2,444 stories from chicagoreader.com
It feels early to stage a play set during, and concerning the effects of, the early days of COVID-19 on its characters. We can still feel those days intimately, given the short passing of ti…
Barbara Gaines started her tenure as artistic director for Chicago Shakespeare Theater (then called Chicago Shakespeare Workshop) in 1986 by staging Henry V on the rooftop of the Red Lion Pu…
A production with a promising premise is especially disappointing when it falls short. Unfortunately, that's the case with Uprising Theater's Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play. Amidst…
The Book of Mormon is back in Chicago, slightly rewritten since it last played here in 2018 but still the same wildly irreverent take on that most quintessential of homegrown white American …
Idle Muse Theatre Company's The Last Queen of Camelot, scripted and directed by Idle Muse artistic director Evan M. Jackson, plays like an Arthurian fantasy graphic novel come to life. Jacks…
Originally developed by the Philadelphia-based Pig Iron Theatre Company in 2015, this queer adventure drag alt-comedy feels both like a natural fit for Hell in a Handbag Productions and a re…
Heading into opening night of Dying for It at Artistic Home, I wasn't sure what to expect from Moira Buffini's adaptation of The Suicide, a 1928 satire by Soviet playwright Nikolai Erdman th…
Like the people in the allegorical Tower of Babel, the citizens of Jacqueline Goldfinger's futuristic Babel are seeking oneness. The kind of oneness that mankind has never reasonably come cl…
What does material success look like to young people in 2023? Is it possible to attain the lifestyle they see in 80s TV shows? Is that something to aspire to? A talented Neo-Futurist troupe …
I cannot recommend this play without caveats. At least to Black people. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not a bad play. As a matter of fact, it's a very good play. It's clever, well-writte…
Filament Theatre's Think Fast, Jordan Chase!, written by Sonia Goldberg and directed by Jamal Howard, is full of plot twists which weave in and out of schoolyard and fantasy. Addressing diff…
Dame Peggy Ashcroft considered the role of Winnie in Samuel Beckett's notoriously difficult Happy Days a "summit part," one of those roles, like Hamlet or King Lear, that tests an actor's me…
Promethean Theatre's world premiere of local playwright Trina Kakacek's two-act dramedy, directed by Anna C. Bahow, is a unique and meaty thought experiment that would benefit from some clea…
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…
Hajja Souad's story, eight decades of life lived, is woven into a narrative of resilience, hope, and the changing tides in Palestine during her long lifetime. Brought to life in the U.S. pre…
"The shit we deal with in Baghdad, it doesn't exist in America," declares Sahir early in Martin Yousif Zebari's Layalina, now in a world premiere at the Goodman under Sivan Battat's directio…
On the ticketing page for Broadway in Chicago's presentation of the touring version of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, there's a small line at the bottom: "Please note that Tina Turner does n…
I'm just going to get the obvious adjective out of the way right now: Rajiv Joseph's Describe the Night, now in its local premiere at Steppenwolf under Austin Pendleton's direction, is defin…
Black Ensemble Theater has cornered the Chicago market on excellent musical tributes to prominent Black musicians, and their latest show Reasons: A Tribute to Earth, Wind & Fire (EWF) is…
In the world premiere of MIA: Where Have All the Young Girls Gone?, writer and director Mary Bonnett uses interviews and research to illuminate the crisis of missing young women in the Unite…
Joan of Arc: history or apocrypha, saint or schizophrenic, myth or martyr? We're all mad here, suggests Trap Door Theatre's vivacious U.S. premiere production of Matei ViÅŸniec's Joan and …
WTF is Black Joy, anyway? Rob Wilson aims to get into specifics with his Second City directorial debut, Dance Like There Are Black People Watching: A Black Excellence Revue. Second City has …
When I read Molly Smith Metzler's now award-winning Cry It Out in 2018, I knew it was something special. I am still not a parent myself nor (at that point) were any of my closest friends. Fa…
In what was seen at the time as quite the upset, Avenue Q took home the Tony Award for best musical in 2004, beating out the Wicked machine and the critically acclaimed Caroline, or Change. …
When it comes to Factory Theater, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Shannon O'Neill's play The Kelly Girls, about two sisters in Northern Ireland, would be close in tone and spirit to the …
