Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Shannon Matesky and Harry Groener in Steppenwolf’s “The March“ When adapting a 400 page epic novel for the stage, you usually have about three options: 1) Make the play 6 h…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 02:47PMFriday, April 13, 2012
Hit the Wall, a powerful new play about the Stonewall Uprising produced by the relatively newbie theater company The Inconvenience, is one of those shows everyone in Chicago is talking about…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 05:37PMThursday, April 12, 2012
Erin Creighton and John Sessler in Street Tempo Theatre’s “Little Shop of Horrors.” Photo credit: Linda Gartz You think you’ve seen Little Shop, right? You’ve p…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 10:33AMTuesday, April 10, 2012
Sometimes I take living in the city for granted. To avoid the rat race, I typically take the Pedway to get from the train to my downtown office and back again, which means that I may go for …
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 12:11PMFriday, April 6, 2012
Ah, Chicago theatre. The place where people willingly toil away for countless hours in windowless black boxes, bearing their souls for little to no pay. As a frequent voyeur of such perversi…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 12:29PMThursday, April 5, 2012
This audition video for Goodman Theatre’s Crowns is quite charming. These two young actresses look like they’re completely gobsmacked to be working on this show, and their energy…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 07:23PMTuesday, April 3, 2012
Fela!, which started as an Off-Broadway show in 2008 and has grown into an international sensation (and is now playing at Chicago’s Oriental Theatre through April 15), follows the life of …
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 06:19PMWednesday, March 28, 2012
There are many fancy Hollywood actor types who got their start toiling away in Chicago storefront theatre. I won’t name them here (we get to that later), but trust me: it’s true.…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 02:41PMTuesday, March 27, 2012
In Mark St. Germain’s play, Freud’s Last Session, which is receiving its Chicago premiere with the original New York cast, director and producers, he imagines what would happen i…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 03:58PMSunday, March 25, 2012
Sometimes there are those characters in a movie or play that you wish could be extracted from the clutter around them and given their own showcase piece. Such is the case with the characters…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 10:05AMThursday, March 22, 2012
While there were many moments in Goodman Theatre’s deeply disturbing and immensely fascinating production of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real that flew over my head, one thing cer…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 05:47PMTuesday, March 20, 2012
They say role play is a great form of therapy. But in French playwright Jean Genet’s 1947 play, The Maids, this concept is taken to a whole new sadomasochistic level. Two maids, who al…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 01:22PMMonday, March 19, 2012
Not that anybody has asked for my opinion on the matter, but here ya go… I’m not going to rehash all the back story on this, because by now you’ve probably heard it all (in…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 06:35PMFriday, March 16, 2012
What do you get when you take five singer/comedians, one pianist, a top hat filled with fictional song titles and shove them on a stage? You get BEST MUSICAL! A Completely Improvised Musical…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 07:32AMThursday, March 15, 2012
Do you have your tickets to Theo Ubique’s The Light in the Piazza? No? Well, you should, because it’s remarkable. In fact, Chris Jones gave it an out-and-out rave and said that K…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 11:31AMWednesday, March 14, 2012
My latest HuffPo review is now live, people. Check it. — After 16 years renting spaces around town, Rivendell Theatre Ensemble — Chicago’s only producing organization dedic…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 06:17PMSunday, March 11, 2012
There are some people out there (you know who you are) who refer to me as “Ravinia Bob.” Over time, this nickname was been truncated to “RivB,” and eventually “…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 06:20PMWednesday, March 7, 2012
Can you believe it? Phantom is a quarter of a century old. It’s the longest running show on Broadway, has generated roughly 4,678,980 katillion dollars, and your beer guzzling brother-…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 09:01AMTuesday, March 6, 2012
“Laramie is a community, not a ‘project,’” declares a biting editorial published in the Laramie Boomerang on October 12, 2008 — the tenth anniversary of Matthew…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 04:23PMSaturday, March 3, 2012
[image source] Yesterday evening, as my cab pulled up to The Den Theatre for Nothing Special Productions’ My Kinda Town, this totally true conversation transpired between me and the cr…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 12:07PMOk, let’s just get this out of the way: Brian Blankenship’s play, My Kinda Town (which is receiving its world premiere by Nothing Special Productions), simply needs work. But the…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 10:36AMWednesday, February 29, 2012
The 2011 Honor Awards®, the official alternative Chicago theatre awards show mastermind(ed) by Katy Walsh and Joshua Volkers, took place last night, and what a whoop-de-do blast it was! Gre…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 06:20PMWar is a bloody, ugly thing. It changes people, f*cks with their minds, turns nervous young boys into soulless killing machines. Yet, it can also bring people together in unexpected, life-ch…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 01:19PMMonday, February 27, 2012
The Huffington Post is looking to expand its national theatre coverage, so they asked me if I’d be interested in contributing to their site to talk about the awesome goings on in Chica…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 04:57PM“Fulton Street Sessions is a cabaret-style production in the form of a collection of sketches, musical numbers, and interludes capturing the essence of current national and local news …
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 04:16PMSaturday, February 25, 2012
Photo credit: Dean Leprairie Is it a comedy? A love story? A ghost story? A tragedy? A murder mystery? In the first scene of Dating Walter Dante, playwright Jon Steinhagen actually addresses…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 09:27AMWednesday, February 22, 2012
Jerry O’Boyle, Craig Spidle and Rebecca Finnegan in Porchlight’s ”A Catered Affair.” Photo credit: Brandon Dahlquist In its essence, Harvey Fierstein and John Bucc…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 02:28PMMonday, February 20, 2012
Every so often you encounter the perfect pairing of actor and role. Mary-Arrchie founding member and Artistic Director Richard Cotovsky has found one of those roles. From his shoulder-slumpe…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 08:57AMThursday, February 16, 2012
Elizabeth Morgan as Googie Gomez in Circle Theatre’s “The Ritz” There comes a point in Circle Theatre’s production of Terrence McNally’s The Ritz where you real…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 11:00AMWednesday, February 15, 2012
Let’s pause this Chicago theatre discussion for something much more important and topical. I’m one of those people who goes around saying snobby things like, “I don’t…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 07:32PMMonday, February 13, 2012
Written by Jerome Kern (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics), Show Boat broke the mold when it premiered in 1927. Most Broadway shows at the time were frivolous trivialities wit…
SOURCE: Chicago Theatre Addict at 03:37PM 
