Twelfth Night is a perfect ten at Chicago Shakes
They couldn't be more different in tone and setting, but Tyrone Phillips's current gorgeous staging of Twelfth Night at Chicago Shakespeare and Robert Falls's brilliant 2013 reimagining of M…
They couldn't be more different in tone and setting, but Tyrone Phillips's current gorgeous staging of Twelfth Night at Chicago Shakespeare and Robert Falls's brilliant 2013 reimagining of M…
If you look at French-Canadian playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin's Right Now with an eye toward finding narrative antecedents, you won't be disappointed. There's the young couple living acros…
Doing a gender reversal for Company, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's 1970 ironic comedy of marriage vs. singledom, is such a great idea it's surprising that nobody thought to do it befor…
Plays about the relationships between caregivers and their clients aren't new. The late Chicago playwright, actor, and disability rights activist Susan Nussbaumʼs well-received No One as …
On a clear day in Brigadoon, you can see Oklahoma. Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner's 1947 Scottish romantic fantasia is set in a far more mystical and picturesque realm than the Oklahoma…
There's a long tradition of Black American playwrights and filmmakers subverting the tropes of vaudeville and other popular entertainments to critique white supremacy and its violent power s…
Now in a short run with Broadway in Chicago before a hoped-for New York production, A Wonderful World still has a ways to go before it feels like a fully realized portrait of Louis Armstrong…
Last year for the Destinos festival and Teatro Vista, Georgette Verdin directed Paloma Nozicka's haunting Enough to Let the Light In, which amply demonstrated her ability to create chilling …
Nestled in a strip of storefronts in Marquette Park, Teatro Tariakuri (led by founder and artistic director Karla Galván) has been offering Spanish-language comedies and family shows for …
Because we live in stupid times, Barbara Park's Junie B. Jones series of kids' books about an enthusiastic first-grader ended up at number 71 on the American Library Association's list of to…
For the third year running, Theatre Above the Law in Rogers Park presents a cornucopia of fairy tales by and about the Brothers Grimm, concocted by Michael Dalberg and directed by Tony Lawry…
The Impostors have only been producing since 2018, and (like every other company) were on a hiatus from live production from March 2020 to fall of 2021. But they've already carved out a dist…
Last year for the Halloween season, Kokandy Productions presented Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. Now they're back with another slasher songfest: American Psycho: The Musical, adapted from …
Before Martyna Majok won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for her drama Cost of Living (which was planned for this season at Victory Gardens before the board decided to close up shop at the Tony A…
Pearl Cleage isn't from Chicago, but she's been produced enough here that she feels like an adopted playwright at least. Now-defunct Eclipse Theatre Company (dedicated to the one playwright,…
There's a great show about a Founding Father onstage right now in Chicago who is not named Alexander Hamilton. And while it doesn't feature an award-winning score by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mesm…
"Well, look who's come to dinner!" bellows Gerald (Ronald L. Conner) to the neighbors he and wife Patricia (Sydney Charles) have invited to their home in Inda Craig-Galván's WELCOME TO MA…
Chicago playwright Brett Neveu is so good at writing about the darker side of life (as in his 2002 play Eric LaRue, now a film directed by Michael Shannon, his fellow ensemble member at A Re…
I don't know who came up with the idea of a Pearl Cleage festival for Chicago theater, but based on Mikael Burke's gorgeous production of the Atlanta poet laureate's 1995 drama, Blues for an…
At this point, Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton is beyond critic-proof. (Once you've had an entire episode of Drunk History dedicated to your recap of the events in your musical, what else is t…
Though it's based loosely on a real story, John Webster's Jacobean revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi plays like a cross between torture porn and Shakespeare, what with the piling up of bu…
When The Beauty Queen of Leenane first premiered with Galway's Druid Theatre in 1996, it marked its author, Martin McDonagh (then just shy of age 26) as an exhilarating new voice in Celtic d…
Water People Theater's last full-length production was The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon, presented in September 2019 as part of the Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festiv…
Several years before they struck Disney gold with Beauty and the Beast, the musical team of composer Alan Menken and book writer and lyricist Howard Ashman stuck their toes into campy cult w…
The play about lucha libre is hoping to bring in new audiences to the Chicago theatre.