Linda, the Steep Theatre production of Penelope Skinner’s 2015 play, is entertaining and poignant, cataloging the life and career of the successful brand strategist for a beauty company. Robin Witt’s smart […]
Playwright William Inge is considered a quintessential midwestern writer. Born in Kansas, he worked in Kansas and Missouri, and died (by suicide) in Hollywood. His 1955 play Bus Stop is one […]
Every now and then, when I’m feeling particularly down, I’ll queue up this segment from the 2016 Tony Awards: a performance from the 2015 revival of The Color Purple featuring […]
Ubiquitous big-budget bad guy Michael Shannon returns to his roots, his theater company, his kind of town in the remount of A Red Orchid’s Victims of Duty. He reunites with […]
Last weekend in Spring Green, I saw the Ionesco play, Exit the King, an absurdist but moving play about death and mortality. My first night at home, I attended another […]
Spring Green is an arts center in nearby south central Wisconsin that’s easily accessible to Chicagoans interested in theater and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. In a long weekend, […]
There are lots of dynamic duos—Batman and Robin, peanut butter and jelly, Italian beef and fries. Now there’s murder and dancing. Murder for Two is a horse of a different color […]
As the Goodman Theatre opens Pamplona, a one-man show starring Stacy Keach as an aging, rambling Ernest Hemingway, the production’s primary claim to fame may be its rough road to […]
One of the missions of theater is to tell untold stories, as Elizabeth Lovelady points out in her director’s note for Sickle, the new production at Red Theater. The story […]
Search the Chicago theater listings far and wide this summer and you will find very few productions with two 50-something women at the center of the production, if any (and […]
—Last month, I was at Chicago Shakespeare Theater to see Macbeth, a brooding, dark tale produced at the Yard, their newest and most versatile stage. Co-directed by Teller (of Penn […]
Since it first premiered in 2003, the hot-button topics of the puppet-based musical, Avenue Q, seem to have only become hotter and hotter. Racism, homophobia, even post-graduate, millennial strife seem […]