44 stories by "Kelly Kleiman"
Rarely has a mediocre musical received as sparkling a revival as Blank Theatre Company's current rendition of On the Twentieth Century, the Adolph Green-Betty Comden-Cy Coleman adaptation of…
Tom Stoppard's debut 1966 play could be called Waiting for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: it matches Samuel Beckett's meditation on the meaninglessness of existence with Shakespeare's portrai…
In this wonderfully satisfying revue, Theo deploys its reliably exceptional voices to give the audience a sampling both deep and broad of the works of Stephen Sondheim. The program contains …
This is actually Two One-Acts On A Single Set, both directed by City Lit Theater artistic director Terry McCabe and with music direction by Shraman Ghosh. The first, Waiting for Tina Meyer b…
Artistic director Susan V. Booth waited a good long time after rejoining the Goodman in 2022 to direct a show of her own, but it was totally worth the wait. Her production of Margaret Atwood…
The title of David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize"winning play does double duty: it refers to mathematical proofs but also to the question of what constitutes sufficient evidence of devotion to tho…
This is a perfect production of Lauren Gunderson's biographical drama about Henrietta Leavitt and her sister astronomers at Harvard in the early 20th century. Under Beth Wolf's direction, th…
The world premiere of Loy A. Webb's Judy's Life's Work is everything a playwright could hope for. Director Michelle Renee Bester and her first-rate cast bring out every emotional nuance in t…
Lin-Manuel Miranda's pre-Hamilton musical In The Heights (book by Quiara AlegrÃa Hudes) is not a work of genius, but it deserves a better production than it's currently receiving at Marri…
The whole time I was watching Shrek: The Musical, I hoped I was witnessing a pre-Broadway tryout"something susceptible to fixing. But I should have known better"it is a final product of play…
The arch dialogue in James Goldman's 1966 drama The Lion in Winter (turned into a 1968 film starring Katharine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole) about the eventful Christmas of 1183 at the English …
This was the first time in a long time that a Second City performance didn't seem to be an audition for Saturday Night Live. The company of four women and two men (a refreshing change of bal…
Mia McCullough's play, now receiving its world premiere at Theater Wit, is about the immovable object (denial) meeting the irresistible force (the past), with a family crushed in between. So…
Strong acting and a powerful theme can't quite bring Juan Ramirez Jr.'s world premiere at Subtext Studio Theatre (part of Destinos: 6th Chicago International Latino Theater Festival) to life…
Noah Haidle's play got absolutely savaged in New York, with the critics' main objection being that the story of a family over time had already been told in Thornton Wilder's Our Town and The…
When it's directed wrong, Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge comes off as a dated melodrama about the unthinkability of incest. Fortunately, director Louis Contey at Shattered Globe unde…
It's incredibly ambitious for a Chicago company to choose A Chorus Line, because although the city has a strong dance community, it's not one with a tradition of crossing over into theatrica…
It looks so simple: two people occupy a stage, waiting for something and talking about nothing. But Waiting for Godot works because Samuel Beckett was a genius, and because waiting itself…
It's not clear that there's anything funny about the life story or legacy of John D. Rockefeller, which raises the question of Corn Productions' attraction to the material and goal in presen…
Hair is such an icon"profanity and naked people on Broadway, oh my!"that it can be hard to remember it's an actual play with a plot (Gerome Ragni and James Rado wrote the book and lyrics for…
In most productions of West Side Story (and I've seen half a dozen or more), Tony is the weakest link: the character just isn't as cool as Riff or as sexy as Bernardo. He's kind of a dork, i…
If verisimilitude and timeliness were all it took to create a great play, Ken Green's world premiere comedy-drama about working in big-box retail would be a home run. Its dialogue captures e…
Donnetta Lavinia Grays's play is about the limits of love"both in what it can accomplish, even when it feels infinite, and in what it can tolerate before it disappears. Monique (the protean …
Motherhouse begins with a recently bereaved daughter struggling to write her mother's eulogy. Her mother's four sisters arrive to help with the task but instead reenact every unresolved …
Directors have two jobs: to help the audience understand what the play is about and to stage it so the audience can see it. Director Fred Anzevino has failed at both here. The Threepenny Ope…
