CHOOSING BETWEEN FAMILY AND FUTURE In xenophobic times wracked by exclusionary panics, any immigrant's odyssey speaks for millions of refugees, within as much as outside the U.S.. Truth-base…
BLOOD ON THE NOTES Jazz doesn't just soothe"it can bleed. Both acts happen throughout these 150 minutes, never more so than at the end. Paradise Blue brings the lyricism of Tennessee William…
LACERATING LA-LA LAND It's a crash course in one man's life-long damage control: Up close, personal, and, therapeutically playful, Dylan Brody's Driving Hollywood is a liberal-minded Califor…
LITTLE SHOP OF HAPPINESS Who can't love She Loves Me? This utterly unpretentious, easily adored chamber musical delivers the first word in entertainment and the last word in love. Completely…
PUNCTURING PREVARICATIONS We've seen a lot of lying lately"enough to make Pierre Corneille's 1644 comedy The Liar cruelly contemporary. An uncharacteristic farce from a famously tragic drama…
THINK GLOBALLY, DANCE LOCALLY Leaps of faith meet jumps for joy. Closing its 2016-2017 season with a bold new offering by Alexander Ekman, Global Visionaries is a salute to the future and th…
BEFORE ANY GLASS MENAGERIE, A PRISON SWEATBOX It's not the "odor of mendacity" that wafts through this Tennessee Williams play"it's more like the whiff of tear gas. The "kindness of stranger…
DISCO DESPAIR Now festering at Chicago's A Red Orchid Theatre, 3C, David Adjmi's 90-minute one-act, is perversely perky, as zany as a zombie. With rapid-fire non-sequiturs and six crazy/need…
HAPPY HOAX OR LITERARY LARCENY? Can we really separate a creator from his art? Can our sense of Shakespeare feel more real to us than his characters do? These aren't rhetorical questions: A …
HIVE AGAINST HIVE Bees, it seems, are humming their last. In the future,honey could well be synthetic. Appropriately debuting on Earth Day weekend, this world premiere from Chicago's Victory…
A WHOLE NEW WORLD FROM BROADWAY: A MUSICAL THAT TRULY SOARS "Open sesame" indeed! It’s "Abracadabra" times ten as the arrival of Aladdin in Chi-town feels as triumphant as Prince Ali's…
SONDHEIM'S CARE PACKAGE FOR LOST LOVERS In a melodically and lyrically mediocre time like, for instance, 2017, even lesser songs by Stephen Sondheim beat half the musicals at large. In 1981 …
"IT'S A FREE COUNTRY!" It's one of the seven wonders of the American theater: Few sights on stage are as magical as watching Billie Dawn wise up. This dumb-as-a-rock good-time girl slowly wa…
AN IDENTITY QUEST COMES UP EMPTY As the cops say, "Nothing to see here, folks. Move right along." Or, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there is no "there there." Both cautions apply to Goo…
DEATH BY ANECDOTE A playwright dredges up her past at her peril. As with Goodman Theatre's current confusion King of the Yees, Sarah Ruhl's For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday is a very…
FINDING FOCUS Linda Vista is billed as "an adult comedy about immature behavior." Surprisingly tender, Tracy Letts' Steppenwolf stunner examines one man's mid-life crisis from all sides and,…
A SPADEFUL OF SUGAR As the supplicating ballad puts it, "Let's hope she will stay." Not just the quintessentially "practically perfect" nanny, Mary Poppins is a kind of cosmic cure. Given th…
260 HOOVES AND 96 FEET Pegasus would be proud: The vast White Big Top commanding the south parking lot of Chicago's Soldier Field barely hints at the $30 million "theatrical adventure" benea…
TOIL AND TROUBLE There are no miniaturized marvels, no surprises sprung from trap doors, no white rabbits from a hat. Beyond Caring bears none of Lookingglass Theatre Company's vintage make-…
SGT. PEPPER'S AT 50; LET IT RAIN For baby boomers wanting to share their childhood with their kids, for all the true-blue or late-blooming fans of the Fab Four whose great regret is that the…
MORE THAN LAVENDER, BEYOND A RAINBOW Finding another noble excuse to make music, for its fourth concert this season Chicago Sinfonietta offered a sweet salute to a worthy cause. Performed to…
A SEASON OF SOAPS IN ONE SHOW An exhilarating, over-the-top, floridly artificial romp, Destiny of Desire is as wonderfully hokey as its title. A Chicago premiere, Goodman Theatre's co-produc…
DRAMATIZING WHAT CANNOT BE KNOWN Aerobic exercises for the cerebral cortex, Tom Stoppard's daunting dramas (The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Invention of Love) go for the gray matter. In perpetu…
IF ONLY SINCERITY MEANT SUCCESS You really want this play to work. It means so well and maybe so much. But it's hard to find a worthy resolution in a play about repeated, nation-wide violati…
IN SEARCH OF A STORY Loved ones seen in stasis are probably truer to most families. No clans are ever collectively happy or purposeful, only the members and not, of course, all the time. But…