2,444 stories from chicagoreader.com
The title of the show is an overstatement. Yes, the show does have west coast roots; the particular version of long-form used in the show was developed at the LA-based, Second City"influence…
Chicago Dramatists has been transformed into a realm where love clashes with tradition, liberation grapples with convention, and the echoes of ancient narratives resound in contemporary soci…
Charles Smith writes historical plays with lively consciences that provide ample opportunities for his characters to debate. But first and foremost, he writes plays about people who are nego…
Ronán Noone's 2019 solo play, The Smuggler, now in a local premiere with Jackalope Theatre Company, seems to carry the DNA of early Conor McPherson plays in its bones. In particular, Noon…
Violence, vengeance, and a moment's glimmer of peace and love in between the mayhem. That is the ageless story amongst humans. This time it comes to Chicago in stereo: the tragedy of Romeo a…
Wendy Kesselman's 1997 adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank did some things that original adapters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett didn't back in 1955 (slightly more than ten years afte…
I spent a semester studying in London in the winter of 1985, and one of the first concerts I attended was a benefit at Brixton Academy for the striking coal miners, featuring Aztec Camera an…
This is a perfect production of Lauren Gunderson's biographical drama about Henrietta Leavitt and her sister astronomers at Harvard in the early 20th century. Under Beth Wolf's direction, th…
The view is sumptuous even before the curtain rises on Mary Zimmerman's The Matchbox Magic Flute: chandeliers dripping with gems, stars on a painted firmament, a cascade of crimson velvet, m…
Scheduled long before the current conflagration in the Middle East, Writers Theatre's lovely, intimate staging of The Band's Visit, the multiple Tony Award"winning musical, which premiered o…
Invictus Theatre Company's production of Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog is gripping from start to finish. Since being abandoned by their parents as teens, brothers Lincoln (Mikha'el Amin…
Despite my years of research in the fields of using cannabis and watching funny things, I have to confess: I have no idea what qualifies as "stoner comedy." Is it when the characters are hig…
Alex Edelman's Just for Us is a ridiculously funny show about going to a white supremacist meeting in Queens, NY, falling for a girl, and wondering if it could work. Edelman interrogates our…
Eminent domain, as defined by Cornell Law School, is "the power of the government to take private property and convert it into public use." In other words, your property is yours until the g…
Conor McPherson's Girl From the North Country draws on some of the same narrative tropes that the Irish playwright has used in the past in plays like The Weir and The Seafarer. A group of pe…
Billionaires take up so much oxygen in today's political and cultural dialogue that it's easy to forget how few of them there really are. Over $12 trillion of the world's total spending powe…
"Maybe people aren't supposed to have their reality shattered every few years." When a superhero known as The Titan is exiled by his arch nemesis, Dr. Fiendish, to a world without flying cap…
Gwydion Theatre Company is a relatively new addition to the Chicago storefront scene (they moved here from Los Angeles last year), but their current revival of Clifford Odets's Waiting for L…
The night before seeing Edward Hall's stylish, arresting"but not totally convincing"production of Richard III at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, I finally caught up with Danai Gurira's turn as …
Talented director Mikael Burke has assembled a powerhouse trio to perform a series of 19 riveting and gut-wrenching monologues that attempt to cut the Gordian knot that is the school-to-pris…
The world premiere of Loy A. Webb's Judy's Life's Work is everything a playwright could hope for. Director Michelle Renee Bester and her first-rate cast bring out every emotional nuance in t…
Back in college, when I mentioned I was writing a paper on Antigone as presented in both the Sophoclean original and in Jean Anouilh's 1944 French Resistance"era update, a dorm friend rolled…
When we meet Gigi (Iris GarcÃa) she is having a crisis of personality. Staring horrified in front of her bedroom mirror, the blonde wealthy woman is suddenly a dark-haired Indigenous woma…
Sitting in near silence in an apartment, curtains drawn, television above a whisper, and fans oscillating to feign static sound. That is how we meet Taroon (Owais Ahmed). Alone in a Kabul re…
Mark David Kaplan is terrific as Tevye in Drury Lane's new production of the Jerry Bock"Joseph Stein"Sheldon Harnick classic. The show opens in a deep haze, transporting us into Tevye's memo…
