LEAPING TO THE SOLSTICE Between now and Sunday, four innovative female choreographers offer an evening of motion quests. The Harris Theatre is the backdrop for themes of not-so-close encount…
HILARITY HAMMERED HOME, OR AN HEIR TO MISFORTUNE The tone is set from the start: The Heir Apparent begins with a chamber pot being emptied from a balcony window. It answers a question …
TO HAVE AND HAVE NUT After 28 years the Joffrey Ballet is ending Robert Joffrey's The Nutcracker. All good things, it seems, must come to an end. Next year Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's belo…
DUMBING DOWN DICKENS It doesn't matter that A Christmas Carol has drifted from Dickens: Goodman Theatre will never slaughter its sacred (cash) cow. For 38 years now, playing three venu…
AN ABORTED AFFAIR The "Maui Pipeline," it seems, has run out of waves. This "co-world premiere" from Boise Contemporary Theater and Chicago's Sideshow Theatre Company offers an unedifying lo…
QUIT WHILE YOU'RE BEHIND Some absurdities are just too stupid for satire. Transparently ridiculous, they automatically self-indict, hanging themselves on their own petard. Such is the object…
COALS IN EVERYONE'S STOCKINGS Sometimes an entire life can crystallize around a seminal recollection. It can freeze a moment of time into a measure of what did and didn't come true, what mig…
WHEN LIFE IMITATES OPERA Life imitates opera: Concluding Eclipse Theatre Company's season-long retrospective of oeuvres by Terrence McNally (Lips Together, Teeth Apart and A Perfect Ga…
A HALF CENTURY OF HOOFING After 50 years of high-impact dancing, it's worth taking a five-city victory lap. Twyla Tharp's troupe, featured at Chicago's Auditorium Theatre this weekend, is of…
A ROM-COM TO RELISH AND REGRET Taking a chance at love–that's the germ and gist of Neil Simon's mating comedy. Chapter Two remains a quasi-autobiographical depiction of the natio…
FUTURE SHOCK FROM A PAST PRANK In less than 90 minutes this new one-act by Meridith Friedman plays hard: By show's end we get an absorbing case history in situational ethics. Cautionary scen…
A VERY SELECTIVE SILENCE "Let hands do what lips do." Shakespeare never meant the line so literally as it feels in R+J: The Vineyard. Red Theater Chicago delivers a bold resetting, moving th…
TEA AND SYMPATHY–AND TRANSGENDERED KIDS It makes an irresistible transformation tale: Teachers shape students, then get golden too as a Midas touch reverses course. We love it in To…
SAILING OF AGE Prepare to buckle your swashes, shiver your timbers and avoid Davey Jones' locker. In a co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre Company sets sail o…
A SYMPHONY OF QUIRKS An Evening of Work by William Forsythe is a dull title for a frenetic program. This is kinetic dance, its percussive paces almost too fast for feeling. Three years in…
FROM MYTHS TO MOVEMENTS A kind of Mulan among major works of 19th-century ballet (it celebrates a young nymph's coming of age), Leo Delibes' Sylvia is not as famous as his simple…
KILLING COUSINS Serial killers can be fun. In the film Theatre of Blood Vincent Price sardonically played a Shakespearean actor, a hate-filled ham who doggedly "offs" the critics who panned …
OSCAR'S JUKEBOX It's a title to win a crowd on the spot: The revue Hollywood's Greatest Song Hits just requires the right arrangements for a cabaret showcase of four solid talents. Add to th…
CAPTURES EVERYTHING BUT THE COMEDY Two big ironies attach to the new show at the Broadway Playhouse in Water Tower Place. First, it's called Unspeakable but it's not afraid to say anything: …
I'M FEELING UNLUCKY The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence is Theatre Wit's latest local premiere by Madeleine George, author of Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, a 2014 pro…
THE OLD TESTAMENT MEETS THE NEW WORLD A saga of American origins, John Steinbeck's most ambitious novel was published in 1952 and, three years later, starred James Dean and Julie Harris in a…
BREAD AND BOXING Raw as realism requires, good plays about boxing are more than just Rocky slugfests. Like Clifford Odets' seminal Golden Boy, they transform an atavistic popular distraction…
I DID IT FOR THE DAUGHTERS Does evil alter when it switches sexes? Right now the Storefront Theatre is hosting No Beast So Fierce, adaptor/director Max Traux's gender-bending exploration …
DRAMATIC PROFILING In the three years since American Theater Company debuted this corrosive cultural tragicomedy on the North Side, Disgraced has become a massive hit, with revivals on Broad…
A TRAGICOMEDY WITH TRICKS Well, why not do The Tempest as a magic show? It comes with Shakespeare's territory. During the Duke of Milan's unhappy exile, deposed by his nefarious brother, wit…