Review: The Adult in the Room Tells Nancy Pelosi’s Leadership Story
Politics. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. This article is a review of The Adult in the Room, a one-woman show about U.S. House Speaker […]
Review: House Theatre’s Verböten Adds a Lot of Heart to “Three Chords and the Truth”
The old rock trope says that punk music is “three chords and the truth.” That holds true for the fact-based story about a kid punk band from Evanston in the […]
Review: Court Theatre’s The Mousetrap Proves a Timelessly Enjoyable Murder Mystery
Perhaps best known as the longest-running play ever (notching north of 28,000 performances and counting), Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap has been continuously on stage in London’s West End since 1952. […]
Review: The Thrust of Once On This Island Is Gone, But the Heart, Wonder Remain
Just a few blocks north of the heart of Times Square and next door to the massive Gershwin Theatre (capacity: 1,900) is a more intimate space, an 800-seat theater built […]
Review: Females Seek Agency in Remy Bumppo’s Top Girls
Note: Top Girls was reviewed by Karin McKie and Kim Campbell on Women’s March weekend. Caryl Churchill wrote Top Girls in 1982, in the middle of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979-90 fraught, […]
Review: Shattered Globe’s Sheepdog Tells an All-Too-Familiar Story About Police Shootings
Alton Sterling. Laquan McDonald. Walter Scott. Michael Brown. Greg Gunn. Philando Castile. Some of those names might come to mind as you watch the tense, even-handed police thriller, Sheepdog, by […]
Review: The Gulf by About Face Theatre—Two Women Stuck in a Relationship—and a Fishing Boat
Two women on a fishing boat in the Alabama Delta. One casts and sometimes reels in…nothing. The other alternately suns, dozes and reads. It’s late afternoon on a hot, humid […]
Review: Sunday Evening Is an Entertaining Debut for Rose Valley Theatre Group
Rose Valley Theatre Group, Chicago’s newest theater company, makes its debut with the first English language production of Sunday Evening, a play by Zachary Karabashliev, a Bulgarian playwright. You might […]
2019 in Review: Our Favorite Nights at the Theater
This isn’t a “best theater of the year” list. As we’ve noted about past lists, we don’t see everything. Most of our writers are freelancers, all with other gigs, and […]
Review: The Raw World of 13-Year-Olds Comes Alive in Steppenwolf’s Dance Nation
There is dancing in Dance Nation, now at Steppenwolf Theatre. It’s sometimes clumsy, sometimes graceful, and generally amateurish. Clare Barron’s play is about a crew of 13-year-old girls (and a […]
Review: Theo Ubique’s Working Is a Musical Homage to the “Extraordinary Dreams of Ordinary People”
Working transforms Studs Terkel’s iconic 1974 book of interviews with American workers of all stripes into a musical revue that pays homage to the value of work and the pride […]
Review: Chicago’s History Flames Again in Burning Bluebeard by the Ruffians
As part of its 25th anniversary season, Porchlight Music Theatre is presenting the Ruffians’ indispensable Christmas show Burning Bluebeard. Inspired by the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire, Burning Bluebeard is hardly typical Christmas […]