2,444 stories from chicagoreader.com
Romantic regret and stubborn optimism seem as intertwined in the national character of Ireland as a Saint Brigid's cross, and those qualities suffuse Once, the 2012 musical adapted by Irish …
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…
Chicago: it's Pisces season. In case you are not a zodiac crackerjack like moi, Pisces is a water sign, typically represented by two fish swimming in counter directions, which is said to sym…
Simon Stephens's play Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle is set up as a classic story of culture clash: a quirky, talkative woman from New Jersey strikes up a conversation with a reserved…
One can imagine what inspired directors Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page to rework this 1960s musical about the Continental Congress. There's the attraction of doing a piece about the nation…
Artists Lounge Live, started by the husband-and-wife team of Michael and Angela Ingersoll, specializes in presenting tribute shows to various musical legends. (Michael Ingersoll was in the o…
Circus Quixotic, the winter circus production at The Actors Gymnasium, flips the story of Don Quixote into a modern retelling. Through metaphor and audience asides from the actors, director …
Charles Dickens's schoolmaster Mr. Gradgrind from Hard Times (he who insists, "Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts") would feel right at home in the grim …
Nilo Cruz's 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics is a lit-fuse kind of drama, beginning with a slow but unmistakable simmer that ultimately detonates with scorching, devastating i…
Some believe that those who suspect death is near can often feel it approaching, and in Invictus Theatre's rendition of Katori Hall's The Mountaintop, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. senses his e…
Lookingglass Theatre Company's world premiere of Villette, a modern adaptation (written by Sara Gmitter and directed by Tracy Walsh) of Charlotte Brontë's novel, explores the travails of …
Alex Grelle and Jesse Morgan Young's Floor Show premiered in a brief electric run in February 2020 at the Chopin. The plan was to bring it back later that spring. But then . . . you know. Bl…
Ask any middle-aged person about their first romantic breakup, and there's a good chance they'll laugh. Ask about their first friend breakup, on the other hand: no laughter. Director Ericka …
Dominick Alesia's original musical, now in a world premiere with the Impostors under Stefan Roseen's direction, follows a young girl, Amelia, as she searches through a country shattered by w…
Wax nostalgic for the pandemic shutdown as Red Theater presents the world premiere of Indoor Cats by Mora V. Harris, directed by Wyatt Kent. Meet Jules (Karylin Veres), an entitled, selfish …
No wings close the expanse of earth that widens the Court Theatre stage to a landscape in Caryl Churchill's Fen, directed by Vanessa Stalling, with scenic design by Collette Pollard. The ter…
A murder trial transcript that went missing, not to be found until 2004"decades after the murder of Emmett Till. The Black Chicago teen whose unfathomable death in 1955 sparked the Civil Rig…
Like most speculative fiction (and every original Star Trek episode), Ezekiel's Wheel is a fable: a story whose moral applies to circumstances other than those being described. Determining w…
Producing a commentary on the Internet is typically an exercise in redundancy, tasked with avoiding tropes beaten into media by shows like Black Mirror or 13 Reasons Why. At this point, we c…
Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical Into the Woods premiered three years before Robert Bly's Iron John sent men into the wilderness as part of the "mythopoetic men's movement," compl…
This past fall, TimeLine offered a blistering revival of Alice Childress's Trouble in Mind, in which a Black actress in a 1950s Broadway play about lynching (penned and directed by white men…
Racial covenants that kept Black people out of certain neighborhoods of Chicago, and across the U.S., are not just a thing of the past. Today, there are organizations including Chicago Coven…
Like theater, baseball has no set time clock by which the action must unfold. It takes as long as it takes to finish the nine innings. That can lead to longueurs, or it can raise the stakes.…
First, some mathematical context: I've seen A Chorus Line at least 18 times since 1976, the year the first national tour rolled into Chicago. Prior to last week, I was certain the brilliant …
In the musical stage adaptation of Mo Willems's Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! (book by Willems and Mr. Warburton, music by Deborah Wicks La Puma, and lyrics by Willems), a down-on-his-…
