Thursday, May 23, 2019
As always, it takes long enough to get here — and summer in Chicago can be gone before we know it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make time for great theater, which never takes time o…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AMTuesday, May 21, 2019
The men may kick and scream, but it’s the women who lead.
Whether Augie March turns out to be the hero of his own play, or whether that station is held by the …
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 04:30PMMolly Bloom has come unstuck in time. All right, not the real Molly Bloom. She’s fictional, after all. But in Steven Dietz’s 2015 time-travel romance, “Bloomsday,” James Joyce’s he…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:30PMThursday, May 16, 2019
The nostalgic tones don't resonate quite as fully with the modern music scene as they could.
In his 2004 New York Times essay "The Rap Against Rockism," Kelefa S…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 07:00AMWednesday, May 15, 2019
Obsessive-compulsive disorder and comedy aren’t strangers to each other, as fans of Tony Shalhoub’s “Monk” can attest. But comedian and solo performer Adam Strauss’s detective work…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:45PMTuesday, May 7, 2019
In the early years of this century, Tom Dudzick’s meat-and-potatoes (or should that be “kielbasa-and-cabbage?”) nostalgic comedy “Over the Tavern,” about a Polish-Catholic working-…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AMWednesday, May 1, 2019
“Unless your being innocent is as interesting to them as being guilty, you will not be believed.”
Egyptian American playwright Yussef El Guindi is mostly kno…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 07:00AMFriday, April 19, 2019
Small towns afraid of dancing and alternative lifestyles (such as … enjoying dancing, I guess) have provided a fair amount of fodder for musicals. “The Prom,” the sweet-and-snarky musi…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:00AMTuesday, April 16, 2019
Kate Fodor set the stakes high in her first play, 2003’s “Hannah and Martin,” which debuted at TimeLine Theatre (and enjoyed a reprise with them the following season). By putting the t…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:30PMWednesday, April 10, 2019
The cast elevates the production beyond karaoke night.
Fans of both the 1999 film riff on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses and of…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 07:00AMMonday, April 8, 2019
Many years ago, I had the privilege of watching theater artist and activist Rhodessa Jones work with incarcerated women through her Medea Project in San Francisco. The women’s stories, whi…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:25PMThursday, April 4, 2019
The horror! The horror!
Wolfram Lotz's fractured take on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (and its famous cinematic version, Apocalypse Now) started out as a ra…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 07:00AMMonday, April 1, 2019
A white — and putatively liberal — politician with a rising profile finds his career threatened when a story about a racist act he committed in college comes to light. No, it’s not the…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 11:15AMFriday, March 29, 2019
A stellar cast keeps the parody musical cruising.
The dramatic footage from the Norwegian cruise ship stranded in rough waters this past weekend was cool, but yo…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 07:00AMThursday, March 28, 2019
Kerry Reid’s top picks for spring theater
Three new shows this season celebrate defiance and derring-do, from the poetic grit of Saul Bellow to the feminist s…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 07:00AMMonday, March 25, 2019
In Season 3 of NBC’s afterlife comedy, “The Good Place,” the quartet of humans who’ve dubbed themselves “The Soul Squad” find out (spoiler alert!) that getting into heaven has be…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:30PMWednesday, March 20, 2019
But the performances in this touring production are fresh and assured.
This 2016 musical based on Chazz Palminteri's 1989 solo show (which itself became a Robert…
Linked From www.chicagoreader.com at 07:00AMMonday, March 18, 2019
The terrorist murders at the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand cast an understandable pall Friday night at the opening of Silk Road Rising’s latest offering. But Karim Nagi’s spirited…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:15PMMonday, March 11, 2019
Longtime patrons of Black Ensemble Theater are probably familiar with the post-curtain speech sometimes heard there. “Going to Black Ensemble is just like going to church — because there…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:10PMTuesday, March 5, 2019
The first genocide of the 20th century — the German extermination of the Herero people in what is now Namibia — remains largely ignored and untaught, at least in America. Playwright Jack…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:00PMMonday, February 25, 2019
Chaos is dull. That which goes right is poetry,” declares Gabriel Syme, the protagonist in G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 metaphysical/satirical novel, “The Man Who Was Thursday.” But in Bil…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:30PMWednesday, February 13, 2019
As sleet and snow slashed the air outside on Tuesday night, a theatrical fire blazed onstage at the Den Theatre. In “The Total Bent,” the polymath known as Stew, perhaps best known for h…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:30PMTuesday, February 12, 2019
Midway through Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive,” a man gives fishing lessons to an unseen child. He describes the pompano as “a very shy, mercurial fish,” and advises that ca…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:00PMFriday, February 8, 2019
The grungy motel in the middle of nowhere is as much a trope for American psychological thrillers as the gloomy country manse in English murder mysteries. From “Psycho” to “Bug,” it…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00PMMonday, January 28, 2019
Joseph Zettelmaier has become something of a playwright in residence for suburban First Folio. In addition to a trilogy of plays that skillfully reimagined classic horror stories about Frank…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:40PMThursday, January 24, 2019
The cure for the wintertime blues is apparently “Million Dollar Quartet.” Two theaters in the Chicago area — Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire and Theatre at the Center in Munster, Ind.…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:30PMTuesday, January 22, 2019
Long before “Scream” sent up the teen slasher genre, there was the “Evil Dead” trilogy. Director Sam Raimi’s low-budget homage/spoof series blended H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos about …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:50PMMonday, January 7, 2019
On the heels of a wave of diverse younger women joining the ranks of the 116th Congress, Pegasus Theatre Chicago’s 32nd Young Playwrights Festival feels right at home with the zeitgeist. T…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:00PMWednesday, December 19, 2018
Issues of identity and immigration, borders and belonging, took on harsh and frightening dimensions in the headlines this year. So in looking over the shows that made the biggest impression …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMTuesday, December 18, 2018
I’ve seen more than 30 shows at Trap Door Theatre over the past 16 years. Yet their current offering, Tadeusz Rozewicz’s “The Old Woman Broods,” may be the Trap Dooriest of them all …
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AMTuesday, December 4, 2018
The opening moments of Strawdog Theatre’s “The Revolutionists” feel like they might be perfectly at home at Trap Door. Four women, garbed in deconstructed variants of 18th century garb…
Linked From Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:00PM 
