DÉJÀ VU MEETS GROUNDHOG DAY "Birth was the death of him": Terse to the point of cruelty, Samuel Beckett devours the human experience in six words, repeatedly juxtaposing graves with …
CHICAGO OPERA THEATER UPS THE ANTE AND PUSHES THE LIMITS The bad news: Everest and Aleko, Chicago Opera Theater's engrossing double bill at Millennium Park's Harris Theatre, clos…
AN EDWARDIAN WAKE-UP CALL You can't keep a good play down. Produced under the pseudonym of K.G. Sowerby, the Edwardian drama Rutherford and Son was a huge hit in 1912 " until the playw…
PICKED, PECKED, AND PACKED Some solo shows can be valued simply for their superb simulations of someone else's story. Others succeed because we pay extra special attention when the chronicle…
HE'S BACK ON DUTY It's now become a holiday classic, Mary Zimmerman's gorgeous The Steadfast Tin Soldier at Lookingglass Theatre. It was glorious last year. It's lost no luster since. In onl…
A SHOW THAT CASTS A SPELL Whether it really works or it's just self-fulfilling wishful thinking, magic can misfire. Â Detailing a downhome tragedy set in Memphis during the Depression, Hoo…
THE HURT OF HATE Dirty laundry demands an airing. Given the disunion afflicting our republic, a play like N (short for the "N word") has healing to share. A provocative world premiere …
HATE CRIMES ROCK A SUBVERSIVE COMEDY This show can never be nice: Along with The Taming of the Shrew, a comedy built squarely on misogyny, The Merchant of Venice, a tragicomedy festeri…
CABIN FEVER AT ITS CRAZIEST Make of this what you will. All too predictably, every review that Grey House receives will be different. Because this new work by Red Orchid Theatre ensemb…
UP CLOSE, SHE'S BIGGER THAN EVEN PEANUT BUTTER From the start it seemed strange that anyone would make a musical out of a movie that embodies its medium so completely. Yes, the film All A…
A FAMILY IN KEY SIGNATURES As she showed in Five Mile Lake, Rachel Bonds works with a small brush. She lays low before her subject in order to convey tender, unassuming connections bet…
THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME Terry McCabe, artistic director of City Lit Theater, knows Sherlock Holmes and his shadow sleuth Dr. Watson almost as well as author Sir Arthur …
WELL, LERNER & LOEWE ME DOWN Seldom has a dream team had a shorter span: It was all over in only 13 years. But between 1947 and 1960 Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe ran a glorious gam…
TO BE OR NOT TO BE SARAH BERNHARDT Well, with "Bernhardt" and "Hamlet" sharing the marquee, Goodman Theatre's season-opener must be larger than life if not literature. Sprawling and stuffed …
A MUSICAL CIRCLE JERK You could call it a daisy chain of horizontal encounters, this chronicle of sexual partisans whose sleeping around creates a sort of chain letter of lust. A ton of tale…
MY FAIR MONARCH We love levelling. Mark Twain's prince and the pauper, Queen Victoria and her Scottish and Indian boyfriends, Queen Anne and her favorites, a British schoolteacher and the Ki…
DANCE OF DIPLOMACY Clandestine and volatile, high-stakes diplomacy can be as taut as any courtroom drama. It's hard to imagine a story more intrinsically theatrical than the real-life crises…
HOOP DREAMS IN THE CELESTIAL KINGDOM No question, Lauren Yee is a wonderful new voice in theater. With Cambodian Rock Band she made crucial connections between iconic survivors and unspea…
CAPSULE CURES Not to be confused with anything else, Tiny Beautiful Things is a theatrical curiosity, fluidly blocked but dramatically static as it unleashes a swirling cascade of ques…
A CONVERGENCE OF HISTORY It was supposedly the "end of an era," the memorial service for Richard Nixon in the Nixon Library in his birthplace Yorba Linda, California, on April 27, 1994. And …
NOT DEAD YET It's at least a chuckle a minute. Half the hilarity is verbal sallies, half sight gags. This cheeky, subversive, and unashamedly sidesplitting Spamalot, described in the pres…
LOVE IN THE FAST LANE "Love will break your heart; sometimes you want it to." That curious contradiction is the opening shot in MIDSUMMER (A Play with Songs). This theatrical roller coast…
MAY HOWARDS END NEVER END "Only connect..! Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer." Seldom h…
THE SON ALSO RISES It's always fascinating to be present at the creation of a crucial writer. Like James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's J…
THE WRONG WARDROBE? Clothes make the man " even if he dresses as a woman. An entire individuality, it seems, can hang in a closet, as transvestites have proven across the centuries. Casa Val…