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.
Della’s Sweets is an adorable little cake shop somewhere in North Carolina. Winston is mentioned, which is what locals call Winston-Salem. The shop is pink and white, filled with cakes, and shepherded […]
Yvonne Zipter, poet and Portage Park resident, is spreading her love for poetry in a creative way. She has placed “poetry machines” in two neighborhood venues. Customers can drop 50 cents in […]
A middle-aged woman, her boyfriend and her teenaged son—all in one small apartment. That sounds like a formula for trouble and so it proves to be in William Inge’s Natural Affection. The […]
The calendar says it’s spring, even though the weather doesn’t. But it was time to hit the beach anyway. That is, the Jersey Shore. We spent four days last week in the […]
Paul (Joel Reitsma) is a rock star, with rock star habits and ego. He’s now in Moscow, nearing the end of a long tour and faced with going home to London. He […]
Tennessee Williams has been a local favorite for decades, ever since December 27, 1944, when Claudia Cassidy, the fearsome Chicago Tribune theater critic, said Williams turned the theater “into a place of […]
Round Heads and Pointed Heads is a cavalcade of political events and characters, woven loosely (very loosely) into a Brechtian story of politics and money. Red Tape Theatre’s new production of Bertolt […]
How I Learned to Drive isn’t a play for the squeamish. It’s a disturbing and ultimately sad story about pedophilia, sexual abuse, drinking and driving. It illustrates how the predator sometimes gets […]
We sit through 60 minutes of ambiguity and tension—about what? When hang finally reveals (almost reveals) its essential point in the final 25 minutes, we are caught up in the conversation among […]
I love soup and tortilla soup is one of my favorites. When I’m in the Loop around lunchtime, I like to go to the Frontera Grill counter on the seventh floor of […]
Through the Elevated Line at Silk Road Rising is a play about a stranger in a new land. We meet Razi Gol (Salar Ardebili) as he arrives from Iran. We learn about […]
Cyrano, the new adaptation of Edmund Rostand’s poetic Cyrano de Bergerac, by Michael Hollinger and Aaron Posner, is lean and hilarious. The man with the famously large nose is played by Michael […]
