100 stories by "Jack Helbig"
What a difference nine years makes. When Paul Slade Smith's witty, political farce, then called A Real Lulu, premiered in the summer of 2015 at the Peninsula Players in Door Country, Wiscons…
In the program for Pulse Theatre Chicago's world premiere production of Beneath the Willow Tree, playwright Isis Elizabeth tells us a little about the origins of her play. Begun during the p…
When legend becomes fact, musicalize the legend (to paraphrase John Ford). Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone follow this strategy again and again over the course of their rousing 1969 musical …
Collaboraction began in the late nineties as a tiny, itinerant, non-Equity theater company, performing low-budget productions of contemporary American plays. Over the years the company has g…
For those of us who know and love Shakespeare mostly for his most popular plays"the often produced comedies, tragedies, and histories"Pericles is a hard play to warm up to. Pericles's story …
Because theater lovers love to be dramatic, we constantly divide shows into hits and flops, shows that soar and shows that don't. But what about all those mid shows"shows that sometimes ente…
In the late 80s and early 90s, Del Close, in the workshops he taught at iO, used to talk about slowing improv down, not forcing things, and allowing the scenes, characters, and eventually…
Usually in productions of Romeo & Juliet, the craziest character in the play is the clever, word-drunk, not-quite-right-in-his-head Mercutio. It is Mercutio, after all, who delivers t…
The term "jukebox musical" is usually used in contempt to describe a musical revue with no book and no character development"just a collection of popular songs plopped on the stage, sung by …
When Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller died at 39 of pneumonia on December 15, 1943, while riding a train from LA to Chicago, he left behind a legacy as a popular singer, composer, and performing …
Orlando-based playwright Ashleigh Ann Gardner's fascinating science-fiction play is set in a dystopian future, in a high-tech bunker where a scientist and her AI companion (really just a dis…
"Any idiot can face a crisis," Russian playwright Anton Chekhov wrote in one of his cheerier moods. "It's this day-to-day living that wears you out." Actually, the quote may belong to anothe…
Based on the life experiences of Sonny Mills's great-aunt, Agnete Ottosen, in Denmark before, during, and after the Nazi occupation, The Danish Play tries to pack way too much into its nearl…
MPAACT resident writer Shepsu Aakhu does something remarkable in this gentle, metaphysical play. He creates a world that successfully blends ritual and realism without succumbing to the weak…
Some shows age well, some don't. You'd think a silly 74-year-old musical comedy like Guys and Dolls, with its cartoonish characters and sitcom plotlines (like, gambler makes a bet he can't g…
Under the best of circumstances, it would be hard to make this 1983 musical soar. The story by playwright Sybille Pearson about three prosperous white, middle-class couples coping with pregn…
Written and directed by Grant Batdorff, this satire of spy thrillers for Two Chairs Theatre at the Annoyance begins with a bang: a wry, spot-on parody of those bombastic title sequences popu…
Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is an iconic play that lives up to its reputation. Solidly written, packed with vivid characters and terrific dialogue, the play may run nea…
William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin's 2005 musical about a swarm of blooming, buzzing tween-age lexophiles began life as a fully improvised play, C-R-E-P-U-S-C-U-L-E, created by Rebecca Feldman…
The title of the show is an overstatement. Yes, the show does have west coast roots; the particular version of long-form used in the show was developed at the LA-based, Second City"influence…
If you wanted an example of a pretty well-structured contemporary American play you could do worse than Bruce Graham's drama The Outgoing Tide. Graham's characters"an elderly man with Alzhei…
Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty's 1998 Tony Award-winning score for Ragtime (book by Terrence McNally) has many virtues"strong songs, strong characters, moments of great drama"but for my mo…
There is something about Anton Chekhov's first successful full-length play, The Seagull, that attracts playwrights to try their hand at creating their own adaptations"faithful or otherwise.Ã…
When people talk about the glory years of Chicago theater they rarely mention Jim Cartwright's The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. After opening in London's West End in 1992, with Jane Horroc…
Let's begin with what this 2006 jukebox musical is not. It is not a rich, textured, nuanced, moving, memorable musical biography of Johnny Cash. It does not attempt to do onstage what the ro…
