The early moments of Leah Nanako Winkler’s The Brightest Thing in the World, now in a heartfelt midwest premiere with About Face Theatre under Keira Fromm’s direction, reminded me a bit …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:11PMAs her name suggests, Cloudia has been obsessed with clouds her entire life. In particular, she’s always wanted to see a legendary Cloud Man for herself. So she moves into a cabin on Cloud…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:15PMThe same day I saw Aurora Real de Asua’s Wipeout at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, I read an essay by onetime Reader staffer Heather Kenny about women finding midlife empowerment in outdoor s…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:55AMRonnie Marmo has been extremely candid about his struggles with addiction, especially in the context of playing Lenny Bruce, as he has for several years in his show I’m Not a Comedian . . …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:03AMChicago Danztheatre Ensemble’s Meditations on Being is a sampler platter of eight pieces that in some way “reflects on what one remembers.” Not all the work on display here necessarily…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:59AMDeborah Zoe Laufer’s 2007 dramedy, End Days, has intermittent moments of charm woven into a premise that is trying way too hard for profundity and whimsy. (When a show begins with someone …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:48AMCharles Smith writes historical plays with lively consciences that provide ample opportunities for his characters to debate. But first and foremost, he writes plays about people who are nego…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:01PMRonán Noone’s 2019 solo play, The Smuggler, now in a local premiere with Jackalope Theatre Company, seems to carry the DNA of early Conor McPherson plays in its bones. In particular, Noon…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:34AMWendy Kesselman’s 1997 adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank did some things that original adapters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett didn’t back in 1955 (slightly more than ten years …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:28PMI spent a semester studying in London in the winter of 1985, and one of the first concerts I attended was a benefit at Brixton Academy for the striking coal miners, featuring Aztec Camera an…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:01PMScheduled long before the current conflagration in the Middle East, Writers Theatre’s lovely, intimate staging of The Band’s Visit, the multiple Tony Award–winning musical, which premi…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:09PMConor McPherson’s Girl From the North Country draws on some of the same narrative tropes that the Irish playwright has used in the past in plays like The Weir and The Seafarer. A group of …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:05AMGwydion Theatre Company is a relatively new addition to the Chicago storefront scene (they moved here from Los Angeles last year), but their current revival of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:38PMThe night before seeing Edward Hall’s stylish, arresting—but not totally convincing—production of Richard III at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, I finally caught up with Danai Gurira’s …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:17PMBack in college, when I mentioned I was writing a paper on Antigone as presented in both the Sophoclean original and in Jean Anouilh’s 1944 French Resistance–era update, a dorm friend ro…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:29PMAnna Ouyang Moench is having a moment on Chicago stages right now; her play In Quietness, about women at an evangelical Homemaking House, is playing at A Red Orchid Theatre. Now Gift Theatre…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:28PMDav Pilkey’s popular series of kids’ books about a crime-fighting superhero mutant dog form the basis for this touring TheaterWorks USA musical production, which has settled in at the St…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:27PMThe 6th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival swept through Chicago as vigorously as the cold front that accompanied much of it, and puppets dominated venues all around Chicago for t…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:34PMThe deepfake AI-generated images of Taylor Swift swirling around the Internet inevitably came to mind on opening night of Goodman’s Highway Patrol—if only to make me think that, all thin…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:46AMWhat 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 11:43AMSeventeen 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 05:14PMI’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 09:39AMGregory 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 10:03AMDon’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 11:26AMWhether 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 12:18PMIf 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 10:20AMThere’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 10:26AM