Review: Take a Trip to Memphis in Porchlight’s Latest Hit
Perhaps the best compliment I can pay to Memphis, the 2010 Tony Award winner for Best Musical now on at Porchlight Music Theater (directed by Daryl Brooks), is that in the […]
Last Stop on Market Street Is a Musical Treat With Messages at Chicago Children’s Theatre
Chicago Children’s Theatre’s new production, Last Stop on Market Street, is a sunny, colorful collage of music and dancing with some serious messages for kids and their adults. Director Henry […]
Theater Oobleck’s Reality Is an Activity: 90 Delectable Minutes of Poetry and Word Play
Reality Is an Activity is not a typical theatrical production. It’s short on plot and character development. But it’s a symphony of humorous word play and a love song to poetry, […]
Della’s Cake Shop Confronts the Modern Era in The Cake at Rivendell
Della’s Sweets is an adorable little cake shop somewhere in North Carolina. Winston is mentioned, which is what locals call Winston-Salem. The shop is pink and white, filled with cakes, […]
William Inge’s Natural Affection at Eclipse: A Slice of Bygone America That Wasn’t Idyllic
A middle-aged woman, her boyfriend and her teenaged son—all in one small apartment. That sounds like a formula for trouble and so it proves to be in William Inge’s Natural […]
Review: A Fast Pace and Star Turn Make Hilarious The Doppelgänger A Hit
Chicago loves its celebrities. Lacking the chill of our coastal peers in Los Angeles and New York, we get unabashedly stoked when fame graces us with its presence. And why […]
Review: Lettie at Victory Gardens Theater Is Heartfelt, If Inconsistent
The promo image for Lettie, the new original work by Boo Killebrew now on at Victory Gardens Theater, features Caroline Neff in the title role, wielding a welder’s iron and clad […]
Oprah and Oppression in MCA’s Poor People’s TV Room
Oprah is a leitmotif in the multimedia movement narrative Poor People’s TV Room, at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art from April 12-15. United States Artist Fellow Okwui Okpokwasili and director-designer Peter […]
Steep Theatre’s Birdland Is a Fast-Moving Story of Rock Stardom and its Consequences
Paul (Joel Reitsma) is a rock star, with rock star habits and ego. He’s now in Moscow, nearing the end of a long tour and faced with going home to […]
Two Great Playwrights on the Cusp of Their Careers: Philip Dawkins’ The Gentleman Caller at Raven Theatre
Tennessee Williams has been a local favorite for decades, ever since December 27, 1944, when Claudia Cassidy, the fearsome Chicago Tribune theater critic, said Williams turned the theater “into a […]
Review: Ingredients Don’t Add Up to Much for Refuge Theatre Project’s The Spitfire Grill
Founded in 2014, the relatively new Refuge Theatre Project aspires to bring musical theater to creative spaces, accessible to broad audiences. It’s a commendable mission, and one the crowded Chicago […]
Playwright for the Trump Era? It’s Politics and Money in Brecht’s Round Heads & Pointed Heads at Red Tape
Round Heads and Pointed Heads is a cavalcade of political events and characters, woven loosely (very loosely) into a Brechtian story of politics and money. Red Tape Theatre’s new production […]