Once in a while, a theater production comes along that does better on tour than it does on Broadway. Mrs. Doubtfire, by the songwriting team of Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick […]
Four young women actors, dressed in today’s version of a parochial school uniform (of this, more later) mime a school day, beginning with their confessions. “Bless me, Father, for I have […]
Two middle-aged Black men, both formerly enslaved, visit Monticello the year after the Civil War ends. They’re not there as tourists to explore the majesty of Thomas Jefferson’s estate or […]
Great works of art come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, they are vast and sweeping, like the Sistine Chapel or Anna Karenina; and sometimes they are tiny, like a […]
The way we are taught American history is a scratch-the-surface deal that requires us to keep digging. Playwright Suzan Lori-Parks is a master excavator of history and reveals it in […]
The story of Anne Frank is a familiar one. The expressive teenager, who was sequestered with her family in WWII Amsterdam to protect them from Nazi capture, has been famous […]
Dina (Sophie Madorsky) enters at the top of the show. The space is empty as she calmly stares down at the audience and whispers the opening lines of the play: […]
A new staging of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play An Enemy of the People has come to Chicago, directed by Jim Masini. It dramatizes a public health crisis in a small town and […]
Every time an old play is revived, it inhabits two dimensions—the time of its writing and the time of its revival. You can’t exactly call a restaging of a 2,400+ […]
Girl from the North Country, a musical adaptation of Bob Dylan’s songs by the Irish playwright Conor McPherson, has already appeared in London’s West End, Off-Broadway at the Public Theater, […]
Now is the unseasonably warm winter of our discontent, and Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s new artistic director Edward Hall helms his first production on Navy Pier. Tony Award-nominated track and field […]
A zany and eclectic soundtrack by Tiffany Keane Schaefer and Brian Rasmussen meets a zany and eclectic cast in this hilarious generation-specific parody. The three background musicians (Brian Rasmussen, Mark […]