2,444 stories from chicagoreader.com
Don't ask me how many times I've seen Billy Wilder's Academy Award-winning 1960 film The Apartment. I honestly couldn't tell you. I can tell you it's my favorite movie, and it should certain…
It's been a minute since I've visited the Kingdom of Other: 13 years, to be precise. The last time I saw Jackie Taylor's The Other Cinderella was in 2010, before Black Ensemble Theater moved…
If Laurie Anderson had done a mash-up of Scott O'Dell's young adult classic Island of the Blue Dolphins and the 1994 John Sayles Celtic magic realist film, The Secret of Roan Inish, the resu…
Fast becoming a staple of Chicago's alternative holiday entertainment scene, The Buttcracker: A Nutcracker Burlesque is back for a seventh year of tinseled twerking and tasseled twirling. Dr…
Things get meta pretty quickly when you walk into the theater of Chicago Loop Synagogue to see Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins. Cast members come out to schmooze with the audience members (…
Hell in a Handbag Productions serves up a hefty helping of Christmas camp in this new episode of its "The Golden Girls: Lost Episodes" franchise, which purports to feature never-broadcast ep…
Clare Brennan directs Savannah Reich's 2017 silly/smart comedy about the dawn of civilization"and the audience gets to decide how it works out in the end. Dandelion (Tess Galbiati) and Rocky…
Whether you're waiting anxiously to see Timothée Chalamet in Wonka (the musical prequel to Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), or are rolling your eyes in anticipatory disgust …
Manual Cinema's Christmas Carol (devised and directed by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller, and Kyle Vegter) is a charming remix of an old classic, but with added layers fo…
If you want a charming and heartwarming family show for the holidays, look no further than Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, now bringing all the sweet quiet magic of the Jim Henson 1977 tel…
As a burgeoning, albeit un-self-aware, gay kid in the 70s, I developed an inexplicable fascination with TV and film scenes where women changed outfits quickly. When Cher had her own show, sh…
There's a memorable moment in an episode of Mad Men between office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) and copywriter Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss). The former, fed up with the consta…
The complicated backstory of the play The Lifespan of a Fact, now in its local premiere at TimeLine, reads like a series of "begats" out of the book of Genesis. Ready? Here goes. John D'…
Leave it to Factory Theater to come up with a twist on the story of the Magi that's smart-assed and sincere at the same time. In Chase Wheaton-Werle's Wise Guys: The First Christmas Story, n…
The arch dialogue in James Goldman's 1966 drama The Lion in Winter (turned into a 1968 film starring Katharine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole) about the eventful Christmas of 1183 at the English …
Feel like you've been living in hell the past several years? The Conspirators understand. In their latest offering, Commedia Divina: It's Worse Than That, writer Sid Feldman concocts a Dante…
Thirty-five years after its film debut, the classic Tim Burton Halloween comedy Beetlejuice has been reimagined, first set loose like a demon as a 2019 Broadway musical (score by Eddie Perfe…
In Jen Silverman's 2018 play, Witch, the devil goes down to a quiet English village and finds a lot more than he bargained for, including a supposed witch who is surprisingly resistant to se…
Stupid F@*#ing Bird is my kind of play"the kind that plumbs the depths of despair as if it were a vaudeville skit. "I'm in mourning for my life," says Mash, quoting a line straight out of Ch…
Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty's 1998 Tony Award-winning score for Ragtime (book by Terrence McNally) has many virtues"strong songs, strong characters, moments of great drama"but for my mo…
This was the first time in a long time that a Second City performance didn't seem to be an audition for Saturday Night Live. The company of four women and two men (a refreshing change of bal…
I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen Stephen Sondheim's appallingly timely tale of U.S. assassins (and wannabe assassins) since it premiered in 1990. I can tell you that Theo's produ…
They couldn't be more different in tone and setting, but Tyrone Phillips's current gorgeous staging of Twelfth Night at Chicago Shakespeare and Robert Falls's brilliant 2013 reimagining of M…
A stellar cast more than makes up for some of the inherent unevenness in Charles Busch's The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, produced at Skokie Theatre as part of MadKap Productions's 2023-24 …
If you look at French-Canadian playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin's Right Now with an eye toward finding narrative antecedents, you won't be disappointed. There's the young couple living acros…
