First Floor Theater brings something strange but not altogether original with its debut of Evanston Salt Costs Rising, written by Succession writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Will Arbery and directed […]
This Avalanche Theatre world premiere, at the Bramble Arts Loft, might win the Adam Kaz Critic Award for Year’s Coolest Title. Time Is a Color and the Color Is Blue by […]
Some debut novels confidently announce a fresh, fully realized voice. Others are a little uneven and wear their amateurishness obviously. I’m afraid Greg Hewett’s debut No Names belongs to the […]
The script of Sam Shepard’s romantic drama Fool For Love begins with the stage direction, “This play is be performed relentlessly, without a break.” The superb actors at Steppenwolf Theatre […]
The holidays are a weird time for critics. We stand by mouths agape as an entire nation, again, infantilizes itself with saccharine songs and schmaltzy movies. Critics in December who […]
Who would’ve thought two 19th-century German nerds could cause such a stir? When Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm compiled their nation’s folklore in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales they sparked two centuries […]
Short stories exist in the literary world somewhere between the novel and the dirty joke. Their readers want the accouterments of a novel delivered in the most expedient, gut-punchy way […]
Misery might be the Stephen King novel best suited for a theatrical adaptation. Not only because its single-bedroom setting makes it decidedly stage-sized, but also because its two main characters […]
Let’s simplify and take all the phrases critics could use for Field of Flesh—surrealist, experimental, avant garde, etc.—and put them under the umbrella term “weird theater.” You know, it’s the […]
In Chicago theater, the return of a great—not to mention famous—ensemble actor to the Steppenwolf Theatre Company is an event exciting enough to register on the Richter scale. Particularly when […]
Melodrama gets a bum rap. It’s silly, the cynics say, unrealistic, it’s too much. But when melodrama is done well there’s nothing else like it. The genre appeals to the […]
Some properties exist on a Wheel of Fortune spinner of adaptations. The Producers was a movie, then a musical, then a movie. Mean Girls lived the same life. Beetlejuice has […]