Days get shorter, weather gets brisker " and the stages get busier. The fall theater season is always filled with more shows than anyone could possibly see. But here are a few of our best be…
Director Ron OJ Parson's staging of Athol Fugard's "Blood Knot" caused a stir earlier this summer at Wisconsin's American Players Theatre due to the casting of a white actor in the role of a…
Here's something that's hard to believe, but absolutely true: Chicago Shakespeare's current Shakespeare in the Parks tour of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" marks the first time Barbara Gaines h…
The costs of warfare on the home front come into sharp " and at times almost unbearable " focus in "The Hero's Wife," Aline Lathrop's taut two-character piece at Berwyn's 16th Street Theater…
Tackling a musical adaptation of "The Taming of the Shrew" in the nearly 70-year-old footsteps of "Kiss Me, Kate" takes chutzpah. While Cole Porter can rest easy that "Shrew'd!," now onstage…
"This is the Plains, a state of mind, right, some spiritual affliction, like the blues" says Barbara, the eldest daughter of the Oklahoma Weston clan in Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County." …
After the 2016 massacre of 49 people at Orlando's Pulse dance club, fresh attention landed on a tragedy in the gay community decades earlier. On June 24, 1973, an arsonist set fire to the Up…
"Easy as pie" doesn't apply to the life of Jenna, the anguished-but-still-warmhearted baking whiz at the heart of "Waitress." But then, the colloquialism refers not to the act of creating pi…
Is "You Can't Take It With You," that nuttiest of chestnuts in the classic American comedy canon, the play we need right now? Arguably, no. Given the current stakes for our democracy, George…
Combining Shakespeare and songcraft is a Broadway tradition " whether it be "Kiss Me, Kate" or "Something Rotten!" But Len Cariou's "Broadway & the Bard" brings the two together in an intima…
Smart horror is turning out to be the piquant flavor of the season in smaller theater offerings. On the heels of Ike Holter's "The Light Fantastic" at Jackalope (running through June 16), Ha…
If Virginia Woolf's time-traveling, gender-shifting "Orlando" had crash-landed in the French courts of Louis XV and Louis XVI, the result might be a bit like Canadian playwright Mark Brownel…
When spring comes so late, we know it's even harder to take time away from beaches and barbecues, street fairs and sunshine. But great theater happens year-round in Chicago. Here are 25 pick…
If class and social status determine how we live, why shouldn't it determine how we die? That premise is the jumping-off point for Lucas Baisch's "Refrigerator," now in a world premiere with…
When are penguins " those adorable, tuxedo-clad flightless waddlers " the stuff of controversy? When they're in a same-sex relationship, of course. The true story of Roy and Silo, two chinst…
Nothing has changed, but everything is changing. That's the first gut reaction to "Columbinus," the docudrama about the 1999 attacks at Columbine High School that ended with 15 dead, includi…
The young artists of Albany Park Theater Project have explored the theme of "home" many times in the past, including in their celebrated production of "Home/Land," which looked at the plight…
When it first opened in 1989, "Grand Hotel" won more plaudits for Tommy Tune's stylish direction and choreography than for its score (by Robert Wright, George Forrest and Maury Yeston) or bo…
The American dream of home ownership is indelibly entwined with our shameful history of racial discrimination. That's particularly true in Chicago, which has served as a laboratory for segre…
Caught in a poetic no man's land between Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and Wilfred Owen's grim battlefield verses, Stephen Massicotte's World War I-era drama, "Ma…
"What does a woman want?" Sigmund Freud famously asked. If he'd taken a glance at 21st-century advertising featuring women, he might well have answered "salad!" The Hairpin, a feminist blog,…
The recording studio as the crucible of creative dreams figures in a lot of plays and movies. Sam Phillips' legendary Sun Studios alone gave us the jukebox musical "Million Dollar Quartet" a…
"The most defiant nose in France" gets a contemporary makeover in BoHo Theatre's "Cyrano." But though Edmond Rostand's script has been sculpted and contemporized in places, the old-fashioned…
Much as we might prefer living in less interesting times, Sideshow Theatre Company's opening of Mia Chung's "You for Me for You" " on the night that the White House announced a meeting betwe…
Nearly a year after his death at 90, Chuck Berry is getting the bio-musical treatment at Black Ensemble Theater. The man who helped create rock and roll music (as well as writing, well, "Roc…