FORGET STICKS AND STONES: WORDS WILL ALWAYS HURT YOU Who says words can’t kill? In BigMouth, flawlessly intoning English, Walloon, French, and German (with captions), Belgian solo perfo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:52PMTHE RIGHT TO DO WRONG Count this among the finest offerings from a Chicago theater: Shattered Globe Theatre’s kinetic staging of Chris Hannan’s adaptation of Crime and Punishment is flaw…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:00AMTRAPPED IN A DREARY DRAMEDY There’s a tender scene at the start of HOMOS, OR EVERYONE IN AMERICA (a perversely paradoxical title) that wants to convince us that Jordan Seavey’s lads real…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:22PMNO CLOSURE FOR GENOCIDE Family is how history happens. As Arthur Miller wisely showed in All My Sons, The Gift and The Crucible, change radiates outward. Even, or especially, an immense …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:54PMA WAY TO GHOUL OFF THIS SUMMER It’s not easy for a frightfest to work (or play) just as well as a laff-fest, let alone to be both: A delightful exercise in creepy-crawly quirkiness, Night…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:29PMLOVE ON A LINER, OR COLE PORTER’S SHIP OF FOOLS It’s still “de-lovely,” but, steeped in bon-vivant euphoria and Roaring 20s’ hedonism, this 1934 musical is so silly it’s hard to …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:55AMHOLDING OUR ATTENTION Playful and powerful, hilarious and anguished, Tommy Murphy’s Holding the Man is a 2006 drama based on an immensely successful 1995 memoir. The author was apprentic…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:27PMDAMAGE CONTROL Sometimes everything old is just — well — old again: The fourth entry in Pride Films and Plays’ five-show PAC Pride Fest, Hurricane Damage is a bittersweet wor…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:57AMCLASSICAL MARTYRS AS NEW JERSEY HOUSEWIVES Imagine Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone and Cassandra — ancient anti-heroines with loathsome mates, a religious martyr, and a disrespected prop…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:09PMWHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR SONG This time it’s up close and down home. Rick Stone the Blues Man departs from the Black Ensemble Theater’s standard tributes to superstars like Patti LaB…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:22PMRIGHT PLAY, WRONG STOP The plays of William Inge, featured this season by Eclipse Theatre Company, offer a bedrock realism that fuels the down-home decency of his small-town characters. But …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:43PMBLACK AND BLUE After winning a Tony last year for best revival of a musical, Oprah’s once and future movie-turned-musical has finally hit her home town, part of a national tour. As alive a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:36PMSIN AS CRAZINESS You don’t see morality plays like Everyman anymore — and not just because it’s not the 15th century. We shy away from such absolutes as Death and even Good Deed…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:58PMBEFORE THE CROWN PRINCE BECAME THE KING Legends require reclamation: Created by Floyd Mutrux, the huge hit Million Dollar Quartet reprised a once-in-four-lifetimes recording session in a M…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:18PMSERIAL SEX AS A CONTINUUM OF DESIRE There’s not much to learn from Fucking Men — an unabashed sexual merry-go-round and a late-night offering from Pride Films & Plays —…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:00PMIT’S LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT WITH THE BARD’S FIRST LOOK AT LOVE Happily, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare’s first play, is not like the first pancake — a test case to be thr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:47PMREMAKE YOUR LIFE—AT YOUR PERIL With some plays what doesn’t happen is the whole megillah. Jen Silverman’s two-character one-act The Roommate, now simmering in a Chicago premiere by St…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:55PMOPEN SESAME SEASON Peter Pan never grew up. Likewise Alice in Wonderland, the Hardy Boys, Freddy the Pig, Nancy Drew, Huck Finn, or Donald Trump. It’s a pity people do: Why must grown-ups …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:26PMSEA WORLD AS A CITADEL OF CAUCASIAN COMMAND Orcas, it seems, can suffer for our sins. In Tilikum — a world-premiere from Sideshow Theatre Company — the struggle of indigenous peo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:08PMA DIFFERENT LOOK AT THE VIEW Now a nearly forgotten but seminal gay tragedy, it happened after Stonewall but before AIDS and Orlando’s Pulse terrorist attack – a 1973 arson atrocity in T…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:55PMBEAUTY AND BLOOD Guards at the Taj is, in the very best sense, unavoidable. To appreciate this grim and great drama by Rajiv Joseph (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, The Lake Effect), it h…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:25PMOUR LOST DREAM CITY It’s possible to think that it never happened, that we imagined its splendor to exalt our past. It was the most transient of treasures, with only the Museum of Science …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:16PMTHE UNCIVIL WAR Goodman Theatre’s current epic won’t be confused with other dramas. It explores the Civil War as seen and suffered by the slaves. Not the usual perspective but it deliver…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:44PMA LEAGUES OF THEIR OWN You can’t keep a bad man down. Especially when he’s Captain Nemo, the scourge of the sea. Returning to the watery roots of Moby Dick, Lookingglass Theatre Company …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:00PMSTRINDBERG SET IN SOUTH AFRICA Yes, it’s Mies Julie, not Miss Julie, and it’s by Yaël Farber, not August Strindberg. And that makes a monstrous difference. Repurposed to depict a differ…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:55PMA POWER COUPLE WORTH RECLAIMING Lest we forget two women who long ago shaped their future into our present, witness Bull in a China Shop. Written by Mount Holyoke alumna Bryna Turner, this c…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:32PMEINE KLEINE SWEDISH SOLSTICE Some 40 years after its birth, A Little Night Music feels like it’s always been here. Wisely and warmly, composer Stephen Sondheim and writer Hugh Wheeler, bor…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:01AMSTOOD UP YET AGAIN… “Birth was the death of him”: Terse to the point of cruelty, Samuel Beckett here devours the human experience in six words. Waiting for Godot, his minimalist maste…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:32PMOUT OF THE MOUTHS OF CENTENARIANS “Life is short. It’s up to you to make it sweet.” No cliché in Emily Mann’s moving 1993 play, this is one of many hard-earned pearls of wisdom in h…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:45PMPATTI QUAKES, PATTI SHAKES. PATTI GETS HER CAKES You can only listen and love: The former Patricia Louise Holt-Edwards oozes energy on stage. She kicks off her shoes in sheer delight. Loving…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:19PMPROMETHEUS SETS THE STAGE AFIRE Imagination sometimes seems abstract. It’s a term you can’t always savor — until you see it blossom before you. It’s in full force in City Lit’…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:56PM
