Sex work is hard. As a spectator, I've noticed at best it can be filled with perks, and at worst, it's a thankless, even fatal profession where your humanity is rarely, if ever, considered. …
Usually in productions of Romeo & Juliet, the craziest character in the play is the clever, word-drunk, not-quite-right-in-his-head Mercutio. It is Mercutio, after all, who delivers t…
Romeo and Juliet has been on my mind lately, ever since I saw the lovely made-in-Chicago indie film Ghostlight earlier this summer. In that movie, Dan, a middle-aged construction worker (Kei…
The Revival celebrates its new South Loop location with Blank! The Musical, an off-Broadway hit created a decade ago by Michael Girts, T.J. Shanoff, and Mike Descoteaux. Shanoff, who also di…
The term "jukebox musical" is usually used in contempt to describe a musical revue with no book and no character development"just a collection of popular songs plopped on the stage, sung by …
When Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller died at 39 of pneumonia on December 15, 1943, while riding a train from LA to Chicago, he left behind a legacy as a popular singer, composer, and performing …
Cooking as the crucible for family and friendship, as well as self-discovery, is familiar territory in theater and film. Whether it's Jenna in Waitress working out her personal angst through…
In a 1967 letter to his editor Annis Duff, author Don Freeman made an assertion that feels like it makes sense, even if it technically makes no sense: "Buttons and bears do go together, some…
Wai (Wai Yim) is the flamboyant, brash host of a YouTube show called Hornyscope; David (Hansel Tan) is his buttoned-up friend, who works as a teacher but wants to be an actor. Both men are f…
The characters at the center of Samuel D. Hunter's plays aren't rude, per se. They're more what you might call post-courteous"people whose battles against the clock, their inadequacies, and/…
As Dennis Dent's undeniably charming Hustleman makes all too clear, there is always more to every story. And this story? It may be called The Salon, but its roots run far deeper than its par…
Orlando-based playwright Ashleigh Ann Gardner's fascinating science-fiction play is set in a dystopian future, in a high-tech bunker where a scientist and her AI companion (really just a dis…
Going into a Second City revue during an election year always feels like an anxiety-making proposition and that feels even more true this year. We already know what's at stake"do we really n…
Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre moves into movement (and movements) for their summer season; next month, they open Ntozake Shange's classic choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicid…
Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel, The Kite Runner, about the diverging paths of two boys in Kabul during the 1970s and after, is a moving and sorrowful story of how geopolitical, class, and reli…
It's safe to assume that any Haymarket Opera Company performance will transport you from the blare of contemporary life to the more genteel soundscape of the baroque. Last weekend's producti…
If you've ever imagined how Oscar Wilde would fare in contemporary queer Chicago life, look no further than Strawdog Theatre's sparkling and delightful adaptation of The Importance of Being …
During a decade for Chicago theater that has largely felt like an endless in memoriam reel for retiring or shuttered companies, there's something reassuring about Factory Theater"a company t…
"Any idiot can face a crisis," Russian playwright Anton Chekhov wrote in one of his cheerier moods. "It's this day-to-day living that wears you out." Actually, the quote may belong to anothe…
Martin Crimp's 1997 play, Attempts on Her Life, won international acclaim. But Crimp, like fellow controversial 90s Brit playwright Sarah Kane, remains more talked about than seen onstage, a…
Antigonick, Anne Carson's 2012 translation of Sophokles's Antigone, is both heavy and light, with terse language hand-lettered in black and red caps, interleaved with illustrations by Bianca…
An attic is a blank canvas for artistic expression and endless imagination in the Impostors Theatre Company's Footholds Vol. 5. This is the fifth installment of the annual anthology seri…
Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) has seemingly existed in popular culture mostly as a footnote to other, better-known civil rights figures. In George C. Wolfe's Rustin and Ava DuVern…
The sexual round-robin that swirls through the heart of composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim's lilting masterpiece A Little Night Music is set in motion by regrets over paths both taken and no…
The Enigmatist run time is officially 95 minutes, but you'll want to get there a solid half hour early so you can crack the codes in the "puzzle garden" that greets audiences on the sixth-fl…