2,444 stories from chicagoreader.com
The roommates in Steve Yockey's 2013 one-act "Little Red Riding Hood" redux are too young to be spending their weekends hunkered down like grannies in a cabin, but that's exactly what their …
At first, it seems like a match made in heaven. Or rather, Mount Olympus. But marriages between goddesses and mortals are complicated, and throughout Greek myth, their unions are defined by …
Three actors play more than 50 characters over a span of some 160 years in the TimeLine Theatre/Broadway in Chicago collaboration on the epic drama The Lehman Trilogy. But it's not daunting …
Before Martyna Majok won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for her drama Cost of Living (which was planned for this season at Victory Gardens before the board decided to close up shop at the Tony A…
Pearl Cleage isn't from Chicago, but she's been produced enough here that she feels like an adopted playwright at least. Now-defunct Eclipse Theatre Company (dedicated to the one playwright,…
Set in a place that is equal parts dystopian disco and minimal sci-fi torture dungeon (set and costumes designed by Natasha Djukic), Zeljko Djukic directs Adam RanÄ‘elović's adaptatio…
There's a great show about a Founding Father onstage right now in Chicago who is not named Alexander Hamilton. And while it doesn't feature an award-winning score by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mesm…
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…
Though it's based loosely on a real story, John Webster's Jacobean revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi plays like a cross between torture porn and Shakespeare, what with the piling up of bu…
At this point, Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton is beyond critic-proof. (Once you've had an entire episode of Drunk History dedicated to your recap of the events in your musical, what else is t…
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…
I don't know who came up with the idea of a Pearl Cleage festival for Chicago theater, but based on Mikael Burke's gorgeous production of the Atlanta poet laureate's 1995 drama, Blues for an…
Chicago playwright Brett Neveu is so good at writing about the darker side of life (as in his 2002 play Eric LaRue, now a film directed by Michael Shannon, his fellow ensemble member at A Re…
From 1969 to 1973, a Chicago-based organization known by the code name "Jane" brought safe and accessible abortions to more than 10,000 women. Paula Kamen's Jane: Abortion and the Undergroun…
"Well, look who's come to dinner!" bellows Gerald (Ronald L. Conner) to the neighbors he and wife Patricia (Sydney Charles) have invited to their home in Inda Craig-Galván's WELCOME TO MA…
When The Beauty Queen of Leenane first premiered with Galway's Druid Theatre in 1996, it marked its author, Martin McDonagh (then just shy of age 26) as an exhilarating new voice in Celtic d…
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…
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…
Water People Theater's last full-length production was The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon, presented in September 2019 as part of the Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festiv…
Several years before they struck Disney gold with Beauty and the Beast, the musical team of composer Alan Menken and book writer and lyricist Howard Ashman stuck their toes into campy cult w…
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…
Heather Currie directs John Hildreth's laugh-a-minute adaptation Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut's satire about the U.S. nuclear program and all-around ignorant hubris. The story is told in flas…
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…
The titular showgirl in Gypsy isn't necessarily Gypsy Rose Lee, the reluctant vaudeville child star who"per the "musical fable" from Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Jule Styne (score) and Arthur …
The title of writer/director Mark Pracht's second installment to his Four-Color Trilogy, a series about the comic books publishing industry, could easily be mistaken for one of the real-worl…
