Thursday, November 7, 2019
HE’S BACK ON DUTY It’s now become a holiday classic, Mary Zimmerman’s gorgeous The Steadfast Tin Soldier at Lookingglass Theatre. It was glorious last year. It’s lost no luster since…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:10PMWednesday, November 6, 2019
A SHOW THAT CASTS A SPELL Whether it really works or it’s just self-fulfilling wishful thinking, magic can misfire. Detailing a downhome tragedy set in Memphis during the Depression, Hoo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:24PMMonday, October 28, 2019
THE HURT OF HATE Dirty laundry demands an airing. Given the disunion afflicting our republic, a play like N (short for the “N word”) has healing to share. A provocative world premiere …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:55PMTuesday, October 22, 2019
HATE CRIMES ROCK A SUBVERSIVE COMEDY This show can never be nice: Along with The Taming of the Shrew, a comedy built squarely on misogyny, The Merchant of Venice, a tragicomedy festering w…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:56PMSunday, October 20, 2019
CABIN FEVER AT ITS CRAZIEST Make of this what you will. All too predictably, every review that Grey House receives will be different. Because this new work by Red Orchid Theatre ensemble m…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:55PMWednesday, October 16, 2019
UP CLOSE, SHE’S BIGGER THAN EVEN PEANUT BUTTER From the start it seemed strange that anyone would make a musical out of a movie that embodies its medium so completely. Yes, the film All A…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:06PMFriday, October 11, 2019
A FAMILY IN KEY SIGNATURES As she showed in Five Mile Lake, Rachel Bonds works with a small brush. She lays low before her subject in order to convey tender, unassuming connections between…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:25PMMonday, October 7, 2019
THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME Terry McCabe, artistic director of City Lit Theater, knows Sherlock Holmes and his shadow sleuth Dr. Watson almost as well as author Sir Arthur …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:45PMSaturday, October 5, 2019
WELL, LERNER & LOEWE ME DOWN Seldom has a dream team had a shorter span: It was all over in only 13 years. But between 1947 and 1960 Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe ran a glorious gam…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:18PMTuesday, September 24, 2019
TO BE OR NOT TO BE SARAH BERNHARDT Well, with “Bernhardt” and “Hamlet” sharing the marquee, Goodman Theatre’s season-opener must be larger than life if not literature. Sprawling an…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:06PMMonday, September 23, 2019
A MUSICAL CIRCLE JERK You could call it a daisy chain of horizontal encounters, this chronicle of sexual partisans whose sleeping around creates a sort of chain letter of lust. A ton of tale…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:19PMSaturday, September 21, 2019
MY FAIR MONARCH We love levelling. Mark Twain’s prince and the pauper, Queen Victoria and her Scottish and Indian boyfriends, Queen Anne and her favorites, a British schoolteacher and the …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:59PMThursday, September 19, 2019
DANCE OF DIPLOMACY Clandestine and volatile, high-stakes diplomacy can be as taut as any courtroom drama. It’s hard to imagine a story more intrinsically theatrical than the real-life cris…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:18PMMonday, September 16, 2019
HOOP DREAMS IN THE CELESTIAL KINGDOM No question, Lauren Yee is a wonderful new voice in theater. With Cambodian Rock Band she made crucial connections between iconic survivors and unspeaka…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:03PMSaturday, September 14, 2019
CAPSULE CURES Not to be confused with anything else, Tiny Beautiful Things is a theatrical curiosity, fluidly blocked but dramatically static as it unleashes a swirling cascade of question…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:10PMFriday, September 13, 2019
A CONVERGENCE OF HISTORY It was supposedly the “end of an era,” the memorial service for Richard Nixon in the Nixon Library in his birthplace Yorba Linda, California, on April 27, 1994. …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:56PMMonday, September 9, 2019
NOT DEAD YET It’s at least a chuckle a minute. Half the hilarity is verbal sallies, half sight gags. This cheeky, subversive, and unashamedly sidesplitting Spamalot, described in the pres…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:02PMSunday, September 8, 2019
LOVE IN THE FAST LANE “Love will break your heart; sometimes you want it to.” That curious contradiction is the opening shot in MIDSUMMER (A Play with Songs). This theatrical roller coa…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:26PMMonday, September 2, 2019
MAY HOWARDS END NEVER END “Only connect..! Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” Seld…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:25PMSunday, September 1, 2019
THE SON ALSO RISES It’s always fascinating to be present at the creation of a crucial writer. Like James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day�…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:08PMTuesday, August 27, 2019
THE WRONG WARDROBE? Clothes make the man — even if he dresses as a woman. An entire individuality, it seems, can hang in a closet, as transvestites have proven across the centuries. Casa V…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:32PMMonday, August 19, 2019
A SERMON IN FLESH WOW spelled backwards! In almost forty seasons it’s their biggest show, with full orchestra and a cast of over 40, including a seated choir. It sprawls with spectacle bu…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:11PMSaturday, August 17, 2019
ALL QUIET MAKES A BIG NOISE One of the saddest truths about humanity is that we always need to be warned against war, so tempting is its license to kill. All Quiet on the Western Front, Eri…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:43PMTuesday, August 13, 2019
MEMORIES IN MUSIC FORGE A GREATER WHOLE We’re witnesses to an aftermath and its collateral healing, the unsought legacy of a gay guy who died too soon: Newly revised after its 1993 incepti…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:16PMSaturday, August 10, 2019
COLLATERAL HEALING It’s a justified transfer. A very enterprising theater called none too fragile from Akron, Ohio has come to Chicago (and later to New York City) to offer a pretty powerf…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:26AMMonday, July 29, 2019
PUTTING THE FUN IN FUNK Taking us as far from death as is humanly possible, some shows just reward you for being alive. In perhaps their most joyous musical celebration yet, the 43-year-old …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:23PMSunday, July 21, 2019
SEEING RIGHT THROUGH THIS MACABRE MASHUP It’s a roller coaster journey to the dark side of almost everything: Ghost Quartet, now haunting Stage 773 in a Chicago premiere from Black Button…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:46PMSaturday, July 20, 2019
SECOND CHANCES NEED SECOND ACTS Sit — and calm — down and make yourself at show. A captivating work extolling rural redemption, The Spitfire Grill, a 2001 musical of the 1995 film, shows…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:43PMWednesday, July 17, 2019
SIBLING WARFARE Can lightning strike again after 37 years? In 1982 Steppenwolf Theatre Company put itself on the map with a landmark staging of Sam Shepard’s domestic disruption True West…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:12PMSunday, July 14, 2019
THE PLAY ABOUT THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG GOES WRONG The title of this play is brutally honest — and you can’t say you weren’t warned. In the style of Monty Python and Michael Frayn’s …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:17PMTuesday, July 9, 2019
MAN, OH MUSIC MAN If ever a show spelled out summer, it’s Meredith Willson’s 1957 masterpiece The Music Man. Throughout the rollicking story, the title character exudes sunny optimism,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:53PM 
