Wednesday, September 11, 2024
Here’s the thing about icons: they’re not known for their flexibility. Take Pablo Picasso’s towering, untitled 1967 Core-Ten steel sculpture outside Daley Plaza. It’s been featured o…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:12PMWednesday, August 7, 2024
One of the sinister knock-on effects of religious institutions rejecting queer people is how it encourages so many of them to negate inner faith altogether—to throw out the spiritual baby …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:43PMWednesday, June 26, 2024
In a 1967 letter to his editor Annis Duff, author Don Freeman made an assertion that feels like it makes sense, even if it technically makes no sense: “Buttons and bears do go together, so…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:37PMThe characters at the center of Samuel D. Hunter’s plays aren’t rude, per se. They’re more what you might call post-courteous—people whose battles against the clock, their inadequaci…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:48AMWednesday, June 12, 2024
During a decade for Chicago theater that has largely felt like an endless in memoriam reel for retiring or shuttered companies, there’s something reassuring about Factory Theater—a compa…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:58PMWednesday, May 1, 2024
Could you call Chris Dritsas’s and Zach Hacker’s musical comedy a parody? They probably wouldn’t fight you on it, but I might—the gags, send-ups, and compositions here (music by John…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:49PMWednesday, April 17, 2024
Forgetting a hookup’s name? Bad. Forgetting your spouse’s name? So bad it requires Old Testament intervention. Hetchman (Scott Danielson) is on a mission to find his lost partner (Da…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:43AMWednesday, February 21, 2024
Despite my years of research in the fields of using cannabis and watching funny things, I have to confess: I have no idea what qualifies as “stoner comedy.” Is it when the characters are…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:33AMFriday, February 16, 2024
Billionaires take up so much oxygen in today’s political and cultural dialogue that it’s easy to forget how few of them there really are. Over $12 trillion of the world’s total spendin…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 08:53AMWednesday, February 7, 2024
The term storefront gets tossed around as a catchall for modestly budgeted performance spaces. But Chicago stage artists and viewers are likely familiar with an even more shoestring venue ca…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:49PMWednesday, October 4, 2023
The roommates in Steve Yockey’s 2013 one-act “Little Red Riding Hood” redux are too young to be spending their weekends hunkered down like grannies in a cabin, but that’s exactly wha…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:51AMWednesday, September 6, 2023
The title of writer/director Mark Pracht’s second installment to his Four-Color Trilogy, a series about the comic books publishing industry, could easily be mistaken for one of the real-wo…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:37PMThursday, August 31, 2023
“If the Internet taught me anything,” says Logan, a shaggy-haired, newly-out incoming college freshman played by Ben Ballmer, “it was that gay people are awesome.” He’s blessed in …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:17AMFriday, June 23, 2023
Remote work, for those fortunate enough to enjoy it, has killed off many aspects of professional life that were long overdue to be put down: Agonizing commutes. $18 cafeteria salads. Ramblin…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:37AMWednesday, May 17, 2023
Last year, speaking to a BBC reporter about the Singapore government repealing Section 377A, a colonialist-era holdover that criminalized gay sex, local LGBTQ+ historian Isaac Tng paraphrase…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:45PMFriday, April 21, 2023
The phrase “white spaces” evokes quite a few strong images. Kohl’s. The LDS Church. Late-night talk show desks. Bar Harbor, Maine. And, for too many comics, improv clubs. It’s no sec…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:54AMThursday, March 30, 2023
Originally developed by the Philadelphia-based Pig Iron Theatre Company in 2015, this queer adventure drag alt-comedy feels both like a natural fit for Hell in a Handbag Productions and a re…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:23PMWednesday, February 22, 2023
Ask any middle-aged person about their first romantic breakup, and there’s a good chance they’ll laugh. Ask about their first friend breakup, on the other hand: no laughter. Director Eri…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:30PMFriday, January 27, 2023
Like many of the American musical theater greats, Cabaret is one of those shows that can suffer from style-creep, wherein an unwritten but generally agreed-upon aesthetic tradition grows int…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMWednesday, December 7, 2022
There are two Christmas pantomimes based upon 19th-century fables currently playing on Chicago stages, and unless Mary Zimmerman has been up to some dramatic retooling, it’s safe to assume…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:19PMWednesday, November 30, 2022
Frank Capra’s 1946 Christmas classic film is packed frame-by-frame with small moments of storytelling perfection, and as I get older, there’s one that just guts me like a fish. Exhausted…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:34PMThursday, November 3, 2022
The surrealist, sometimes anarchic style of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s prose invites a lot of directorial interpretation and creativity from the theater artists who’ve been dra…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:58PMFriday, September 16, 2022
Comedian, author, and volunteer ambulance driver Chris Gethard may be a fully Boylan-blooded New Jerseyan, but he’s not shy about the extent to which his improv and stand-up DNA has […]
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SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:40AMWednesday, August 24, 2022
Organizational consulting is like a cube of lard: it looks like a sweet bite of white chocolate but sits heavy in the stomach. Stupid people are to be avoided, like […]
The post Sci-fi hea…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:12PMWednesday, August 10, 2022
In the 20 years since Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis’s gently irreverent and thoroughly catchy musical premiered, it’s become such a beloved staple among professional and amateur companies…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:54PMThursday, June 30, 2022
There are a lot of substantive and weighty criticisms to be levied at the RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise and its global juggernaut influence over drag culture. Then there are petty ones, lik…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:18AMTuesday, May 24, 2022
A good play, suggests Tony Kushner in his 1995 anthology Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue, “should be overstuffed.” Memorably comparing well-constructed theater to lasa…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:46PMTuesday, March 17, 2020
A solo show about the man behind Bull Moose stands alone.
By the time I had the opportunity to see Derek Evans’s 75-minute solo biographical lecture enactment,…
SOURCE: www.chicagoreader.com at 05:45PMTuesday, March 3, 2020
Elaine Carlson delivers a biting title performance for Promethean Theatre.
To get an idea of just how convoluted the legal and moral attitudes toward sex work ar…
SOURCE: www.chicagoreader.com at 07:05PMTuesday, February 25, 2020
A woman chemist helps wives dispatch their plutocratic husbands.
In 2013, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Deborah Blum wrote an article for Wired magazine titl…
SOURCE: www.chicagoreader.com at 07:30PMWednesday, January 29, 2020
MPAACT's campus drama pushes some hot buttons, but casts an ugly pall.
Playwright and MPAACT founding member Shepsu Aakhu was inspired to write this campus sexua…
SOURCE: www.chicagoreader.com at 05:15PM 
