2023
When people talk about the glory years of Chicago theater they rarely mention Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. After opening in London’s West End in 1992, with Jane Ho…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMThursday, September 14, 2023
Let’s begin with what this 2006 jukebox musical is not. It is not a rich, textured, nuanced, moving, memorable musical biography of Johnny Cash. It does not attempt to do onstage what the …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:38AMThursday, August 10, 2023
At a time when so many larger, established theaters are cutting back their seasons, laying off staff, or suspending operations, smaller theaters, like the relatively young Forest Park Theatr…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:39AMWednesday, July 19, 2023
Is there a Shakespeare comedy better suited for an outdoor production in a park in July than A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Much of the play itself takes place outdoors in the summer, in the w…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:42AMFriday, July 7, 2023
Alan Janes’s musical Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story is a clever piece of work, mixing the best elements of a biographical play, a jukebox musical, and a cover band concert into a bubbly, tig…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:19AMFriday, June 23, 2023
The Practical Theatre Company has earned its place in Chicago comedy history. In the 80s, this plucky troupe of young, energetic, gifted comic actors lit up stages around Chicago—including…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:06PMWednesday, May 24, 2023
The Puritans in New England lived fearful, close-minded, claustrophobic lives. Disdainful of all other Christian sects (especially Catholics and Quakers) and of the Native Americans who they…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:30PMThursday, May 11, 2023
This double bill of plays from two very different theater companies (Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble and CIRCA-Pintig), working in two very different styles—one abstract, movement-based, very…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:35PMThursday, May 4, 2023
Pay no attention to the show’s baggy, forgettable, mildly pompous title. This smart, tightly written play is at once a very funny satire of the Star Wars saga—and Star Wars fans—a hear…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:18AMWednesday, April 26, 2023
There have been many versions of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s Grease: the raunchy one that premiered at Kingston Mines in 1971; a much cleaned-up version that opened a year later in New Y…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:07PMThe idea of turning Richard Linklater’s brilliant 2003 film comedy, School of Rock (about a struggling guitarist/substitute teacher coaching his prep-school students on how to, well, rock)…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:57AMThursday, March 23, 2023
Dame Peggy Ashcroft considered the role of Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s notoriously difficult Happy Days a “summit part,” one of those roles, like Hamlet or King Lear, that tests an acto…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:53PMThursday, February 9, 2023
Big Fish bombed on Broadway. Based on Tim Burton’s 2003 movie version of Daniel Wallace’s 1998 novel Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, the show, with a score by Andrew Lippa and a…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:11AMWednesday, January 18, 2023
I remember when rock was young. So, evidently, does Chicago playwright Katie Coleman, as she well attests in her intelligent, heartfelt play about two young Soviets, hopping and bopping to a…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:54PMWednesday, November 23, 2022
Like much that passes for entertainment during the holiday season, this 2010 musical, based on the 2003 movie, lives on the infinitely thin line between charm and utter stupidity. The […]
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SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:30AMWednesday, November 9, 2022
Their premise is not half bad: a “still relatively new” (as they describe themselves) theater company uses a fictional 125th-anniversary “jubilee” to bring together a collection of s…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:10AMThursday, October 27, 2022
Siena Marilyn Ledger’s brand-new two-person play, being produced here with 16th Street Theater and Dragonfly Theatre as part of the National New Play Network rolling world premiere program…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:24AMWednesday, October 19, 2022
This is a play of tiny moments and small details, a play in which characters change slowly, the way people and seasons change—silently, imperceptibly at first and then with the […]
The p…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:26PMWednesday, October 5, 2022
The UrbanTheater Company’s performing space on Division Street is not small—I have seen them stage plays there just packed with actors—but it is really not large enough to contain all …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:51PMThursday, September 22, 2022
Hello, Dolly! is not revived that often. It only feels that way, because Jerry Herman’s score (book by Michael Stewart, based on Thornton Wilder’s play The Matchmaker) is so infectious […
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:56PMWednesday, September 14, 2022
Originally conceived in the mid-70s as a vehicle for Nell Carter but opening on Broadway in 1981 with Jennifer Holliday in the role that might have been Carter’s (if Carter’s […]
The p…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:24PMWednesday, August 31, 2022
James Sherman began his career as an actor; he joined the Second City in the 70s, while he was still a student at Illinois State, appearing in the shows Once […]
The post Chagall’s Camel…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:56PMWednesday, August 3, 2022
Journalist, playwright, screenwriter, theater critic, arts editor, and novelist Adam Langer was born in Chicago, grew up in West Rogers Park, went to school in Evanston, and spent the early …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:25PMTuesday, July 26, 2022
When Chicago poet, sculptor, and musician Marvin Tate was in elementary school, he had a terrible stutter. To help him, his older sister gave him a poem to practice reading aloud. The poem w…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:56PM 
