Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Mary Stuart aligns with the zeitgeist of today’s #TimesUp moment, where women seize the front and center, onstage and off, trying to harness and wield what power […]
The Black Ensemble Theater has a new musical story on stage, a tribute to the late great guitarist Chuck Berry, who died a year ago. Hail Hail Chuck: A Tribute […]
RI was supposed to see Southern Gothic a week ago, but life got in the way and I didn’t make it then. Thankfully, the team at Windy City Playhouse (3014 W. […]
Keith Huff’s Six Corners, the world premiere now at American Blues Theater, is quintessentially Chicago. It’s the story of a pair of shady cops, not always on the up and […]
Theater review. Philip Dawkins’ new play, The Burn, blends today’s online world with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. The real life “mean girls” in The Burn are distant cousins of the […]
Breach: a manifesto on race in america through the eyes of a black girl recovering from self-hate is a world premiere at Victory Gardens Theater. The play’s long title might […]
Fear and Misery in the Third Reich can be described as Bertolt Brecht’s ghost arriving to warn us about the United States of Donald Trump turning into a fascist dictatorship. […]
After seeing Steppenwolf’s Chicago premiere of Clare Barron’s poignant play, You Got Older, I felt the need to text my sister. Much like Barron’s protagonist, Mae (Caroline Neff), my sister, […]
It’s not for nothing that director Nick Bowling selected Ragtime for the 2018 season at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire. When he read the book for the 1996 play, which was based on […]
Red Tape Theatre inaugurates its new “The Ready” space with Howard Barker’s scenery-chewing angst-fest I Saw Myself. The 13th century widow Sleev (Carolyn Hoerdemann), vulnerable in a black slip, is weaving […]
Josephine is the nice girl. She’s so nice that she remains living at home with her mother, working in a dead-end job, when she really wants to do what she […]
Pillars of the Community, adapted by Samuel Adamson from Henrik Ibsen’s 1877 work, The Pillars of Society, is one of Ibsen’s lesser performed works. According to scholars, Ibsen struggled to […]