100 stories by "Jack Helbig"
It flopped on the Great White Way, but BoHo Theatre's production finds the heart in this musical about tall tales and father-son relationships.
Based on Daniel W…
Mark St. Germain's play outlines an unlikely friendship between a Black civil rights activist and a onetime member of the KKK.
Some plays seem tailor-made for sm…
Lili-Anne Brown's staging of the musical based on Alice Walker's classic novel brings down the house.
There is no doubt the 2005 musical adaptation of Alice Walk…
In Rick Cleveland's play, the five men who followed Richard Nixon as POTUS open up about the job at his memorial.
American Blues Theater's Chicago premiere of en…
The playwright's second play in a trilogy comes from a place of personal experience and pain.
Hannah Ii-Epstein hunches over when she talks, her voice soft and v…
Two brothers try to steal from the Bard in Marriott's entertaining take on the Broadway musical comedy.
Set in 1595 during the glorious reign of Elizabeth I, thi…
Laugh Out Loud's LA import can't find the funny.
Few things age as quickly as topical satire, especially in an age of unrestrained Twitter bursts and 24-hour new…
Mark Larson explains how he created his 700-page behemoth.
For the past few years followers of Chicago author Mark Larson on Facebook have been teased with littl…
Beatrice and Benedick are better apart than together in Oak Park Festival's production.
Chemistry is everything in romance. The folks at Oak Park Festival Theatr…
Perfect casting in the title role saves First Folio's production from a conceptual misstep.
Shakespeare's Henry V is very much a play of words not action, this d…
David Cerda's latest classic makeover for Hell in a Handbag is a winner for summer camp.
David Cerda's camp parody of Mervyn LeRoy's 1956 film The Bad Seed, abou…
Marriott's new musical hits standard narrative notes, but the songs soar
Daniel Zaitchik's new musical (he wrote the songs and the book) is a sweet little show t…
He's become a master at the kind of storytelling he pioneered 28 years ago in I'm 27, I Still Live at Home, and I Sell Office Supplies.
It has been 28 years sinc…
In which five actors play the entire village of Highbury.
Phil Timberlake's new dramatization of Jane Austen's 1816 masterpiece, written especially for Lifeline …
The ever-present danger is as much a part of a Cirque show as the spectacle.
Volta is Cirque du Soleil's 41st production since 1983 and, like all the others befo…
It's a rock musical about suffering from bipolar disorder and getting electroshock treatment.
This award-winning 2008 musical by Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics) a…
Or maybe kids just have a higher tolerance for Roald Dahl's sadism.
Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin's musical adaptation of Roald Dahl's 1988 novel about a precocio…
They sound their barbaric yawp through the living room.
The premise of Lauren Gunderson's two-hander is remarkably simple: a socially isolated, housebound high s…
Kick off your Sunday shoes.
The problem with the 1984 movie Footloose is that it tries so damned hard to be a serious, realistic drama about a rebellious teen fi…
Our hero a racist? No sirree!
The premise of Meridith Friedman's 2015 drama sounds all too familiar: Patrick, a popular white politician running for a high offic…
Robin Witt's production takes a somber tone, downplaying the comic turns.
Logging in at a little more than an hour, Writers Theatre's production of Caryl Churchi…
A simple, elegant Shakespeare adaptation
Though advertised as an adaption of William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale by Evan Jackson (who also directs), this pro…
The music's fabulous, but the story's thin.
Jackie Taylor, the founder and leading light of the Black Ensemble Theatre, has spent her career penning and producin…
By turns homage and send-up, faithful adaptation and freewheeling deconstruction, Life Sucks, Aaron Posner's witty, iconoclastic update of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, is much smarter and more ent…
1. Cabaret is a landmark. When it opened in 1967 it was arguably the first Broadway hit to deal with subject matter that had been repressed, or at least buried, by the trauma of Wor…
