Steep Theatre’s world premiere play, Happy Days Are Here (Again) replays a familiar story (sexual abuse in the Catholic Church) and introduces a new one (a Palestinian adapting to American teen life) […]
Playwright Eugene Lee’s East Texas Hot Links takes place in 1955 in the piney woods of East Texas. It was the year that Emmett Till was murdered and the Klan […]
Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 began as something quite special, the brainchild of composer, lyricist and playwright Dave Malloy and originally staged in experimental venues off-Broadway (including, […]
When Barbara Gaines founded Chicago Shakespeare Theater in 1986, the first production held on the rooftop of Lincoln Park’s Red Lion Pub was Henry V, the story of a young […]
There has been a lot of discourse on the survival of opera companies in America. Even the revered Met has met criticisms for everything from the artistic direction and performance […]
The poetic title of Rebeca Aleman’s play, The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon, may delude you into thinking her play is a sweet love story. But don’t expect a romcom […]
Review written by Erin Ryan. Light Switch, written by Dave Osmundsen and directed by Michael D. Graham, is the nonlinear journey of an autistic gay man, Henry, on his quest for […]
Let’s simplify and take all the phrases critics could use for Field of Flesh—surrealist, experimental, avant garde, etc.—and put them under the umbrella term “weird theater.” You know, it’s the […]
First Date, directed by Christina Ramirez, with a script by Austin Winsberg, slams us with all the goofs and hiccups of modern dating, which, without the bubbly, rambunctious soundtrack and […]
If you lived in Chicago during the Richard M. Daley years, you lived in what I call, the real Chicago. We were a bare-knuckled city where people were born with […]
I saw myself as a character on the stage at the Den Theatre. It was weird and exhilarating to see the everyday struggles of a young Black woman making her […]
Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth takes us back 40-some years … to an era when heavy-duty drugs were not only a path to pleasure (and sometimes pain) but the coinage of […]