Review: At Raven Theatre, Will Hank’s Bar Survive The Undeniable Sound of Right Now?
First of all, there’s the bar. Jeffrey D. Kmiec’s design of Hank’s Bar is a classic and so realistic you will want to park on a stool and order a […]
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: There Are No Children in The Children at Steppenwolf Theatre—It’s a Cautionary Tale
There are no children in Lucy Kirkwood’s play, The Children. The play’s storyline is built on “the disaster,” which we don’t learn the nature of immediately. The disaster was an explosion […]
Review: The Beats and WannaBeats on the Road in Mad Beat Hip & Gone at Promethean Theatre
We never actually meet Jack and Neal. They’re just off stage, just around the bend, at a booth in the corner of the bar. But the spirit and poetry of […]
Stage Shorts: Broken Nose Theatre and First Floor Theater Plus a Tantalizing Preview for Reverse Gossip
Another in our series of recap reviews for plays that have just opened in some of Chicago’s storefront theaters. Here we have two very different plays but each focuses on […]
Review: Babes With Blades Stages Masterful All-Female Othello
Babes With Blades Theatre Company is performing Shakespeare’s Othello with a talented all-female cast at the Factory Theater. The cast is all female, trans, and gender-nonconforming. This otherwise-traditional production demonstrates that with […]
Review: Steep Theatre’s First Love Is the Revolution Gives Us a Different Skew on Love
Heartbreaking and hilarious. Both at the same time. First Love Is the Revolution at Steep Theatre is a classic romance where two young people break from their warring families to be […]
Review: Shattered Globe’s Hannah and Martin, an Intellectual Romance and Ideological Battle
Hannah Arendt is having a moment. There’s renewed interest in this brilliant 20th century political philosopher, probably best known for her writing on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel, published […]
Review: Cambodian Rock Band Mixes Joyous Cambodian Rock Music and a Genocide Story
Cambodia’s violent and genocidal past doesn’t sound like a story that will have you leaving the theater smiling. But Lauren Yee manages to create a small miracle with her brave, […]
Review: Holter’s Lottery Day Tells a Colorful Story of What’s Right and What’s Wrong with Chicago
Lottery Day is a party with a guest list of nine. Mallory (a sizzling J. Nicole Brooks) has invited them to her back yard to celebrate, but no one knows what […]
New York Review: The Cradle Will Rock, a Depression-Era Operetta That Creaks With Age
The Cradle Will Rock is a Depression-era operetta about union organizing, class tensions and anti-capitalist fervor in 1930s Steeltown. Classic Stage Company and director John Doyle have created a lively rendition […]
New York Reviews: Powerful Performances in The Mother, Julius Caesar, King Lear
The Mother at Atlantic Theater Company I sat down in my front row seat at Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater in an old church in Chelsea. Fiddled with my coat and notebook. […]
New York Museums: Frida Kahlo at the Brooklyn Museum—Obsession With Self-Image; Plus MAD
The Brooklyn Museum is a grand art museum housed in an 1893 building designed by McKim, Mead and White. You enter the museum, not through its 19th century Beaux Arts […]