2,444 stories from chicagoreader.com
Domestic violence, suicide, bullying"Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's 1945 musical Carousel is as famous for its dark subject matter as its soaring score. (My high school graduatio…
During the pandemic shutdown, perhaps nothing surprised me as much with Zoom theater as seeing magicians work their craft without the close-up settings we're so used to, especially in Chicag…
Fat Theatre Project makes an exuberant debut with The InterPlays, an anthology of short plays celebrating and untangling the enigma of love. Founded by Eileen Tull in early 2024, Fat The…
For those of us who know and love Shakespeare mostly for his most popular plays"the often produced comedies, tragedies, and histories"Pericles is a hard play to warm up to. Pericles's story …
Tin Drum Theatre Company's inaugural production is well-suited for its motto, "where dramatic disturbances are the norm." Founding member Steve Needham's original one-act, directed by cofoun…
There is irony in this play bookending itself with a Blanche DuBois scene from A Streetcar Named Desire, because those moments hold more nuance than the rest of This One Will Grow. As the yo…
For their follow-up to 2006's Spring Awakening, composer Duncan Sheik and librettist and lyricist Steven Sater turned to Lewis Carroll's children's classic. Set in a bomb shelter during the …
One of the sinister knock-on effects of religious institutions rejecting queer people is how it encourages so many of them to negate inner faith altogether"to throw out the spiritual baby wi…
Because theater lovers love to be dramatic, we constantly divide shows into hits and flops, shows that soar and shows that don't. But what about all those mid shows"shows that sometimes ente…
We're spoiled for choice when it comes to magic practitioners in Chicago, but David Parr is always a good bet for a fun and thought-provoking night out. His current Wednesday-night show at t…
There's a cartoon that made the rounds on social media a few years ago laying out the dissonance for the modern comedy scene. In the first two frames, labeled "Comedians at the Club," a guy …
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy is held so closely by so many people that it's a tall order for anyone to adapt Middle-earth into another art form. Take Amazon's original stre…
It takes a special kind of person to enjoy Saw the Musical. That's because you must be a fan of the film to appreciate this production's absurdity at its fullest. Luckily, Saw is my Rocky Ho…
As Steppenwolf Theatre's world premiere production of Samuel D. Hunter's Little Bear Ridge Road nears the end of its run, Steep Theatre presents the Chicago premiere of Hunter's 2022 drama, …
Amy Crider's entertaining and stimulating new play Wells and Welles, receiving its world premiere in a very well-acted non-Equity production by Lucid Theater at the City Lit Theater space in…
I suspect more people would find poetry accessible if, instead of reading it on the page, they experienced it in live performance"especially one on par with Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre's curr…
In the late 80s and early 90s, Del Close, in the workshops he taught at iO, used to talk about slowing improv down, not forcing things, and allowing the scenes, characters, and eventually…
Drumbeats pierce the air with discomfiting bluntness, a beeline for the ear soothed into tranquility with music performed by Fred Jackson Jr., Evan Hill, and Chér Jey. Three masked figures …
The summer between graduation from high school and college, for those of us who went, was a shaky time filled with its fair share of doubt, anxiety, and questions. Meet Sam. She's just gradu…
The ocean is an obsession for 18-year-old Dontrell Jones III (Blake Dupree) of Baltimore, a high school graduate mere weeks from starting his full ride to Johns Hopkins, with the vastness of…
In the tradition of rom-coms like the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors, Audrey Cefaly's The Last Wide Open uses the conceit of what-ifs to take us through a missed-it-by-that-much …
Being a musician can be a lonely business. Want even a wisp of a prayer of making it into one of the world's professional classical orchestras? Be prepared to spend five hours or more a day"…
Haven Chicago is going out the way they came in 11 years ago"sweaty, sexy, sinuous, and unapologetic. In 2013, the company announced their presence with a production of John Cameron Mitchell…
Claustrophobia versus freedom"it's a theme of sorts in this dramatic fantasy by Elizabeth Egloff (billed as a psychosexual thriller, directed by Erin Sheets, produced by Theatre L'Acadie). A…
It was the unsecured, random bundle of cords that first caught my eye at Otherworld Theatre's The Lightning Thief: A Percy Jackson Musical. They were slung around the railing to the audience…
