The performances feel as fresh as they were over a decade ago & stack up well against the star-studded originals. TYLER FAUNTLEROY gives Hamilton galvanic, powerhouse vocals & a swagger matc…
In Chicago Shakespeare's violent, bloody, overstuffed freight train of a production, the traditionally heroic King Henry V is a symbol of unchecked nationalism. Henry VThrough 10/6: Tue 7 PM…
Being a musician can be a lonely business. Want even a wisp of a prayer of making it into one of the world's professional classical orchestras? Be prepared to spend five hours or more a day"…
The sexual round-robin that swirls through the heart of composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim's lilting masterpiece A Little Night Music is set in motion by regrets over paths both taken and no…
The Enigmatist run time is officially 95 minutes, but you'll want to get there a solid half hour early so you can crack the codes in the "puzzle garden" that greets audiences on the sixth-fl…
The galvanic power of language to create and destroy is easy to take for granted. Language defines how we think, how others perceive us, and how we engage with the world. So what happens whe…
It's been too long since actor/director/writer/singer/dancer/Obama media strategist Paul Oakley Stovall dedicated his prolific talents to Chicago's theater community. A regular on stages her…
Editor's Note: Since all the plays presented in Hamburgers & Disappointment are for two people, we thought it made some sense to have two critics writing about the festival. Capacity and…
Brooklyn Laundry is a deceptive show: It begins with a meet-cute and briefly lulls you into the sense that it will unspool as something of a rom-com. But playwright John Patrick Shanley isn'…
I've seen Jersey Boys at least six times, which I mention not as a flex but for context. It's a fantastic show, but over the years the various productions have blurred together and become in…
When Harry Milas makes a royal flush materialize from the chaos of a deck we just inarguably saw shuffled at the hands of several of his 35 audience members, it's not magic. Instead, he expl…
Steppenwolf has long had a way with wildly dysfunctional family dramas. From Anton Chekhov's Seagull to Sam Shepard's True West to Tracy Letts's August: Osage County, the off-Loop institutio…
It's totally easy to make fun of the 1980s. Shoulder pads you could poke an eye out with. Leg warmers over fishnets. The elevation of Bret Easton Ellis into a literary celebrity. But it was …
Longtime cabaret chanteuse Meghan Murphy has always had an outsize stage persona. For years her "Big Red" shows (the name refers to both Murphy's supermodel stature and flaming red hair) hav…
Teatro ZinZanni Presents: Love, Chaos, & Dinner has been a reliably entertaining fantasia of top-tier circus hijinks since it debuted here way back in the before times of 2019. (For a fe…
I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen Stephen Sondheim's appallingly timely tale of U.S. assassins (and wannabe assassins) since it premiered in 1990. I can tell you that Theo's produ…
At first, it seems like a match made in heaven. Or rather, Mount Olympus. But marriages between goddesses and mortals are complicated, and throughout Greek myth, their unions are defined by …
Three actors play more than 50 characters over a span of some 160 years in the TimeLine Theatre/Broadway in Chicago collaboration on the epic drama The Lehman Trilogy. But it's not daunting …
The titular showgirl in Gypsy isn't necessarily Gypsy Rose Lee, the reluctant vaudeville child star who"per the "musical fable" from Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Jule Styne (score) and Arthur …
Sometimes more didactic than dramatically sound, Ella Hickson's The Writer remains enraging and engaging as it offers a graphic crash course in the perils of playwriting while female. And, f…
At the crux of writer/director Kareem Fahmy's promising but incomplete drama is a father and a daughter, whose relationship is cruelly subject to the seemingly random structures of immigrati…
Pippin was a forerunner in the big swing of musical theater away from the happy-ever-after era that defined the genre's "golden age." The 1972 show by Stephen Schwartz (music) and Roger O. H…
The dramaturgy displays alone for Mercury Theater Chicago's Big River, based on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, taught me more about Mark Twain's 1830s-set, biting antislavery novel than I l…
The woods are leaf-free spires of light, Cinderella's sisters are outfitted in bad 80s prom dresses, and Rapunzel's coil of blonde hair is a rope in the national touring production of Into t…
The devil goes down to Washington (D.C.) in the 1955 musical Damn Yankees, and he's rarely been more irresistible than in his current incarnation at the Marriott Lincolnshire. Damn Y…