Tuesday, December 10, 2013
There’s no sleeping in heavenly peace over at Studio BE where the New Millennium Theatre Company’s Christmas zombie comedy “Silent Night of the Living Dead” is attempting to offer up…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00AMMonday, December 9, 2013
RECOMMENDED Sometimes the title of a show can give you some clear direction as to its content (“Death of a Salesman,” “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” “Conversations on a Homecoming”…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00AMSunday, December 8, 2013
RECOMMENDED The devil sure knows his way around Chicago. Besides the usual mixture of gang violence and Rham-style politics, Satan has been a feature of many recent stage productions includi…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 03:00PMFriday, December 6, 2013
RECOMMENDED Here’s a recipe for making your holiday season jolly and gay (listen, I knew there would have to be a gay pun in here somewhere so I figured I’d get it out of the way right a…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 05:00PMWednesday, December 4, 2013
RECOMMENDED Playing at the Black Ensemble Theater in Uptown, “Once Upon A People” is the perfect antidote to the same old same old that can plague the holiday season. No offense to the t…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 03:00PMTuesday, December 3, 2013
RECOMMENDED “I am not David Sedaris,” Mitchell Fain notifies his audience at the start of “The Santaland Diaries,” the stage adaptation of the famed author’s popular holiday essay.…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00AMMonday, December 2, 2013
Christmas merriment is in full swing at the home of young Clara and her family in the fantastically staged opening scene of The House Theatre’s musical retelling of “The Nutcracker.” T…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00PMBy Mark Eleveld Chicago theater during the Christmas season is plentiful. Add to this growing list an “out-of-the-box, not your typical fare, wild, crazy, gay fantasia,” as director Scot…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMSunday, December 1, 2013
RECOMMENDED This family-friendly 2010 Broadway adaptation of the 2003 film “Elf” is basically a high-octane song-and-dance version of the story of Buddy the Elf that has plenty to keep a…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:00PMMonday, November 25, 2013
RECOMMENDED Since Charles Dickens’ novella about the overnight transformation of the crotchety Ebeneezer Scrooge was first published in 1843 (right around Christmastime, natch) it has been…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 06:00PMRECOMMENDED With Illinois signing gay marriage into law this month, the crumbling gay community at the center of Larry Kramer’s 1985 play “The Normal Heart” is almost unrecognizable to…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 04:00PMFor anyone who’s ever pined for a movie star from a past era or maybe got a little too turned on by famous figures in history class, “The Dead Prince—A New Muzical” just might be the…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 03:00PMRECOMMENDED The Verdi bicentennial celebration continues at Lyric Opera with a new production of “La traviata,” Verdi’s most popular middle-period work. As was the case with the new �…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 12:00PMRECOMMENDED Despite the fact that it’s been a Chicago holiday tradition for more than a decade (first produced in 2002) and its source material is a 1946 film, every moment of American Blu…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:30AMRECOMMENDED “You know how you go to most Christmas shows and you’re sitting there and they don’t catch you on fire?” one of the characters in “Burning Bluebeard” rhetorically ask…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:00AMSaturday, November 23, 2013
RECOMMENDED Cross-fertilize Julie Taymor with Rankin and Bass and the result is very much what you get in this live-action version of the famous red-nosed reindeer that actually began life i…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 03:00PMFriday, November 22, 2013
RECOMMENDED Religion, sex, gender roles, relationships, violence, murder, suffering, xenophobia, shame, war, self-loathing, capitalism; you know, all the best aspects of humanity. It’s all…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:00PMThursday, November 21, 2013
RECOMMENDED Marc Kelly Smith is one of the most natural, purely comfortable actors on the stage. It’s a joy to see, and it comes across immediately, this intense ease that allows him to di…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 06:30PMWednesday, November 20, 2013
RECOMMENDED During last Sunday’s unseasonable tornado alert, The Hypocrites inaugurated their holiday season with a fittingly dramatic opening: the remount of their 2012 hit production…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:00PMTuesday, November 19, 2013
By Mark Eleveld Chicago is notorious for big fires, big shows and lamentation at such horrific circumstances, all of which can be found in Jay Torrence’s “Burning Bluebeard,” which ret…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMMonday, November 18, 2013
RECOMMENDED Quite simply, this is one of the great one-man shows. The story is the greatest, oldest ever told—literally, the start of Western civilization is in “An Iliad.” The Chicago…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00PMBy Zach Freeman As any denizen of the theater who’s been in this town for any amount of time knows, Chicago DOES theater. With more than 250 active theater companies and a constantly growi…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMSaturday, November 16, 2013
RECOMMENDED Kudos to Lyric Opera for celebrating the Wagner bicentennial by bringing us Wagner’s last, most glorious and perhaps most controversial work, “Parsifal,” in an all-new prod…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 08:35AMFriday, November 15, 2013
By Zach Freeman Written by Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project, “The Laramie Project” is based on a series of interviews surrounding the brutal murder of Matthew S…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMWednesday, November 13, 2013
By Zach Freeman Noah Ginex loves puppets. To paraphrase the great poet Fifty Cent, he loves them like a fat kid loves cake. So it makes sense that for almost twenty years now, Ginex has been…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMFriday, November 8, 2013
“Hello, Dolly!” is a show that more often than not, does not work. To be sure, that title song that Louis Armstrong made a huge hit before the cast album even came out is wonderful. Conc…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 06:00PMRECOMMENDED Trying to understand the Holocaust is like staring into the sun, and to dramatize it is to minimize it. Playwright Ron Hirsen’s “Elegy” – now running in a taut, eloquent …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 09:00AMThursday, November 7, 2013
RECOMMENDED Here’s the basic plot: not long after word of their breakup hits the interwebs, ex-mall cop (and current lonely loser) Bill (Rob Grabowski) kidnaps celebrity (ex)couple Kate Th…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 09:00AMMonday, November 4, 2013
RECOMMENDED What is it about Chicago and Oz? Is it because L. Frank Baum wrote “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” while he was living in Chicago? The Midwest ethos of the characters? In any ca…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 04:00PMWednesday, October 30, 2013
By Robert Eric Shoemaker “White Rabbit, Red Rabbit” is a solo piece with no rehearsals, no set and almost no readily available information about it. For its short run of performances at …
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 07:00AMTuesday, October 29, 2013
RECOMMENDED Kudos to newborn Linchpin Theatre for making its debut with Shakespeare’s “King John,” a play that is about as popular these days as its protagonist. The Victorians loved t…
SOURCE: Newcity Stage at 01:30PM 
