KEEPING ROCK REAL Letting a good thing go is a hard fate: Change is always constant but it's never guaranteed to be good. A tough transition in Chicago's indie rock scene is feelingly chroni…
ANOTHER DREAM DEFERRED The price of progress is no abstraction, not during the fully-freighted 160 minutes of Jiréh Breon Holder's civil rights drama Too Heavy for Your Pocket. A TimeLine T…
 THE PARENTS CRUSADE The setting is the story in The Children, Steppenwolf Theatre Company's Chicago premiere. Set designer Chelsea M. Warren depicts a cluttered seaside cottage …
THE PARALYZED PRINCE Century after century, thespian tyro after marquee headliner, something remains rotten in the state of Denmark. A defining challenge for thousands of careers, Hamlet …
THE WHALE WINS There's only one more performance " on Sunday at 3 at the Harris Theatre " of Chicago Opera Theater's awesomely ambitious Moby-Dick, a nearly-three-hour 2010 epic with music b…
BRITAIN'S BALLET FINDS CHICAGO Springing into the season, the Joffrey Ballet's current visit to the Auditorium Theatre delivers very welcome art " two world premieres and a Chicago first. Ac…
TWIN TRAVESTIES (OF JUSTICE) ARE DOUBLE THE FUN Order in the court! Closing its season with dueling gavels, City Lit Theater offers Two Days in Court in only 90 minutes. Merrily combining…
CAN LOVE ENABLE EVIL? There is no last supper or cross on Golgotha but, yes, Hannah and Martin is a true passion play. What makes this even stranger is that it's as much about clashing…
GOTTA DANCE! Now 44 years old, which means that a third generation of hoofers is now recreating it, A Chorus Line remains the late Michael Bennett's breakthrough backstage musical, winner…
HATE VS. MUSIC It's impossible to grasp a monster evil like genocide as a whole, to weigh it as so many calculable, tangible acts of human failure that yield a vast vileness and a terrible w…
THE BOYFRIENDS ARE BACK Back by popular demand but for only one week at the Auditorium Theatre, the mega-jukebox musical Jersey Boys continues to stir up a perfect storm of industrial-…
AFFIRMATIVE RE-ACTION Don't let the title fool you. Produced last year at Lincoln Center Theater, Admissions arrived too early to address the recent scandal involving illegal offenses in col…
DOES LOVE NEED A LEASH? "The heart wants what the heart wants." Emily Dickinson's seemingly simple saying (akin to Gertrude Stein's "A rose is a rose is a rose") in fact packs a lot of wary …
TODAY'S LOST BOYS Theater takes us places and shows us stuff that we might never freely choose to go or see. Exhibits A-Z areYen, a 2013 visit to Gorki's "lower depths" by British playwright…
A BRIGHT STAR ISN'T ON THE HORIZON; IT'S RIGHT HERE You can savor heart and hope in every scene in Bright Star, BoHo Theatre's new triumph in their upstairs home at the Greenhouse Thea…
PRECIOUS NONSENSE MAKES MELANCHOLY PLAY A FORTRESS OF ARTIFICE If you ever feel "slightly dead," you may be prey to the humor of melancholy. Melancholy Play: A Contemporary Farce, a 2002 dra…
DIVIDED AND CONQUERED If the American dream needs an obituary, Lynn Nottage's 2017 Pulitzer winner is it. If Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty celebrated the power and promise of labor un…
A BRONX CHEER Unpretentious and unpreaching in its streetwise survival lore, the gangster fable A Bronx Tale is, as the name implies, just one of many small sagas from the lesser borough.…
IN PRAISE OF THE PUB There's no need for a plot, three-dimensional characters, or conflicts pending resolution " no, not when the setting and its songs sell themselves from the start. That f…
THE HORROR…THE HORROR… THE FUN…THE FUN… You can see it as a modern parable of how the neglect that created Skid Row and its plethora of poverty brings its own revenge: A literally bl…
TRANS-CENDENT Rather than dwell on the similitude of roses, Gertrude Stein might better have said love is love is love. It certainly is in one particular North Side storefront: A 2016 blue-g…
HANDEL WITH CARE It's hard to believe that, following its Covent Garden debut in 1735, this glorious opera seria endured 191 years of neglect. It returned to the boards in 1926, even m…
IF IT'S THURSDAY, IT MUST BE LIFELINE Deemed a "metaphysical thriller," The Man Who Was Thursday is religious writer G.K. Chesterton's celebrated satire from 1908. Intentionally confou…
TOO MANY ACT(S) Even apocalypses, it seems, can be goofy, disruptive, and "meta" " if you go by Lookingglass Theatre Company's irritating and overlong world premiere. With two intermissions …
SHE STRIKES! SHE SCORES! WELL, BOWL ME OVER It's only women who perform, design, direct, write, and otherwise shape this Goodman Theatre world premiere. Rebecca Gilman's Twilight Bowl …