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 of the […]
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 Cynthia Erivo […]
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 original co-star […]
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 play with […]
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 for the Marriott […]
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 this five-week […]
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 of the […]
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 no, Cher […]
—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 & Teller), […]
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 to have […]
Welcome to Stage Shorts, our feature that highlights current plays at Chicago’s storefront theaters. It’s our way of covering more of Chicago’s theatrical productions and giving you more choices in the plays […]
Sometimes you see a familiar play, one that you’ve seen many times, and it gains new power because of the casting and staging or the mood created by the director. I felt […]
