Friday, April 25, 2025
When the inevitable happens, we are right there with each and all of them—those who make it and those who don’t—powerfully caught up in the surreal reality that the vessel between you …
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, March 21, 2025
Without question, “La bohème” has been the opera most performed at Lyric Opera over my decades as a critic.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, March 10, 2025
The fifty-seven-year-old Opus One of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice is getting an amazing Technicolor facelift.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, February 24, 2025
Some might be expecting to see given that Broadway in Chicago’s signature genre is musicals, this is a non-singing “Clue: On Stage.” For this new, believe it or not, national tour inca…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, February 17, 2025
The sixtieth anniversary of the death of playwright Lorraine Hansberry is the catalyst for the first-ever Court Theatre production of “A Raisin in the Sun.” The Chicago-born Hansberry wa…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThursday, January 23, 2025
One of the most satisfying aspects of the overall approach taken here is not just that everyone in the cast can sing effectively, but that they are aesthetically on the same page walking the…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThursday, November 21, 2024
“Blue” is a powerful and moving new work deeply rooted in the continuum of operatic tradition.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, November 18, 2024
Unlike typical jukebox musicals, “A Beautiful Noise” is not an extroverted epic extravaganza, but an introverted intimate introspection.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, October 4, 2024
It is a rare and wonderful occurrence when you can hear two operas where two different composers have set the same libretto side-by-side.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMTuesday, October 1, 2024
What distinguishes “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” is not the story that is told but the way in which the story is told.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThursday, September 19, 2024
Friday, September 13, 2024
Freud has been the general director of Lyric Opera since 2011—the titles of president and CEO were added in 2015—the first person recruited from outside of the company to run it in its s…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, August 30, 2024
Lyric Opera’s free pre-season preview concert in Millennium Park has gone from a September extravaganza to a more modest August concert called “Sunday in the Park with Lyric.”
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMTuesday, August 20, 2024
“Back to the Future: The Musical” attempts to flesh out the film’s representation of both the 1950s and the 1980s with a post-millennial overlay.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMWednesday, July 17, 2024
Every voice is sterling in terms of technique and diction but especially in terms of dynamics, expression and blend, revealing just how gifted Waller is as a songwriter.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMThursday, June 20, 2024
Composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown is sitting in a room with a piano at the Goodman Theatre. A rehearsal of his much-anticipated musical of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil�…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMWednesday, May 22, 2024
It is obvious that the elements and talent are in place and that the potential is there for this to become a really killer show. Maybe by Broadway.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, May 17, 2024
City Lit is advertising its season-closing production of “Murder in the Cathedral”—which is director and outgoing producer and artistic director Terry McCabe’s last—as “the first…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, May 3, 2024
Chris Herzberger has been working on the launch of the pre-Broadway world premiere of the musical of “Death Becomes Her,” currently underway in previews at the Cadillac Palace with a May…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMWednesday, May 1, 2024
It has been a fourteen-year dream of director Stearns for “Jersey Boys”—such a popular show in its original Broadway in Chicago run that a separate multi-year Chicago company was creat…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, April 22, 2024
The best element of this production is the dancing, wonderfully choreographed by Dan Knechtges.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, April 19, 2024
The juxtaposition of brutal historical awareness with comedy makes “The Thanksgiving Play," which will be presented at Steppenwolf Theatre, such a unique experience.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMWednesday, March 13, 2024
It was an inspiring bit of casting to reunite soprano Michelle Bradley and tenor Russell Thomas as the doomed lovers Aida and Radamès.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMTuesday, March 5, 2024
Back in the early years of the non-Equity storefront theater company known as Theo—which began as Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre—it was pretty much founder and artistic director Fred Anzevi…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, March 4, 2024
The best thing about “Mrs. Doubtfire: A New Musical Comedy” is that it restores the heartfelt message of the original book—that divorce doesn’t have to be an end for a family, but ca…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, February 23, 2024
When new Goodman artistic director Susan V. Booth asked Mary Zimmerman what she might want to do this season, a small-scale rethinking of “The Magic Flute” was the response. That means …
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, February 19, 2024
The action takes place in Duluth, Minnesota, but playwright Conor McPherson’s Irish melancholy weighs heavily throughout, with nods to O’Neill and Wilder.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, January 22, 2024
Eclectic is an overused word. But in the case of trumpeter, pianist and composer Terence Blanchard who rose to the top of the jazz world, has composed scores for more than fifty films and mo…
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMFriday, December 22, 2023
In its initial Broadway run in 2006, the show broke box-office records. It has been a seasonal phenomenon ever since.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMTuesday, December 5, 2023
The Broadway-bound fiftieth-anniversary revival of “The Wiz” gets to the heart of what made “The Wiz” so special: song and dance.
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AMMonday, December 4, 2023
The setting of “Christmas with C. S. Lewis” is a group of American historians visiting England at Christmastime. “Because Lewis was a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature, …
SOURCE: www.newcitystage.com at 08:00AM 
