On Monday, Trap Door Theatre received a special citation at the Non-Equity Jeff Awards, recognizing the company's "endeavors in opening a magical door to an evocative and surreal world over …
The glorious Broadway revival makes a quick stop in Chicago. Halfway through the first act of Falsettos, Trina, a woman whose husband has left her for a younger …
Style and grace fill the stage with abundance in Black Ensemble Theater's latest show. When you're focusing on Lena Horne and Nancy Wilson, how could they not? But if you're looking for deep…
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 off in …
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 en…
Molly 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 heroine is t…
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…
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 takes him…
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-class fami…
"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 known t…
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 musical …
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 thought…
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…
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, which…
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…
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 Ralph…
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…
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 sas…
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 become a near-…
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…
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 sol…
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's a…
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 Jackie S…
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 Bilal Darda…
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 his s…