Review: Goodman Theatre’s Highway Patrol Is a Thought-Provoking Story About Online Friendship
“The truth is, I needed to know I could love someone.” That’s all so many of us want—to love and to feel loved. That can look a number of different […]
Review: How Will the World End? Fire, Ice or Water? In Flood at Shattered Globe, the Answer Is Water
Shattered Globe Theatre’s new play, Flood, is about family issues—parents who don’t understand their children, children who never call home, elderly parents who ignore the realities of today’s world. There may […]
Review: Champion at the Lyric Defines Opera in Jazz With Story of Boxer Emile Griffith
Champion is the story of welterweight boxer Emile Griffith’s career in boxing with a life-defining fatal bout in 1962 against Benny “Kid” Paret. I believe that an opera in jazz […]
Dispatch: Puppet Theater Festival Closes With Puppetry Comic, Joyful, Grim and Gorgeous
Puppets have stories to tell. And they tell them in all sorts of fanciful and humanistic ways. The 6th annual Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival has come to an end […]
Dispatch: International Puppet Theater Festival Kicks Off With Variety of Puppetry Styles and Formats
The 6th Annual International Puppet Theater Festival is under way in Chicago and we have a few brief reviews to whet your appetite for your own puppetry experiences. The festival […]
Review: Porchlight’s Anything Goes—Delightful… Delovely
Get your tickets and grab your seats. On the relatively small stage at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, Porchlight Music Theatre is putting on a big, big show: […]
Review: Mother Courage at Trap Door Theatre Brings Brecht’s Anti-War Rhetoric Home to the 21st Century
Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 play, Mother Courage and Her Children, is the greatest anti-war play of all time. Anti-war, anti-government and anti-capitalism, as we learn in the opening scene of this stirring […]
Preview: Count Down the Days (6!) to the 6th Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival
A revolt of the animals to save the planet. The adventures of a marooned astronaut. The creation of an Afro-futurist Pinocchio. A monster who can’t scare a scaredycat. Urban youth […]
Review: A Harlem Reverie in Sugar Hill: the Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker
Harlem. The name evokes a sense of place, time, and for some, the halcyon days of the Harlem Renaissance. Sugar Hill is a section of Harlem where the strivers lived, […]
Review: Northlight Theatre Brings Thrilling Murder Mystery to the Holiday Season with Dial M for Murder
Money, fear, jealousy, revenge, and protecting someone you love. These are the five top motives for murder, according to Maxine Hadley (Elizabeth Laidlaw), a murder mystery writer who is about […]
Review: Cirque du Soleil Performs a Holiday Thrill Ride in ‘Twas the Night Before
As we were making our way to the Chicago Theatre on Thursday, my friend asked me how I thought Cirque du Soleil was going to pull off their feats of […]
Review: Boop! The Betty Boop Musical Sizzles Thanks to Its Star—But Its Plot Fizzles
What do you say about a priceless diamond in a shabby setting? That it shines brilliantly, no thanks to what surrounds it—a dull distraction than can, by contrast, sometimes make […]