27 stories by "Matt Simonette"
There's self-aware"and then there's [title of show]. Billed as being "about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical," PrideArts launches its 2024-25 season with the Broad…
At one point in Hell in a Handbag's new opus, Poor People! The Parody Musical, the central protagonist, L'il Orphan Arnie (Dakota Hughes), complains, "Nothing makes sense when I try to make …
T.S. Eliot conceived of his verse play Murder in the Cathedral in 1935. It was performed at Canterbury Cathedral and in the very room where the murder that provides the inciting incident of …
It's amazing that this play about old souls moves along at such a brisk pace. Theatre Above the Law's new production of Craig Lucas's romantic comedy/drama Prelude to a Kiss is intention…
It's tempting to start a review of Beyond the Garden Gate with a comment like, "The fairy tales I grew up with were never like this." But let's face it: The fairy tales we grew up with at le…
Mark David Kaplan is terrific as Tevye in Drury Lane's new production of the Jerry Bock"Joseph Stein"Sheldon Harnick classic. The show opens in a deep haze, transporting us into Tevye's memo…
Things get meta pretty quickly when you walk into the theater of Chicago Loop Synagogue to see Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins. Cast members come out to schmooze with the audience members (…
As a burgeoning, albeit un-self-aware, gay kid in the 70s, I developed an inexplicable fascination with TV and film scenes where women changed outfits quickly. When Cher had her own show, sh…
A stellar cast more than makes up for some of the inherent unevenness in Charles Busch's The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, produced at Skokie Theatre as part of MadKap Productions's 2023-24 …
At one point in Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre's excellent production of Harrison David Rivers's This Bitter Earth, the central character, Jesse (Matthew Lolar-Johnson), says to his activist boy…
Near the end of Black Ensemble Theater's (BET) superb new revue A Taste of Soul, co-emcee Qiana McNary mentions that the show's creators hope to leave the audience both "full and hungry at t…
Obama campaign operatives stationed in East Cleveland at the height of the 2008 presidential run felt like they were at the center of the political world. An idealistic"and existentially los…
I'm generally not a huge fan of material wherein creative folk in any discipline"theater, film, publishing, music"turn to their own profession for inspiration. If a movie is about filmmaking…
Even as the audience find their seats before the start of PrideArts's new production one in two, they'll get a sense that their relationship with the actors for the next 90 minutes will be a…
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, first presented on Broadway in 1978 and memorably mounted as a film in 1982, is ironically one of the most prescient musicals for the 21st century. The s…
I try not to lose myself in hyperbole, but I'm guessing Tom Whalley's Jack Off the Beanstalk (a bawdy take on the classic British "panto") is the only play this […]
The post Have yourself …
Sarah Sapperstein's Maggie the Cat commands your attention with her act one monologues in MadKap Productions's mounting of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Skokie Theatre, direc…
In Boeing-Boeing, the 1960 French sex comedy by Marc Camoletti (translated by Beverly Cross and Francis Evans) that's now being mounted by Saint Sebastian Players, protagonist Bernard (Garre…
Sam Shepard's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a rural Illinois family beset by delusion and dysfunction is brilliantly brought to life by AstonRep Theatre Company.  Alcoholic patri…
Music Theater Works (MTW) ambitiously takes on some of the problems with Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's formless and dated book, keeping our focus on Arthur (Michael Metcalf), Gueneve…
Dr. Barbra Joan Frankenstreisand (Tyler Anthony Smith)"that ultimate hyphenate: superstar-mad scientist"has commandeered the stage at the Raven Room at Redline VR bar for what she calls a "c…
Two emotionally intense woman-centered productions are among the offerings at this fall's fifth Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, with the first focusing on the psycho…
The titular girlfriend in the local premiere of the two-person musical (book by Todd Almond, music and lyrics by Matthew Sweet) kicking off PrideArts's 2022-23 season never appears. Referred…
Late in Evanston's Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre's production of The Mamalogues, one character asks, "If I am my ancestors' wildest dream, why am I still living out their worst nightmares?" The…
Airport (1970) introduced many tropes so closely associated with the 70s disaster genre: the reverence for"and subsequent destabilization of"then-new technologies, in this case the Boeing 70…
