This review offers some tough love. Love for Kokandy Productions, for its ambitions and scope, for its actors and musicians. But I’m also going to add a tough critique for […]

Chicago’s Porchlight Music Theatre is a standout among a crowded landscape of local production companies. Focused on musical theater, their shows—usually presented at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts […]

The American musical theater has been graced with another revival of Company, Stephen Sondheim’s and George Furth’s 1970 musical about our basic human need for togetherness. In this 2021 Broadway […]

Choreography by Jerome Robbins, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and music by Leonard Bernstein are the calling cards of West Side Story. This is an energetic and passionate contemporary retelling directed […]

It’s not entirely clear when (or if) Lin-Manuel Miranda sleeps, but really, that’s his personal business. In his very productive waking hours, Miranda has seemingly not stopped creating since moving […]

In 2016, for the second season of the groundbreaking British mini-series The Hollow Crown (adaptations of Shakespeare’s royalty-based history plays), director Dominic Cooke cast Benedict Cumberbatch to play one of […]

At a typical (however one defines that) performance at Lyric Opera of Chicago, the accompanying program includes in each cast and crew bio the professional’s previous Lyric credits. The asterisks […]

In 1981, Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince collaborated with writer George Furth for a new musical based on a 1934 play, Merrily We Roll Along. The show was to be […]

When I interviewed La La Land writer-director Damien Chazelle a couple months ago for Ain’t it Cool News, we discussed one of the film’s themes being the power of rejection […]