Wednesday, May 22, 2024
Rarely has a mediocre musical received as sparkling a revival as Blank Theatre Company’s current rendition of On the Twentieth Century, the Adolph Green-Betty Comden-Cy Coleman adaptation …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:59PMWednesday, April 10, 2024
Tom Stoppard’s debut 1966 play could be called Waiting for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: it matches Samuel Beckett’s meditation on the meaninglessness of existence with Shakespeare’s p…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:48PMThursday, March 21, 2024
In this wonderfully satisfying revue, Theo deploys its reliably exceptional voices to give the audience a sampling both deep and broad of the works of Stephen Sondheim. The program contains …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:31PMThis is actually Two One-Acts On A Single Set, both directed by City Lit Theater artistic director Terry McCabe and with music direction by Shraman Ghosh. The first, Waiting for Tina Meyer b…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:39PMWednesday, March 13, 2024
Artistic director Susan V. Booth waited a good long time after rejoining the Goodman in 2022 to direct a show of her own, but it was totally worth the wait. Her production of Margaret Atwood…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:41AMWednesday, March 6, 2024
The title of David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play does double duty: it refers to mathematical proofs but also to the question of what constitutes sufficient evidence of devotion to…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:42AMWednesday, February 21, 2024
This is a perfect production of Lauren Gunderson’s biographical drama about Henrietta Leavitt and her sister astronomers at Harvard in the early 20th century. Under Beth Wolf’s direction…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:42PMTuesday, February 13, 2024
The world premiere of Loy A. Webb’s Judy’s Life’s Work is everything a playwright could hope for. Director Michelle Renee Bester and her first-rate cast bring out every emotional nuanc…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:43PMWednesday, February 7, 2024
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pre-Hamilton musical In The Heights (book by Quiara Alegría Hudes) is not a work of genius, but it deserves a better production than it’s currently receiving at Mar…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 01:26PMTuesday, December 26, 2023
The whole time I was watching Shrek: The Musical, I hoped I was witnessing a pre-Broadway tryout—something susceptible to fixing. But I should have known better—it is a final product of …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:52PMWednesday, November 15, 2023
The arch dialogue in James Goldman’s 1966 drama The Lion in Winter (turned into a 1968 film starring Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole) about the eventful Christmas of 1183 at the Engl…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:24AMThursday, November 9, 2023
This was the first time in a long time that a Second City performance didn’t seem to be an audition for Saturday Night Live. The company of four women and two men (a refreshing change of b…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:20AMThursday, October 19, 2023
Mia McCullough’s play, now receiving its world premiere at Theater Wit, is about the immovable object (denial) meeting the irresistible force (the past), with a family crushed in between. …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:42AMTuesday, October 10, 2023
Strong acting and a powerful theme can’t quite bring Juan Ramirez Jr.’s world premiere at Subtext Studio Theatre (part of Destinos: 6th Chicago International Latino Theater Festival) to …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 02:28PMThursday, September 21, 2023
Noah Haidle’s play got absolutely savaged in New York, with the critics’ main objection being that the story of a family over time had already been told in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town a…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMThursday, September 14, 2023
When it’s directed wrong, Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge comes off as a dated melodrama about the unthinkability of incest. Fortunately, director Louis Contey at Shattered Globe …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:52AMIt’s incredibly ambitious for a Chicago company to choose A Chorus Line, because although the city has a strong dance community, it’s not one with a tradition of crossing over into theat…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:54AMTuesday, August 22, 2023
It looks so simple: two people occupy a stage, waiting for something and talking about nothing. But Waiting for Godot works because Samuel Beckett was a genius, and because waiting itself w…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 06:12PMTuesday, August 1, 2023
It’s not clear that there’s anything funny about the life story or legacy of John D. Rockefeller, which raises the question of Corn Productions’ attraction to the material and goal in …
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:49PMThursday, June 29, 2023
Hair is such an icon—profanity and naked people on Broadway, oh my!—that it can be hard to remember it’s an actual play with a plot (Gerome Ragni and James Rado wrote the book and lyri…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:32AMThursday, June 8, 2023
In most productions of West Side Story (and I’ve seen half a dozen or more), Tony is the weakest link: the character just isn’t as cool as Riff or as sexy as Bernardo. He’s kind of a d…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:18AMThursday, May 4, 2023
If verisimilitude and timeliness were all it took to create a great play, Ken Green’s world premiere comedy-drama about working in big-box retail would be a home run. Its dialogue captures…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:05AMFriday, April 21, 2023
Donnetta Lavinia Grays’s play is about the limits of love—both in what it can accomplish, even when it feels infinite, and in what it can tolerate before it disappears. Monique (the prot…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:33AMFriday, April 14, 2023
Motherhouse begins with a recently bereaved daughter struggling to write her mother’s eulogy. Her mother’s four sisters arrive to help with the task but instead reenact every unresolve…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 10:34AMThursday, March 23, 2023
Directors have two jobs: to help the audience understand what the play is about and to stage it so the audience can see it. Director Fred Anzevino has failed at both here. The Threepenny Ope…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:53AMThursday, March 2, 2023
One can imagine what inspired directors Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page to rework this 1960s musical about the Continental Congress. There’s the attraction of doing a piece about the nati…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 04:31PMWednesday, February 15, 2023
Like most speculative fiction (and every original Star Trek episode), Ezekiel’s Wheel is a fable: a story whose moral applies to circumstances other than those being described. Determining…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 03:40PMThursday, February 2, 2023
Ann Noble’s play about an Irish family decompensating after the mother’s death had its premiere in Chicago nearly 30 years ago, and it’s showing its age. There are plots and subplots a…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:22AMFriday, January 27, 2023
If you were concerned that Chicago’s storefront theaters lost their mojo during the pandemic, get thee to Terry McCabe’s gripping production of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. It’…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 11:00AMWednesday, January 18, 2023
It would be hard to find a more appealing trio to embody Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical musical tick, tick . . . BOOM! than the ones in BoHo Theatre’s production—and “embody” i…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:36PMWednesday, December 7, 2022
Playwrights Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon wrap up their Pride and Prejudice fan fiction trilogy with Georgiana and Kitty, once more bringing to the center of the action characters perip…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 12:36PM 
