The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity is about pro wrestling in all its pounding, banging, slamming, kicking performance art glory. It’s loud and obnoxious. And much of the play that […]
If the crux of your musical’s story centers around its 13-year-old protagonist’s attempted suicide, it may be best to forgo an Act II opener that dresses its young cast in […]
It is no small undertaking to decide to adapt Charles Baudelaire’s seminal 19th century volume of poetry, Les fleurs du mal. Some may find its sheer length and poetic complexity daunting, […]
The play opens with a symphony of switchboard operators, those 1920s-era office workers who kept people talking by plugging phones into jacks, greeting and connecting the world outside with the […]
What if Edgar Allen Poe, a new student and earnest young writer at the University of Virginia, went to Monticello in July 1826 to help Thomas Jefferson with an important […]
It’s been almost 50 years since I saw Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical at the old Shubert Theatre in Chicago. But I sat in the Mercury Theater Friday night […]
Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins gives us something to think about in the opening moments of his play, An Octoroon, by Definition Theatre Company, directed by Chuck Smith. An actor (Breon Arzell) appears […]
Calling all dance aficionados! Tony-Award winning, An American in Paris has arrived at the Oriental Theatre for its limited engagement running now through August 13. The coveted Broadway musical tells […]
The About Face Youth Theatre is staging an energetic and thoughtful world premiere, titled Brave Like Them, which revisits the riot grrrls punk movement of the 1990s. The movement countered […]
The play opens with a bubbly Sylvie (Melissa Young) singing and dancing to “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” on the stage of an old New York […]
Aura Curiatlas Physical Theatre, an acrobatic dance theater company that is in its 4th year of touring the U.S. with several shows, is bringing a new work to Chicago. They will […]
Two black men on a street corner, drinking beer. One is a college student, the other a dad talking about how he loves to buy books for his daughter. Two […]