87 stories by "C.j. Fernandes"
TOWERING TALENT ELEVATES A MUSICAL AS SCHIZOPHRENIC AS JEKYLL & HYDE THEMSELVES Next up for Halloween, and my second gothic horror in as many days, is Kokandy Productions' presentation o…
A Bite Out of Minimalism: Timothy Griffin's imaginative adaptation turns Stoker's most chilling chapter into a voyage of dread, myth, and mind In 1897, Bram Stoker published a gothic horror …
YOU'RE NEVER GOING TO SEE A BETTER PRODUCTION OF THIS EVERGREEN MUSICAL. JUST BRING SOME CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM. How do you solve a problem like the schmaltz in The Sound of Music? Or even, how d…
ROXIE'S BACK IN TOWN! MY KIND OF PLAY, CHICAGO IS In Jazz Age Chicago, 1924 to be precise, Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner were tried and subsequently acquitted of murder. A young Tribune re…
A revolution without an end game misses the mark, but only by this much. Babes With Blades, a theatre company that uses stage combat to create striking, thought-provoking theatre, presents a…
A REVOLUTION LOST IN THE (BEAUTIFUL) NOISE Revolution(s) is the first Owen Theatre production of Goodman's centennial celebration. With a book by Zayd Ayers Dohrn and music and lyrics by mul…
A CIRCUS OF CULTURE, A CABARET OF CONSCIENCE: STEP RIGHT UP TO THE UNITED STATES OF ZINZANNI The gorgeous Art Deco Spielgeltent still sits on the fourteenth floor of the Cambria Hotel in the…
All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Â Â " Leo Tolstoy The most remarkable thing about Joel Drake Johnson's Four Places is how it prepares you …
DON'T KILL THE FATTED CALF JUST YET " THE PRODIGAL SON RETURNS EMPTY-HANDED "I was fifteen. Do you remember fifteen? For me, it was a special, beautiful room in Hell." That brilliant line op…
A BEAUTIFUL NIGHTMARE IN A HOUSE THAT BLEEDS ART As a fan of the horror genre in every medium, how could I resist the chance to review something as delightfully titled as House of the Exquis…
AN OAK WHOSE ROOTS WON'T LET GO A flashlight illuminating a face from below: what else could follow that image but a ghost story. And what better time for a ghost story than the month that c…
ON THE THIRD RAIL: STRONG ACTORS KEEP THIS DUTCHMAN FLYING The Trap Door Theatre is a quintessential Chicago storefront theatre " it's housed in a converted garage, accessed through a narrow…
SINK YOUR TEETH INTO THIS BLOODY CUT OF MEAT At some time in the future, a band of rebels have staged a successful coup against the United States. The prevailing system of order has been vio…
CARB-LOADERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! "For the gods know I speak this in hunger for bread…" Alright, so that's not from Julius Caesar but Coriolanus, that other Shakespeare play about a politi…
A thing of beauty is a joy forever. " John Keats Sleep-deprived and fortified with four cups of coffee, I hauled my cranky, cynical self on a Sunday morning to the Chicago Children's Theatre…
TWO CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR An aging, reclusive movie star strikes up a relationship with a struggling writer. It may sound familiar but this isn't Sunset Boulevard, more's the pit…
THREE WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL In 1978, five women gather in an upper-middle-class home in Karaj, Iran, to primp and prepare themselves; one of them is getting married and being that they are …
WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY Late in the first act of Lauren Gunderson's The Book of Will, a character makes an impassioned plea to her husband, John Heminges, one of William Shakespea…
NOBODY PUTS THIS BABY IN A CORNER A set doesn't get any sparser than the one for Gangsta Baby, in the sense that there isn't one. You step in off the street into a basement with two dozen ch…
TAKE A TRIP DOWN THIS RABBIT HOLE Coping with familial grief has long been fertile ground for theatre, from Rabbit Hole to Hamlet to Antigone, performed almost 2500 years ago at the birth of…
A STAR VEHICLE ON THE ROAD TO FRANCIS GUINAN I confess to some amount of trepidation as I settled into my seat at the Goodman Theatre, launching its centennial season with the world premiere…
A CLIFFHANGER For the Midwest premiere of TL;DR: Thelma Louise: Dyke Remix, a rock musical by Ellarose Chary (book & lyrics) and Brandon James Gwinn (music and lyrics), the entirety of t…
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE… Early in the proceedings of Things with Friends, the new play by Kristoffer Diaz (Hell's Kitchen, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity) a character dismisses an…
WHO NEEDS A HEALTHY CORTEX WHEN YOU'VE GOT THIRTY-TWO SHOWSTOPPERS? The urge to create has served as a muse for countless forms of art: literature, opera, film, and theatre are littered with…
The circus is in town! The entrance to the Cambria Hotel on West Randolph Street in Chicago is so nondescript as to be almost invisible. Barely wider than its revolving door, you could walk …
