Musical theater nerds in Chicago are lucky to have Porchlight Theatre—if the venerable company (now in its 27th year) didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. Besides mounting full productions of three separate musicals a year, Porchlight also presents regular…
Last year, the Lyric Opera presented a dazzling production of The Magic Flute originally conceived for Berlin’s Komische Oper by Australian director Barrie Kosky. Now, the Lyric is at it again with the English language and North American premier of…
Joseph Kesselring’s 1941 Arsenic and Old Lace is a familiar property, frequently revived and indelibly captured on film in Frank Capra’s 1944 movie starring Cary Grant. Its popularity is well deserved. A classic mid-century American farce, it has more than…
A funny thing happened in the New York theater scene in 1999: two new musicals, with the same name and based on the same source material, debuted in the same year: The Wild Party. One was on Broadway by Michael…
In 1907, John Millington Synge’s landmark Playboy of the Western World caused riots everywhere it premiered—Dublin, New York, and even, eventually, here in Chicago. Irish patriots claimed the play portrayed the Irish peasantry as violent, foolish and amoral. What’s more,…
I’ll keep this short – but it won’t be sweet. The Goodman Theatre’s production of Toronto playwright Britta Johnson’s freshman musical Life After starts promisingly, with an absolutely spectacular set and a lively cast. But it soon becomes apparent that…
On April 23, 1961, superstar Judy Garland launched yet another of her legendary comebacks and appeared on stage at Carnegie Hall. Subsequently called “the Greatest Night in Showbiz,” her performance riveted the star-filled (Richard Burton, Noel Coward, Bette Davis, Marilyn…
There are two ways to tell history: the Big Men, Big Events timeline that Henry Ford once called “just one damn thing after another” and a more involving, intimate option that observes the daily lives of people—hopes, disappointments and breakfasts…
Let’s get this out of the way: I like Alyssa Edwards. She’s one of my favorite drag queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race. She stands out as one of the most charismatic, likable, entertaining personalities to ever come out of the…
Just over 130 years ago, when the German Empire was young and the 19th century was old, the German expressionist playwright Frank Wedekind wrote eine Kindertragödie (the play’s subtitle) called Frühlings Erwachen—“Spring Awakening.” Wedekind’s play was a frontal assault on…
Back in 2020, comedy icon Carol Burnett was scheduled to bring her one-woman show, “An Evening of Reflection and Laughter,” to the equally iconic Chicago Theatre. Then a global pandemic came along, and everyone took a raincheck. Thursday night, Burnett…
More than 80 years ago, Hungary’s most famous playwright not named Ferenc Molnar wrote a little comedy called Parfumerie, all about a fancy cosmetic shop and the clerks who work there. Featuring one of the most adorable pairs of battling…
It’s 1958, and host Jack Paar has brought his Tonight Show to Los Angeles at the behest of NBC President Bob Sarnoff to conduct a simple test: can a live TV talk show be successfully produced from the West Coast?…
Hell in a Handbag’s New York-bound revival of its 2019 production The Drag Seed has lots to say about LGBTQ culture and the advances that have been made in the last 40 years. From literally fighting for our lives in the ‘80s…
Few 20th century works of art have inspired as many adaptations as Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 science fiction classic Solaris: three films, four operas, five plays and an eponymous Hungarian rock band, among others. The most recent stage version, by David…
When asked how to talk about scary news with small children, Fred Rogers famously repeated his mother’s advice: “look for the helpers.” Come from Away, the Tony-nominated musical that opened its Chicago run at the Cadillac Palace Wednesday night, takes…
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