Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s dystopian novel, was considered science fiction when it was published in 1949. Almost 70 years later, in an era of alternative facts and so-called fake news, […]
Were you left a little wanting when Wizard World wrapped up at the end of August? A little bit sad that C2E2 won’t pop up till spring, and can’t wait for […]
Deirdre of the Sorrows by John Millington Synge is based on the Irish legend of Deirdre, set in ancient times in the Irish kingdom of Ulster. City Lit Theater is […]
September is a hectic month for theater in Chicago. Although summer is no longer the slow season it used to be, September sees a lot of season openers and just […]
Robert O’Hara’s Barbecue is not a treatise on meat-grilling. It’s a satire that roasts our attitudes about race, class and money. It’s a funny, biting family story with a twisty, […]
Presented at the Athenaeum Theatre by Black Button Eyes Productions, Shockheaded Peter presents a series of gruesome vignettes adapted from a German book entitled The Struwwelpeter, written in 1845 by […]
The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity is about pro wrestling in all its pounding, banging, slamming, kicking performance art glory. It’s loud and obnoxious. And much of the play that […]
If the crux of your musical’s story centers around its 13-year-old protagonist’s attempted suicide, it may be best to forgo an Act II opener that dresses its young cast in […]
It is no small undertaking to decide to adapt Charles Baudelaire’s seminal 19th century volume of poetry, Les fleurs du mal. Some may find its sheer length and poetic complexity daunting, […]
The play opens with a symphony of switchboard operators, those 1920s-era office workers who kept people talking by plugging phones into jacks, greeting and connecting the world outside with the […]
What if Edgar Allen Poe, a new student and earnest young writer at the University of Virginia, went to Monticello in July 1826 to help Thomas Jefferson with an important […]
It’s been almost 50 years since I saw Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical at the old Shubert Theatre in Chicago. But I sat in the Mercury Theater Friday night […]