[Editor's Note: This week, Steppenwolf raises the curtain once again on its blistering and extraordinary revival of Bug. This time, audiences will return not to the same building they …
GREAT MUSIC. GREAT THEATER. THE WORKS. Music Theater Works will present Mamma Mia! at the North Shore Center For The Performing Arts in Skokie, their new residence, from August 19, 2021 to A…
THIS YEAR MORE THAN EVER, THE PROJECT(S) MUST BE SEEN It's a continuing crisis seen from the inside out, fleshed out with warmth and truth. In The Project(s), the late, great American Theate…
JUST AS MAGICAL REMOTELY Is stuff magical only because it can't be explained? Perhaps it's more than just the absence of logic, probability, or reason. There's a presence too: Magic evokes a…
SINGING AGAINST HATE If it takes a village, the Black Ensemble Theater creates one nightly. Actually, it's a "healing circle" that's literally at center stage and figuratively at the heart o…
PUPS 'N' STUFF MAKES A DOGGONE DRAMA "Love me, love my dog. [Then I'll love you…}" That's the operating assumption between Dex & Abby, a cross-species comedy/love play. At 130 minutes …
POSTHUMOUS EMANCIPATION The painful premise behind Kill Move Paradise is that there's no justice on this side of the grave. So author James Ijames goes to the other side. He creates a kind o…
APPROXIMATING AN ATROCITY It's an evil not to be exorcised. As the excellent HBO documentary My Name Is Sandra Bland showed, a tragedy resonates " Bland was found hanged in a prison cell in …
DISCO'S ONCE AND FUTURE DIVA As the song says, "Dim All The Lights" " or set them to scorching splendor. Anyway, the giant mirror ball is back, scintillating and scattering flecks of light t…
EMMA PLOTS, THIS TIME IN SONG Nobody knew better than Jane Austen how love could get lost in the social maze of Regency England, where social distinctions quickly become psychological barrie…
STILL STEPPING This Irish extravaganza is celebrating its 25th anniversary, a quarter century of Celtic thunder as thousands of feet have pounded countless floorboards. What Stomp offe…
I DON'TÂ FEELÂ YOUR PAIN Lately a chronic lack of empathy"sensitivity to the feelings of others"threatens to become a liability as great as any budget deficit. Compassion has never felt …
SOPHISTICATED SWING FROM KING ELLINGTON Some shows are just pure pleasure, delivering unpretentious delight with no plot to process or points to proclaim. Much like Ain't Misbehavin', …
A TREE GROWS IN THE ANTILLES In 1990, eight years before he wrote Ragtime, Stephen Flaherty composed an eclectically exotic score for this one-act fairy tale. It's the forthright story of…
LONELY HUBRIS "I want it all." "The sky's [not] the limit." "You only live once." "You can't take it with you.": We're fascinated by all the pride that precedes a fall. We can conditionally …
ROCKING THE BOAT When we enter the theater, we see two women in a small fishing boat. It's surrounded by huge buckets depicting the shallows of an inlet in the Alabama delta. Overhead nettin…
A LIGHTHOUSE SPILLS ITS SECRETS Isolation forces intimacy on its inhabitants, if only by its process of elimination. It can also foster secrets: Scattered souls protect their privacy by keep…
DANCING AROUND ADOLESCENCE It happened with You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown, that peculiar, often cloying, problem of adult actors playing unfledged kids. There's an unavoidable condesce…
ASHES TO THEATER It's the spectacle that keeps on giving: No longer sprawling the width of the Neo Futurarium's stretched-out stage or concentrated in Theater Wit's proscenium hall, The Ruff…
LET THEM SING AND WE'RE HAPPY Given the daylight deprivation that comes with December, music works like light to dispel the darkness. This musical couldn't be brighter:Â Â White Christma…
A GOLD RUSH NATIVITY You could call it a second coming of Christmas from our Golden West. Delivered with the grit and gusto of 19th century raconteur Bret Harte, The Christmas Foundlin…
A MELLOW YULE Back in the day velvet-toned Nat King Cole practically owned Christmas. His TV specials characterized by what his recreator Evan Tyrone Martin calls "bold simplicity." His trad…
A WELL-MEANING YULE CONFECTION THAT'S A BIT DIFFICULT TO SWALLOW For dogged seekers of sentimentality for whom The Gift of the Magi or It's A Wonderful Life are insufficient tins…
ODDBALL OUTCASTS It pays homage to the goofy compassion exhibited by claymation holiday specials, especially the iconic classic where the inhabitants of the Island of Misfit Toys are rescued…
CHRISTMAS AS A CIRCUS There's a beloved poem behind these multiple circus acts in one act: Clement Moore was never that fond of his famous 1837 poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas (better known…