Thursday, March 13, 2014
There was a brief tease earlier this week that this winter of 2014, the harshest one I’ve experienced in my 16 years of living in Chicago, would finally leave us alone. As I write this blo…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 02:54PMMonday, February 24, 2014
Of course, I would never miss the chance of seeing a play called Cock. So when I was in New York on business in the summer of 2012, I snuck away after interminable day-long discussions of …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 12:15PMMonday, February 17, 2014
For us true-blue, hardcore musical theater aficionados, there is no show greater and more iconic than Gypsy, the sharply-drawn showbiz backstage musical based on the memoirs of stripper Gyps…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 10:49AMThursday, February 6, 2014
I don’t normally make it a point to return to a show twice (if I did that in a city like Chicago with its buzzing theater scene, I’d never get to see as much theater as I would want to),…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 05:59PMThursday, January 30, 2014
Over the years I’ve had a rollercoaster relationship with the plays of Rebecca Gilman. As an avid fan and advocate of Chicago theater, I’m thrilled that despite her national renown and…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 07:48PMMonday, January 27, 2014
Chicago has been repeatedly plagued by the Polar Vortex, but the city’s winter theater season is undeniably sizzling. I was very disappointed by last fall’s lackluster theatrical offer…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 07:32PMSunday, January 19, 2014
In the monster 1980s pop hit “One Night in Bangkok” (which came from the equally monster Broadway musical flop Chess), Murray Head sings “One night in Bangkok makes the hard man humble…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 08:18PMMonday, December 23, 2013
I slowed down writing on this blog this year. I started a new job, I travelled a lot more for leisure rather than business, and decided, after six years, that I just wanted to write if somet…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 09:59AMFriday, December 20, 2013
After skipping a year, I’m glad to be back with my list of best dining experiences of the year. And of course the definition of “best” for me is different from that of the myriad of …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 05:34PMFriday, November 8, 2013
As a gay man who grew up in the 1980s, there are very few theatrical works, heck, cultural pieces as a whole, that are as important and as resonant to me as Larry Kramer’s 1985 call to arm…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 05:36PMWednesday, October 23, 2013
When I started going to the Chicago film festival in the late 1990s, the child prodigy Mark Zuckerberg was just learning computer programming via Atari software (does anyone even remember th…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 06:00PMMonday, October 21, 2013
If you’ve been reading my blog from the beginning, you know that by the time the second week of the Chicago International Film Festival comes along, I’ve turned into a cantankerous, blea…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 05:49PMWednesday, October 16, 2013
There’s been such a sea change in moviegoing since I first started attending the Chicago International Film Festival in 1999: you can now watch movies on streaming NetFlix anywhere as lo…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 11:29AMFriday, October 11, 2013
It has been quite the busy Chicago fall theater season so far; I saw eight shows over a two week period during the last week of September and the first week of October. Yes, yes, I say tha…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 07:31PMMonday, October 7, 2013
It’s already October (although you wouldn’t know it from the still-green foliage and the humid 80 degree temperature over the weekend). Where did this year go? I like October though …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 10:00PMMonday, September 23, 2013
Admittedly, I was a little skeptical about going to another Bill Cain play. The last one I saw was Victory Gardens’ 2012 fall season opener Equivocation, which I thought needed drastic amo…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 05:04PMFriday, September 20, 2013
You would think that with my day job which entails crisscrossing the country racking up both air mileage and time zone discombobulation, there would be few places in the US that I would not …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 03:45PMFriday, September 13, 2013
Really, it’s already September? The Chicago summer, so mercurial this year on how warm or not-warm it wanted to be, zoomed by like a Japanese bullet train. Between being busier than usual …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 07:44PMTuesday, August 13, 2013
Last year in early February, while my colleague and I were sitting in our Pittsburgh hotel lobby preparing for a client presentation, an older white gentleman came up to us and stared direct…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 08:29PMFriday, July 19, 2013
As I said in my previous post, Chicago’s summer stages are as hot and sizzling as the 104 degree heat index we’ve been experiencing this past week. And of course, it’s just about the t…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 04:32PMWednesday, July 3, 2013
July has traditionally been a quiet, laidback month in Chicago theater, with the major Equity houses wrapping up their current seasons with lower-profile offerings and the storefronts alread…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 04:06PMThursday, June 20, 2013
Oh, it’s June. And it’s Pride Month. So there are plenty of gay characters jaunting around onstage in Chicago. In some years, this has mildly annoyed me – as an out and proud gay man, …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 08:58PMFriday, June 14, 2013
I’ve had a love affair with the great Latin American cities since those first visits a couple of years ago to Mexico City, and then Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Being Filipino, the shar…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 12:35AMMonday, June 3, 2013
One of the things I love so much about Chicago storefront theater is the astounding intimacy that the audience has with the actors. A lot of it has to do with the performing spaces – many …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 08:26PMFriday, May 17, 2013
I thought I would never say this at the risk of shaving points off from my classy broad image, but I boarded a tour bus at Navy Pier on Sunday afternoon. But this was not just any tour bus…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 06:04PMFriday, May 10, 2013
Back in 2010, I caught the Tricycle Theater’s ambitious, staggering, and nearly eight hour production of The Great Game: Afghanistan in Washington DC during its US tour. Comprised of 1…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 05:08PMFriday, May 3, 2013
It has been quite the exciting, eclectic grab bag of theater openings this Chicago spring (or non-spring, after the cruel tease of two days of 80 degree weather this week, it’s now back to…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 06:20PMFriday, April 26, 2013
Two weeks ago, as I entered The Public Theater’s LuEsther Hall for David Byrne’s world-premiere musical Here Lies Love to thumping disco beats, a seductively enveloping haze, and the eer…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 04:24PMFriday, April 19, 2013
Yes, after an almost four month hiatus, I’m back. I decided to take a break from posting for a couple of reasons: after twelve years, I switched jobs and wanted, no needed, the time to a…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 03:47PMWednesday, December 19, 2012
Where did those twelve months go? It just seemed like yesterday when I was washing the champagne and various other substances out of my hair (yep, that was quite the 2011 New Year’s Eve sh…
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 11:23AMTuesday, December 4, 2012
The December holiday theater season in Chicago has usually been a tepid grab bag of plays about Scrooge, George Bailey, Santa Claus, and all forms Rudolph, naughty, nice, and red-hosed. A …
SOURCE: From the Ledge at 04:46PM 
