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.
If you’re a Kurt Vonnegut reader, Happy Birthday, Wanda June will sound familiar. I was sure I had read it long ago when I was devouring everything he wrote. But no, I never […]
In the madness of our daily lives, we may wish that we could abandon our devices and spend a week meditating in the woods and getting high on nature. We would return […]
Third Coast Review is initiating a rating system for our arts reviews. Starting later this week, our reviews of films, plays, games, albums and more will carry ratings of zero to four […]
The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh is a story of two Irish brothers, locked in a codependent relationship of affection and hatred (mostly the latter). Throughout the course of the 100-minute play by […]
Frankenstein opens with an exquisitely staged birthing scene. The Creature is shrouded in a sheer fabric sac, a metaphoric womb. He struggles to free himself and emerges naked, covered in scars and suture […]
The three plays I saw last weekend in New York provided insights into how theater works, and emphasized language and physicality. Two are one-person performances and the third strongly highlights a single […]
Tom Stoppard stirs up his personal brew of European political ideology, love, death and pop culture in his 2006 play, Rock and Roll, now on stage in a stirring production at the […]
Zürich by Amelia Roper at Steep Theatre is a tantalizing 105 minutes of tension, laced with some smart dialogue. Directed by Brad DeFabo Akin, the play’s five scenes are so cleverly constructed and interrelated […]
Mendoza, a thrillingly raw and earthy adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is being presented this week at Goodman Theatre in collaboration with the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance. This very graphic and bloody production […]
Theater history, immigration, censorship and persecution are some of the ingredients in Paula Vogel’s compelling play, Indecent, which just opened at Victory Gardens Theater. Gary Griffin directs a multitalented cast of nine […]
It’s Rome in 1922. In his play Naked, Luigi Pirandello, the Nobel Prize-winning author, concocts a puzzling tangle of death and passion. Directed by Kay Martinovich, Naked is now on stage at Trap […]
City Lit Theater’s new production of George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play, Arms and the Man, takes full advantage of its broad humor. Perhaps Shaw’s most frothy script, director Brian Pastor directs it with […]
