A quarter-century ago, a sensual Russian aerialist named Vladimir Kekhaial turned up the heat of a Chicago summer by flying around a tent, his undulating, glistening muscles hardly confined …
The little theater under the "L" is set up like a voyeuristic European cabaret: little tables, shaded lamps, intimate fabrics, dark corners into which an amorous couple might try to disappea…
Under the Obama administration in 2015, the Department of Education toughened up a set of rules known as the Gainful Employment Regulations. The rules were designed to protect students from …
For the first time in its history, the Cirque du Soleil has a touring production under its signature grand chapiteau that doesn't dwell in an abstract conceit. "Luzia," which opens in Chicag…
One of the longest-running double acts in Chicago theater history is coming to a close: artistic directors and co-founders Michael Menendian and JoAnn Montemurro are "retiring" from Chicago'…
When the poetic playwright Dael Orlandersmith premiered "Beauty's Daughter" in Midtown Manhattan in 1995, few had heard her name. This was before "Monster," "The Gimmick" or "Yellowman," a f…
"A parrot, a shark and a cheeseburger walk into Wrigley Field" may sound like the beginning of a bad bar joke, but in reality it refers to just a few of the Parrothead characters who made th…
In 2008, a playwright from the Yale School of Drama named Alexander Woo was charged with writing the fifth episode of a new HBO series. The series was "True Blood" and this was to be a gothi…
At the end of the Saturday night performance of his solo show "How to Be a Rock Critic," a work based on the writings of the great Lester Bangs, the actor Erik Jensen, sweaty from his exploi…
In his 1976 Creem magazine review of Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" a review with the headline "The Greatest Album Ever Made," the late rock critic Lester Bangs justifies his enthusiasm by…
The Steppenwolf Theatre Company may not have invented the incendiary play wherein some downstate, post-nuclear American family explodes its rotten guts all over the stage as you stare back i…
After more than 25 years as an innovative, percussive, quirky and cobalt enterprise, the performance company known as Blue Man Group is selling itself to Cirque du Soleil, the Montreal-based…
In 2005, I wrote a profile in this newspaper of Libby Adler Mages, a diminutive, charming and ever-curious Chicagoan and one of the most successful commercial producers in the history of Chi…
Ever since its New York opening in 1977, D.L. Colburn's "The Gin Game" has attracted extraordinary actors. First, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy made the play their own. In the 1990s, Charles…
In 2003, the National Endowment for the Arts put out a genuinely surprising report: Audiences " those attending jazz, classical music, opera, dance and theater performances " were in serious…
If you want to understand how much one performance, by one inestimably excellent artist, can mean to a work of musical theater, let me suggest a trip to "The Bridges of Madison County" at th…
Just in case you have not been paying attention: Issues about who has the right to talk about what, and with whom, are pretty hot right now. Especially when speakers dare to wander beyond th…
If there is a practicing alcoholic or addict in your family when you're a kid, you're better off when the boozer is your uncle rather than your dad or mom. If it's your drunk uncle, he can b…
The Belgian singer-songwriter known as Jacques Brel does not get nearly enough credit for his influence on the popular music of the latter half of the 20th century and beyond. I'd argue that…
Are you a pirate two hundred years too late? Got a Caribbean soul you can barely control? When you see a salt shaker, do you worry it will get lost? If you answered yes to any or all of the …
A rakish, irascible, handsome, poorly behaved and thoroughly charming actor known for both his rich comedy and an oft-confounding sense of pathos, Howard Witt was the embodiment of what, in …
Which American presidents have most loved the arts? The 45th would be a nonstarter, Donald J. Trump's foray into Broadway producing notwithstanding. (If you've not heard, the show was a come…
In Chicago theater circles, the joke about Steve Scott, producer at the Goodman Theatre, is that he does whatever his boss, artistic director Robert Falls, does not want to do. That job desc…
The all-Equity touring version of director Bart Sher's 2015 Lincoln Center revival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's "The King and I" is a magnificent, genuinely revelatory produ…
In their fascinating analysis of the algorithm used by the authorities to predict gun violence in Chicago, the journalists and crime analysts Jeff Asher and Rob Arthur argue that people are …