Nancy S. Bishop is publisher and Stages editor of Third Coast Review. She’s a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and a 2014 Fellow of the National Critics Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. You can read her personal writing on pop culture at nancybishopsjournal.com, and follow her on Twitter @nsbishop. She also writes about film, books, art, architecture and design.
Direct from Death Row: The Scottsboro Boys fools you into thinking you’re getting a straight retelling of the events and trials of the nine young African-American men who were falsely […]
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to start a new theater company in a city that might be considered saturated with storefronts. But Ron Keaton and Kurt Johns […]
My ratings for War Paint: — Scene design and costumes? Four stars. — Performances of its leading actors? Three stars plus. — Sophistication and nuances of its story, smart dialogue, […]
The setting was once a large and elegant apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. There’s a spacious living room and a view of the Hudson River. The place has a […]
Frieda, an Englishwoman of indeterminate age, is one of the links among the three parts of Wastwater, a new play by English playwright Simon Stephens in its U.S. premiere at […]
The Gift Theatre’s eloquent new production of The Grapes of Wrath is a story of Dust Bowl migrants during the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it bears witness […]
Puck, the 19th century literary-political-humor magazine, was revolutionary in ridiculing everything about Gilded Age society through cartoons created by gifted artists of the period. With a Wink and a […]
The Unfortunates, staged by the new SoloChicago Theatre Company, is an excellent second outing from the company that produced the hit one-man show, Churchill, starring Ronald Keaton, in 2015. […]
[soliloquy id=”5562″] Aaron Siskind’s photographs are so painterly that you will at first mistake them for abstract expressionism. Of course, that’s what they are. The beautifully curated exhibit at […]
Tapped, a Treasonous Musical Comedy, is a frothy approach to political satire, featuring tap dancing spies and snitches, a six-piece live band, and songs with refrains like “Everybody loves a […]
Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the “baby killer,” the man tried, convicted and executed for the 1932 kidnapping of the Charles Lindbergh baby, is vividly personified by George Seegebrecht in City […]
Constellations, the new two-character play at Steppenwolf Theatre, is certainly a nonlinear story. Marianne (Jessie Fisher) and Roland (Jon Michael Hill) at times seem to be in parallel universes. She, […]