A SERMON IN FLESH WOWÂ spelled backwards! In almost forty seasons it's their biggest show, with full orchestra and a cast of over 40, including a seated choir. It sprawls with spectacle bu…
ALL QUIET MAKES A BIG NOISE One of the saddest truths about humanity is that we always need to be warned against war, so tempting is its license to kill. All Quiet on the Western Front, E…
MEMORIES IN MUSIC FORGE A GREATER WHOLE We're witnesses to an aftermath and its collateral healing, the unsought legacy of a gay guy who died too soon: Newly revised after its 1993 inception…
COLLATERAL HEALING It's a justified transfer. A very enterprising theater called none too fragile from Akron, Ohio has come to Chicago (and later to New York City) to offer a pretty powerful…
PUTTING THE FUN IN FUNK Taking us as far from death as is humanly possible, some shows just reward you for being alive. In perhaps their most joyous musical celebration yet, the 43-year-old …
SEEING RIGHT THROUGH THIS MACABRE MASHUP It's a roller coaster journey to the dark side of almost everything:Â Ghost Quartet, now haunting Stage 773 in a Chicago premiere from Black Button…
SECOND CHANCES NEED SECOND ACTS Sit " and calm " down and make yourself at show. A captivating work extolling rural redemption, The Spitfire Grill, a 2001 musical of the 1995 film, shows how…
SIBLING WARFARE Can lightning strike again after 37 years? In 1982 Steppenwolf Theatre Company put itself on the map with a landmark staging of Sam Shepard's domestic disruption True West…
MAN, OH MUSIC MAN If ever a show spelled out summer, it's Meredith Willson's 1957 masterpiece The Music Man. Throughout the rollicking story, the title character exudes sunny optimism,…
TEMPEST BELONGS OUTDOORS The words can get windblown or contend with sirens and such. But, just as food tastes different (better?) when eaten outdoors, so does the Bard. Embracing all, Shake…
GO-GO SEE THIS SHOW-SHOW It's a marriage made in musical heaven: A ton of fun erupts from combining seemingly antithetical elements " a 16th-century fairy-tale/poem cycle by Sir Phillip Sidn…
AN APP-ETITE FOR AMOUR Sooner or later you knew an Internet application would get its own show, especially when it plays Dan Cupid, hooking up randy seekers of one-night stands or permanent …
THE WINNER BY AN INCH It's a perverse Pride Month offering that cocks a snoot at authority and respectability: "I'm the new Berlin Wall " try to tear me down!" That defiant dare marks the fl…
A LITERAL STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Only 65 minutes long, British playwright Jez Butterworth's spell-casting The River manages, as few plays have, to simulate a dream on stage. Heraclitu…
THESE CASCADING CRISES ARE NOT SOON FORGOTTEN Sometimes, given the right writing, a seemingly small struggle can defy and define supposedly close kinfolk " and even stamp a society: The futu…
THE ULTIMATE DRAG RACE It's both louder than life and strident with substance. The perfect play for Pride Month and a deafening blast from the past, Ms. Blakk for President, an uproarious…
POINTLESS PERPLEXITY Sometimes what you see is much less than what you get. Case in point: Pride Films and Plays is closing its season with a daunting new work written by Ryan Oliveira and d…
WHAT MORE CAN THEY SING? By its riveting end Falsettos, a fusion of March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990), has jolted us with its heartbreak and won us with its wit.…
SIX CHICKS REMIX TO NIX PRICKS Singing well is the best revenge, especially if you married the spouse from hell. So runs the cunning concept behind Six. This raucous pop concert joyously …
SINGING UP STORMY STUFF With this theater everything good is new again " and never old. The latest homage from Black Ensemble Theater, Style and Grace: In Tribute to Lena Horne and Nancy Wil…
THE MONSTER WITHIN It was a dark and stormy night. Escaping a tempest by seeking shelter in the Villa Diodati on a summer night in 1814, good friends Mary Shelley (as she would later be call…
DÉJÀ VU VS. NEVERMORE A very prolific playwright, Steven Dietz can deliver dense dramatic homage. In his 2013 Mad Beat Hip & Gone, now playing at The Edge Theater Off Broadway…
RETHINKING REPRODUCTION A very pointed question arrives near the end of Rebecca Gilman's useful 2007 drama The Crowd You're in With, first produced in Chicago ten years ago by Goodman …
A FRACTURED FAIRY TALE Shakespeare's strange romance, which begins with gratuitous jealousy and ends with gratuitous forgiveness, is best savored as a fairy tale for grownups: A virtuous que…
TAKE TO THE ROAD Walt Whitman may have patented the "song of the open road," but the Beat Generation gave it their own course correction and made it into a map. These writers of the Eisenhow…