4,886 stories by "Chris Jones"
Coming later this year to 5050 N. Clark St. on Chicago's North Side: A new entertainment venue, replete with food and beverages, that's dedicated to the art of close-up magic. There's a hist…
Manchester " whose big Lancashire heart was broken into pieces Monday night " is England's Second City. It's not the second-biggest city in terms of population: Birmingham, in the Midlands, …
Actor Samuel G. Roberson Jr., who died of pneumonia Sunday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, was diagnosed with leukemia when he was 8 years old. That experience, said his father, Samuel Ro…
On Monday night at the Steppenwolf Theatre " a rare chance to see such a talent in an intimate setting " Audra McDonald ordered up a little singalong to "I Could Have Danced All Night," the …
Mary Chase's "Harvey" " a Colorado journalist's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1944 Broadway play about a man with an imaginary lapine friend " actually has a good deal in common with Ken Kesey's "O…
Albert Einstein is an ideal role for Mike Nussbaum, the new show, "Relativity," at the Northlight Theatre reveals. I speak not merely of the fusion of extraordinary mental capability, althou…
Aging clowns were buying aerialists drinks at the bar. Publicists of four decades standing stood shoulder-to-shoulder with retired jugglers. Jackets read "The Medeiros Troupe," long…
Come with the Theater Loop to the circus:Â The Tribune's Chris Jones and photographer Zbigniew Bzdak will be at the final performances by the Ringling Bros. in New York, backstage and ring…
In 1925, the 19-year-old Josephine Baker moved to France to appear in "La Revue Negre" at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. For a hugely talented young American who was born poor and stymied b…
Time for the lofty to ascend the podium and offer a few words of speechified wisdom to the restless class of 2017, all ready, willing and eager to rectify a nation currently in chaos. At lea…
Before there was Hell in a Handbag Productions, there was Sweetcorn Playhouse in Andersonville, the 60-seat home of Sweetback Productions where a young man named David Cerda once frolicked i…
Despite a tryout trek out West, a book and direction by no less than James Lapine and a mid-process rebooting that replaced much of the cast and most of William Finn's initial score, the mus…
Few things are as vexing in the theater as plays wherein the characters spend all their time on the phone. Unless you have some kind of exceptionally smart or distinctive metaphor for relati…
Is there such a thing as a third space for company dancers, and what might that be? I speak not here of Starbucks but of a place somewhere between the sanctuary of the rehearsal room " where…
Health officials in Minnesota have been dealing in recent days with a costly and dangerous outbreak of measles in children, centered in the large community of Somali immigrants in and around…
Downtown Chicago is bursting with shows this spring weekend. More than 15,000 people will be in or around the Loop on Friday and Saturday night, watching a show. There's more on offer than a…
Jonathan Larson was not much interested in legacy: His gorgeous masterpiece "Rent" is an ode to living for the moment. "There is no future. There is no past," its characters sing. "I live th…
At one point in "Objects in the Mirror," the gripping story of an African refugee who somehow makes it out of a Guinean refugee camp that held 90,000 hopefuls in a petri dish of malaria, dys…
Dating back to the days of Nick Offerman and the late, lamented Defiant Theatre, Chicago has a long and tortured history with slasher theater. But although the desire to bring some of the ic…
There once were more than 350 black-owned clubs and other businesses in the jazz-infused Black Bottom (the term derived from the color of the soil), the east side neighborhood of Detroit tha…
Last Sunday night, a group of America's most prominent chefs, restaurateurs and marketing executives gathered at Vermilion, the remarkable River North restaurant renowned for owner Rohini De…
Prolonged emotional intimacy can be tricky at the Marriott Theatre " an in-the-round auditorium where the physical stillness of a scene always is limited by the audience's tolerance for watc…
Surely no playwright has penned more works about African-American history " especially about the black intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries " than Charles Smith. I've been watc…
In the middle of the 1940s, an employment agency named Castle, Baron and Associates began advertising Chicago factory jobs in Puerto Rico; those who made the move north were mostly single. A…
The new musicals "Dear Evan Hansen," "Come From Away," "Groundhog Day the Musical," and "Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812" all scored their expected Tony Award nominations in New Yo…
