Review: Choir Boy at Steppenwolf Is a Splendid Spectacle With a Flawed Script
It’s not easy growing up as a gay Black boy. Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play Choir Boy is the story of Pharus, a high school senior at the Charles R. Drew Prep School […]
Nancy S. Bishop is publisher and Stages editor of Third Coast Review. She’s a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and a 2014 Fellow of the National Critics Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. You can read her personal writing on pop culture at nancybishopsjournal.com, and follow her on Twitter @nsbishop. She also writes about film, books, art, architecture and design.
Review: Two Exhibits Feature Work of Ukrainian Modernist Michel Andreenko
The work of Michel Andreenko, a Ukrainian émigré modernist painter and stage designer, is featured in two exhibits at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. The main exhibit in the West Gallery—Michel […]
Review: In Lost Illusions, a Young Poet Learns the Brutal World of Media and Criticism in 1800s Paris
It’s an old story: an ambitious young man leaves the provinces for the big city to seek fame and instead finds heartache, corruption and disillusion. In Lost Illusions, Lucien (the […]
Review: In a Storm of Silliness, Theater Wit’s Hurricane Diane Demands That We Care About Climate Change
Dionysus/Diane has messages for us. The messages we continue to ignore about the serious dangers that climate change portends for our future—and more importantly, for the futures of our children […]
Review: Steep Theatre’s Paris Is a Workplace Tragicomedy With a Family Feeling
Paris is a workplace comedy or more accurately, a tragicomedy. It’s tinged with sadness, tainted with racism and with the despair of workers in low-paying, dead-end jobs. It’s set during Christmas […]
Nightmare on Huron Street: Seven Hours in the ER
Yep. ER = Emergency Room. Not a place you want to spend time but if you have to go there, be prepared—to spend time. I had a late night medical […]
Review: Relative, a Genuinely Chicago Film, Tells the Story of a Rogers Park Family Going Through Change
Relative weaves together the stories of a Rogers Park family–the progressive parents, their adult children and their children–as change affects them all.
Review: Eclectic Full Contact Theatre’s Blithe Spirit Is a Frothy Comedy for a Summer Outing
Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward, a story of ghosts and seances set in a posh English home.
Theater Memories: RIP House Theatre of Chicago and So Many More
We learned this week that House Theatre of Chicago, a 21-year-old company, will cease to exist this summer. House will formally wind down its operations now that its North American […]
Review: Raven Theatre Stages The Luckiest, a Play About Love and Family—With an Ironic Title
The Luckiest is the ironic title of a superb play by Melissa Ross, now on stage at Raven Theatre. It’s a play about family, love and relationships and how they matter, […]
Review: To Kill a Mockingbird Isn’t Your Parents’ Mockingbird, But It Tells a Powerful Story
Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird is not the same story you read in high school or reread last year. It’s not the award-winning film you saw many years ago. In adapting Mockingbird for the […]
Review: In After the Blast, a Play About Environmental Disaster, a Robot Named Arthur Steals the Show
Zoe Kazan’s play After the Blast is set a few generations in the future—underground. An environmental disaster has made “upstairs” unlivable and some people were able to escape to a new below-ground […]