You read Romeo & Juliet in high school. You saw Much Ado About Nothing one summer at the park. Even if you’ve never seen (or read) them, cultural references to Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello […]

Adam Strauss sits on an empty stage next to a table loaded with glasses of water. He speaks plaintively to us about his ongoing internal monologue about which MP3 player […]

First of all, there’s the bar. Jeffrey D. Kmiec’s design of Hank’s Bar is a classic and so realistic you will want to park on a stool and order a […]

There are no children in Lucy Kirkwood’s play, The Children. The play’s storyline is built on “the disaster,” which we don’t learn the nature of immediately. The disaster was an explosion […]

It’s been a pretty epic April and May for anyone who belongs to the “nerd” tribe. We had a great (if overstuffed at times) C2E2, Star Wars Celebration at McCormick […]

In some ways Cirque du Soleil really is the circus of the sun. It rotates its shows around the globe each year (there are currently over 20 active productions, 12 […]

We never actually meet Jack and Neal. They’re just off stage, just around the bend, at a booth in the corner of the bar. But the spirit and poetry of […]

At a typical (however one defines that) performance at Lyric Opera of Chicago, the accompanying program includes in each cast and crew bio the professional’s previous Lyric credits. The asterisks […]

  It’s my controversial opinion that you can’t ever truly “spoiler” something. If the work is of worth, then the journey to the ending will render it impactful even if […]

By June Sawyers “Call me Ishmael.” Even if you have never read the novel, you know the sentence, one of the most famous opening lines in American literature. But Jake […]

Another in our series of recap reviews for plays that have just opened in some of Chicago’s storefront theaters. Here we have two very different plays but each focuses on […]

Love, Chaos & Dinner is not another night of Grubhub and Netflix, but a true night out on the town for Chicagoans and tourists starting July 18. What does Chicago need […]