ABBONDANZA! What a gem of a jewel is this rarely done masterwork! It's what Candide was to Leonard Bernstein or Porgy and Bess to George Gershwin, a folk opera to rise above mere musicals. A…
CANNED SPAM-ILTON For little more than an hour, Spamilton, an attention-deficit musical travesty, never lets up until we're let out. Exploding with relentless volleys of unfriendly fire, it …
PLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MORE INCHES "I'm the new Berlin Wall. Try to tear me down!" That defiant dare marks the flaming arrival of Hedwig Schmidt, survivor-heroine of John Cameron Mitchell'…
THE SOUR SMELL OF SUCCESS Never confuse fear with respect. During the Cold War, when the Russians were less deniably our enemies, op-ed tyro Joe Alsop rivaled gossip czar Walter Winchell in …
MATURE MAGIC No spells get cast here, no phantoms materialize. There are no mystical suspension of the laws of physics, just our disbelief. Now in a too-short stop at Chicago's Oriental T…
SINKING INTO THE STEPPES Running invisible endurance feats, the characters of Anton Chekhov expose what Henry David Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.” When the good doc…
THIS BROTHERSÂ IS A KEEPER This winner really is a blast from the past. Celebrating America's most explosive and enthralling tap-dancing team, My Brother's Keeper"The Story of the Nicholas…
A SOUTH SIDE WEAVE The setting is a beloved beauty parlor on Chicago's South Side. It's seen better times and may soon see none. Hanging over the storefront is a gallery of famous female Afr…
NO ADO ABOUT LITTLE Never has a lesser comedy enjoyed a lovelier setting: Embraced by a Rococo balustrade, staircase, and pastoral backdrop worthy of Watteau or Boucher, Chicago Shakespeare …
URINE FOR A GOOD TIME I fondly recall the infectiously brilliant Cardiff Giant shows that Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann perpetrated in the 80s and 90s. After so much success in Chicago, it's …
THE URGE TO BE USEFUL Steppenwolf Theatre is great at stirring things up"on stage and in the minds of its crowds. Nobody does it so well. Exhibit A is their latest offering: There's good cau…
THE SONGS AND THE FURY Sardonic, ironic, cheeky, subversive"hip epithets can't convey the excruciating call-and-response fusion of humor and horror, laughter and tears, that you feel seeing …
TAKING OUT THE (WHITE) TRASH Ever since 1981, small-town souls, Dixie doodles and atavistic Red State rednecks have fueled the fun in the Tuna trilogy. It's a hilarious perpetration by adapt…
ANATEVKA COMES HOME In this world premiere of a newly commissioned and instantly topical new work, Chicago Shakespeare Theater makes it clear: Karen Hartman's The Book of Joseph is not just …
HE FOUND HIS HEART IN SAN FRANCISCOÂ (AND MORE) I Left My Heart: A Salute to the Music of Tony Bennett totally earns its title. Created in 2005 by David Grapes and Todd Olson, this warmly …
PROTECTING YOURÂ ASSET The best thing about The Bodyguard, Lawrence Kasdan's Oscar-nominated 1992 film, was how it put the late Whitney Houston on the map and in our hearts. Despite zero c…
THE DEAD WEIGHT OF RANDOM TALK Richard Greenberg's better works"Take Me Out, Three Days of Rain, The Violet Hour"stand out by putting enough in play to make us care. Raven Theatre's distress…
VISITING THE INTERNET OF 'SHADES' Cryptic and fascinating, Jennifer Haley's 85-minute one-act The Nether takes its name, if not its inspiration, from an allusion to the afterlife. But, persu…
SPOILER ALERT: THE PLAYWRIGHT DID IT Here's the warning issued to the press on Monday night. It's about critiquing Goodman Theatre's imported New York staging of Gloria: "In the hopes of mai…
ANOTHER BAND OF BROTHERS At a certain "tipping point" in the mid-20th century, passing for straight became one lie too many. A generation before the Stonewall riots, a generation after Henry…
THE PURITY OF INFINITY Mathematics can be maddening. Unless reflected in music (as in Bach), the "numbers game" feels stuck in a seemingly sterile realm of abstract entities, perfect in thei…
A CONSECRATION AND A CONCERT FIT FOR A KING Chicago Sinfonietta's annual concert to commemorate Martin Luther King"now in its fourth decade"held more relevance and righteousness than usual, …
THE HERO JOURNEY OF AÂ DRAG QUEEN Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is, of course, a much-loved 1994 "staying out" film from seemingly straight Australia. It spins the peripatetic tale of thr…
LEARNING TO BE DEAD Orpheus usually gets top billing in the classical Greek legend. He is of course the master of music who literally goes to Hell to retrieve his beloved Eurydice, abducted …
WHAT OF OURÂ SUFFERING IN THE NIGHT? Ambition should be made of smarter stuff. Nearly three hours of unfocused agitation, What of the Night? begs its own incoherent question. It's not the …