WHO NEEDS A HEALTHY CORTEX WHEN YOU'VE GOT THIRTY-TWO SHOWSTOPPERS? The urge to create has served as a muse for countless forms of art: literature, opera, film, and theatre are littered with…
The circus is in town! The entrance to the Cambria Hotel on West Randolph Street in Chicago is so nondescript as to be almost invisible. Barely wider than its revolving door, you could walk …
MUFFLE THIS MUFFED; IT'S COMEDY LOST IN THE NOISE The films of Christopher Guest are sui generis. From hundreds of hours of improvisation, his talented troupe of actors create memorable char…
RIDE THIS TRAIN TO THE END OF THE LINE One of Chicago's oldest store-front theaters, City Lit, opens its 45th season with a production of Pulitzer winner, Stephen Adly Gurgis' Jesus Hopped T…
FROM TWEE TO TRÈS MAGNIFIQUE It's fascinating how some stories lend themselves better to one medium than the other. In 2001, the French romantic comedy, Amélie was an unexpected worldwid…
DON'T LET THIS PARADE PASS YOU BY In 1913, in Atlanta, Georgia, the body of Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old factory laborer, was found in the basement of a pencil factory. On the flimsiest …
GAME. SET. NOT QUITE MATCH. Tennis great and feminist icon Billie Jean King gets the biography treatment in Billie Jean by Lauren Gunderson. Opening the new season of Chicago Shakespeare, th…
A FITFULLY AMUSING THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM IN SKOKIE A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a glorious farce, a 20th-century construction based on the characters an…
THE BUSINESS OF NOSTALGIA: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST ALL DRESSED UP WITH NOWHERE TO GO Last Thursday night, a rainy July 10th, ensconced in the stunningly beautiful Cadillac Palace Theatre, I fin…
SEND IN THE CLOWNS Farce is not a style of performance one sees too often these days and that's probably because it is extraordinarily difficult to pull off, requiring complete commitment fr…
COLOR ME DISAPPOINTED I came to see the Goodman Theatre's current production of The Color Purple with a complicated history. I devoured Alice Walker's novel three times as a callow teenager …
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE What is theatre? This was the question that popped into my head as I took my seat in the tiny TUTA Theatre space in Chicago's Ravenswood Manor neighborhood, ready to t…
SICKENINGLY FUNNY Noah Diaz's You Will Get Sick, which opened last night at Steppenwolf, is an odd bird of a play. It begins with an irresistible premise: a middle-aged woman, Callan, respon…
STORYTELLING THAT LAUNCHES A THOUSAND SHIPS There is a moment in Court Theatre's fourth (!) iteration of An Iliad where The Poet holds a flashlight below his chin"I immediately flashed back …