Review, Stages, Theater

Review: Ingredients Don’t Add Up to Much for Refuge Theatre Project’s The Spitfire Grill

Spitfire Grill

Founded in 2014, the relatively new Refuge Theatre Project aspires to bring musical theater to creative spaces, accessible to broad audiences. It’s a commendable mission, and one the crowded Chicago […]

Lisa Trifone /
Stages, Theater

Playwright for the Trump Era? It’s Politics and Money in Brecht’s Round Heads & Pointed Heads at Red Tape

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 […]

Nancy S Bishop /
Stages, Theater

Disturbing Theater, 20 Years Later: How I Learned to Drive Is About Drinking, Driving and Sexual Abuse

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 […]

Nancy S Bishop /
Stages, Theater

Northlight’s Beauty Queen of Leenane A Quietly Devastating Dark Comedy

Northlight Theatre’s production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh’s quietly devastating dark comedy, takes place in the provincial town of Leenane. Directed by B.J. Jones, the Tony Award-winning […]

Brent Eickhoff /
Stages, Theater

Tension Builds as Ambiguity Becomes Retribution in hang at Remy Bumppo Theatre

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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 […]

Nancy S Bishop /
Review, Stages, Theater

An Enemy of the People Is a Well-Dressed Meditation on Politics and Human Nature

When I described the synopsis of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People to my date, he groaned. Politics, environmental crisis, public figures and large companies taking advantage of the little guy… […]

Emma Terhaar /
Review, Stages, Theater

Memes Become Scenes in Theater Wit’s Delicious Women Laughing Alone with Salad

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Playwright Sheila Callaghan (writer/producer of Showtime’s Shameless) morphs memes into scenes in the delicious Chicago premiere of Women Laughing Alone with Salad. Guy (Japhet Balaban) is EveryGuy, a dope-smoking dilettante […]

Karin McKie /
Review, Stages, Theater

Review: What Is and What Could Be at Court Theatre’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner

Last year, when it turned 50, the Stanley Kramer film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, marking it for preservation […]

Lisa Trifone /
Review, Stages, Theater

The Importance of Not Being Earnest Absent in Walkabout’s The Brink

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Writing teachers ask their fledgling essayists to answer the question: “So what? Why write this? What’s the point?” Theater artists also should have a similar rubric for plays. Walkabout’s music, […]

Karin McKie /
Stages, Theater

Through the Elevated Line at Silk Road Rising: Immigrants in the Strange Land of Chicago

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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 […]

Nancy S Bishop /
Stages, Theater

Swashbuckling Is in Style in Boho Theatre’s New Adaptation of Cyrano

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 […]

Nancy S Bishop /
Beyond, Event, Review, Stages

Review: Neil Tobin’s Near Death Experience at Rosehill Cemetery Mildly Amuses

Neil Tobin is a warm, funny man. He’s welcoming and doesn’t have a hard time putting people at ease. It’s a good quality to have in general, but especially important […]

Marielle Bokor /