Linda, the Steep Theatre production of Penelope Skinner’s 2015 play, is entertaining and poignant, cataloging the life and career of the successful brand strategist for a beauty company. Robin Witt’s smart […]
Playwright William Inge is considered a quintessential midwestern writer. Born in Kansas, he worked in Kansas and Missouri, and died (by suicide) in Hollywood. His 1955 play Bus Stop is one […]
Every now and then, when I’m feeling particularly down, I’ll queue up this segment from the 2016 Tony Awards: a performance from the 2015 revival of The Color Purple featuring […]
Ubiquitous big-budget bad guy Michael Shannon returns to his roots, his theater company, his kind of town in the remount of A Red Orchid’s Victims of Duty. He reunites with […]
Last weekend in Spring Green, I saw the Ionesco play, Exit the King, an absurdist but moving play about death and mortality. My first night at home, I attended another […]
There are lots of dynamic duos—Batman and Robin, peanut butter and jelly, Italian beef and fries. Now there’s murder and dancing. Murder for Two is a horse of a different color […]
As the Goodman Theatre opens Pamplona, a one-man show starring Stacy Keach as an aging, rambling Ernest Hemingway, the production’s primary claim to fame may be its rough road to […]
One of the missions of theater is to tell untold stories, as Elizabeth Lovelady points out in her director’s note for Sickle, the new production at Red Theater. The story […]
Search the Chicago theater listings far and wide this summer and you will find very few productions with two 50-something women at the center of the production, if any (and […]
—Last month, I was at Chicago Shakespeare Theater to see Macbeth, a brooding, dark tale produced at the Yard, their newest and most versatile stage. Co-directed by Teller (of Penn […]
Since it first premiered in 2003, the hot-button topics of the puppet-based musical, Avenue Q, seem to have only become hotter and hotter. Racism, homophobia, even post-graduate, millennial strife seem […]
Ellen Fairey knows Chicago. She knows and replicates its sights, sounds and cultural wrinkles in Support Group for Men at the Goodman Theatre, directed by Kimberly Senior. For 95 minutes, Fairey […]