1,044 stories by "Kerry Reid"
Aleshea Harris's 2018 performance piece, What to Send Up When It Goes Down, had its local premiere this past spring with Congo Square Theatre Company in a production that played […]
The po…
Picking up where Teatro ZinZanni left off, the newest attraction under the medium top (that is, the classic circus-meets-Victorian-bordello spiegeltent in the Hotel Cambria), Cabaret ZaZou's…
Amid the tidal wave of turnovers at theaters large and small in Chicago the last two years, we also learned this past February that Deb Clapp, the longtime executive director […]
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Let's get this out of the way immediately: any similarities between Lynn Nottage's Clyde's, now in its local premiere at the Goodman, and the Hulu series The Bear are purely […]
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Factory Theater takes a stab at stories like The Handmaid's Tale and The Stepford Wives (that suburban dystopia envisioned originally by novelist Ira Levin in 1972, and then translated to [â…
Karla Galván fell in love with performing when she was five, appearing in a public celebration of a Mother's Day performance her mother had put together. "She's like, 'OK, mija, […]
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Lindsay Joelle's The Garbologists, now in a local premiere at Northlight under Cody Estle's direction, is a slice-of-life two-hander about an odd-couple pair of New York sanitation workers. …
Right before the pandemic shutdown in 2020, TimeLine Theatre presented James Ijames's sorrowful and powerful Kill Move Paradise, in which a group of Black men murdered by the police gather […
Back in 2016, I climbed up the narrow stairs at the Den Theatre in Wicker Park to see a young solo performer embody the residents of a memory care center […]
The post Mom, meatballs, and '…
Six years ago, Lifeline Theatre unveiled the world premiere of Christopher M. Walsh's Miss Holmes"a cunning gender-bent take on Arthur Conan Doyle's Baker Street polymath that predated the f…
The tangled recent history of Victory Gardens Theater became even more complicated this week with the mass dismissal of the remaining staff members in the wake of an attempt to […]
The pos…
The very phrase "stand-up comedy" is arguably ableist: even though there are many working comedians who use wheelchairs or who have other disabilities, comedy clubs (like a lot of entertainm…
Alison Bechdel's family, captured first in her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home and then in a Tony Award-winning 2015 chamber musical (music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa […]
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Politics has always been a "smelly kitchen," to borrow a phrase from Jean Anouilh's version of Antigone. But in 1933, two new cooks entered that kitchen. And the recipes they came up with co…
Next month, the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance will present the fifth annual Destinos Chicago International Theater Festival. But it will be bittersweet; the woman most responsible for maki…
The past two years have seen more upheavals and changes in leadership at Chicago theaters than at any time in my memory, exacerbated by the long COVID-19 shutdown. So perhaps it makes sense …
There's a brand new dance / But I don't know its name / That people from bad homes / Do again and again / It's big and it's bland / Full of tension and fear / They do it over there / But we …
At one point in Theatre Y's ambulatory Laughing Song: A Walking Dream, Marvin Tate as George W. Johnson (the first Black American recording artist) is asked by a reporter at a press conferen…
The last time I checked in with Evanston's youth-oriented Mudlark Theater in April 2020, they were in the midst of pivoting to online workshops and creating digital shows. The company has re…
In 1994, an Australian road comedy about three drag artists heading off in a beat-up tour bus across the Outback felt like a breath of fresh air in a cinematic landscape that tended to focus…
You want irony? How's this"the actor originally cast as Judas in the 50th-anniversary touring production of Jesus Christ Superstar, James Beeks, was dismissed from the tour after being arres…
Ken Ludwig is best known for high-octane farces such as Lend Me a Tenor, but in Dear Jack, Dear Louise, he goes for tender epistolary romance. Based on the love-affair-via-letters story of h…
The same day that I saw Nikki Lynette's new musical Get Out Alive with Haven, the U.S. rolled out the new 988 phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline, with the promise that …
Twenty years later, I still get chills when I think about the final line in Brett Neveu's Eric LaRue, his drama about the aftermath of a school shooting, in which the mother of a teenage boy…
There's a scene near the end of Albany Park Theater Project's Homecoming (the company's first live show since the pandemic began) where the cast sings "With a Little Help From My Friends." T…
