Nancy Bishop is a Chicago native, who writes about things she loves, like theater, film, books, music, art and design. Nancy is 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. Nancy is editor and publisher and Stages editor of Third Coast Review.
The Gift Theatre’s eloquent new production of The Grapes of Wrath is a story of Dust Bowl migrants during the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it bears witness to many […]
Puck, the 19th century literary-political-humor magazine, was revolutionary in ridiculing everything about Gilded Age society through cartoons created by gifted artists of the period. With a Wink and a Nod: Cartoonists […]
The Unfortunates, staged by the new SoloChicago Theatre Company, is an excellent second outing from the company that produced the hit one-man show, Churchill, starring Ronald Keaton, in 2015. The Unfortunates […]
Aaron Siskind’s photographs are so painterly that you will at first mistake them for abstract expressionism. Of course, that’s what they are. The beautifully curated exhibit at the Art Institute of […]
Tapped, a Treasonous Musical Comedy, is a frothy approach to political satire, featuring tap dancing spies and snitches, a six-piece live band, and songs with refrains like “Everybody loves a whistleblower,” “Your […]
Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the “baby killer,” the man tried, convicted and executed for the 1932 kidnapping of the Charles Lindbergh baby, is vividly personified by George Seegebrecht in City Lit Theater’s […]
Constellations, the new two-character play at Steppenwolf Theatre, is certainly a nonlinear story. Marianne (Jessie Fisher) and Roland (Jon Michael Hill) at times seem to be in parallel universes. She, an academic […]
The struggles of single parenthood and the dread of losing a child cause the worlds of Conor (Dan Waller) and Susan (Jodi Kingsley) to spin out of control in the tense 75-minute play, […]
The Body of an American at Stage Left Theatre is a fact-based play haunted by visions of war and the ghosts that lurk in its shadows. Canadian war reporter/photographer Paul Watson (Don […]
Photos by Evan Hanover. Haymarket: The Anarchist’s Songbook takes us on a visit to a tragic but inspiring moment in Chicago history and does it with a bang-up band of actors and […]
There’s just a rectangular metal table, two chairs—and intelligent discussion. An electronic screen high up on the back wall blinks us through the 13 scenes. One door. No color, no ornament. You […]
If Rahm Emanuel solved all his critical problems and had time to think about something really important, he might decide Chicago needs a poet laureate. If so, there would only be […]
