Meet the 3CR Staff: Nancy Bishop, Editor in Chief and Theater Critic
“When I was in high school we came here. I was in a girl gang at Steinmetz High School, and I was the only one who drove, so four or […]
Review: Ingredients Don’t Add Up to Much for Refuge Theatre Project’s The 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Tension Builds as Ambiguity Becomes Retribution in hang at Remy Bumppo Theatre
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 […]
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… […]
Memes Become Scenes in Theater Wit’s Delicious Women Laughing Alone with Salad
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 […]
Review: What Is and What Could Be at Court Theatre’s 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 […]
The Importance of Not Being Earnest Absent in Walkabout’s The Brink
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, […]
Through the Elevated Line at Silk Road Rising: Immigrants in the Strange Land of Chicago
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 […]
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 […]