Thursday, November 30, 2017
The name of Donald Trump is never spoken in playwright Beau Willimon's "The Parisian Woman," a stunningly smug, utterly incredible and wholly inept political satire of the sexual mores of th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]The board of trustees of Writers Theatre in Glencoe said in a statement Thursday afternoon that it had completed its inquiry into the allegations of sexual harassment made earlier this month…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 06:20PM[SHARE]A lot of large entertainments arrive in downtown Chicago next week as the Loop stocks up for the peak theater-going season. You'll know most of them. "Wicked"? Witches, defying gravity and d…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 29, 2017
If you're Steve Martin " you know, that off-kilter, one-man cultural conglomerate " and you walk into some Los Angeles house party, you must quickly find yourself surrounded by tediously cha…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]Tuesday, November 28, 2017
A quartet of Scrooges bowed together on the stage of the Goodman Theatre on Monday, part of the theater's opening-night celebration of 40 years of "A Christmas Carol," which the Goodman like…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:25PM[SHARE]Monday, November 27, 2017
A rock apologia for she of the 40 whacks, "Lizzie" is the first production from Chicago's new Firebrand Theatre, which declares itself to be "the world's first and foremost feminist musical …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:20PM[SHARE]Friday, November 24, 2017
When Candace Chong Mui Ngam's "Wild Boar" premiered in Cantonese in the playwright's native Hong Kong in 2012, the South China Morning Post described the play as "exploring how urbanites rea…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, November 23, 2017
The Chicago Tribune, it was announced Nov. 17, will be leaving its namesake tower on Michigan Avenue in the second quarter of 2018 after a run of 93 years. The stage set will remain. But the…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Chicago's big downtown theaters are humming with eclectic fodder for the holiday weekend: Budgets and stamina permitting, you can choose from "Hamilton," Jimmy Buffett's "Escape to Margarita…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:35PM[SHARE]Tuesday, November 21, 2017
What should you be doing for your holiday entertainment pleasure? Let's ponder a little of the old, the new and the shifting sands of seasonal change. Some old favorites are expanded, moved …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:33PM[SHARE]In the early 1620s, a couple of aging actors named Henry Condell and John Heminges set about the task of publishing, in a single, bound volume, all of the plays of their late and beloved pal…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:55PM[SHARE]Monday, November 20, 2017
In the moist, all-American burg of Big Cherry " the setting for the new Tracy Letts play "The Minutes" " the rambling and esoteric agenda of the town council is filled with the patter of par…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:30PM[SHARE]Sunday, November 19, 2017
As long as Hollywood has hired playwrights from New York or Chicago, which is as long as there has been Hollywood, these transplanted, bought-and-paid-for scribes have written plays about th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:05PM[SHARE]Friday, November 17, 2017
There's a scene in "Lady Bird," this fall's remarkable coming-of-age movie by Greta Gerwig, where the title character, a complicated Sacramento 17-year-old encapsulated by Saoirse Ronan, fin…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, November 16, 2017
"Work is a dirty word out here," says the charming, guitar-strumming, Jimmy Buffett-esque central figure of the new musical "Escape to Margaritaville," a "Mamma Mia!" for Parrotheads. This s…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:25AM[SHARE]After Donald J. Trump became president of the United States " which, you may recall, actually was a massive surprise to most of us " the amount of analytical bloviating about the reasons for…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Over the years, especially Stateside, Oscar Wilde's fin de siecle satire "The Importance of Being Earnest" has been turned into more of a hootenanny, replete with Lady Bracknell played in dr…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:30PM[SHARE]Tuesday, November 14, 2017
"I find ecstasy in living," wrote the American poet Emily Dickinson, "the mere sense of living is joy enough." So let us begin with that, dear reader, let us just let that sentence lie there…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:45PM[SHARE]Monday, November 13, 2017
"Your wedding," observes the central character in the Broadway comedy "Significant Other," "is my funeral." You may know the feeling: Your best friend ties the knot with someone she or he kn…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:20PM[SHARE]Sunday, November 12, 2017
Think you've seen "42nd Street" before? Not with jazz-funk orchestrations and a rock drum set and a truly diverse cast, you haven't. Not with an ABBA-like synthesizer underpinning "We're in …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:10PM[SHARE]Saturday, November 11, 2017
Lin-Manuel Miranda spent Saturday in Chicago, unannounced and mostly in the company of Jimmy Buffett. Each man has a show currently in Chicago: Miranda's "Hamilton" is in the midst of a long…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:40PM[SHARE]Friday, November 10, 2017
Whither contemporary dance in the golden age of the podcast? Can it fuse? Those provocative questions present themselves at the beginning of "Rooming House," the interesting and experimental…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:20PM[SHARE]Thursday, November 9, 2017
"Once, not long ago," says a character in a weird new Broadway musical, "a group of musicians came to Israel from Egypt. You probably didn't hear about it. It was not important." But the pre…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]If, as reportedly is its intent, Netflix finds a way to expunge Kevin Spacey and his character of Frank Underwood from the final season of "House of Cards," how will that make America feel? …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:50PM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 8, 2017
People who've been around Lin-Manuel Miranda and "Hamilton" for many years tend to share something interesting: total confidence in the power of the arts to effect meaningful and substantial…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:30PM[SHARE]Monday, November 6, 2017
Dewey Finn, the interloping pedagogical hero of "School of Rock" and a character first created by Jack Black, is a tricky, shifty dude to play when live on stage. This Mary Poppins of substi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:15PM[SHARE]Court Theatre said Monday that its executive director, Stephen J. Albert, would be leaving his job in the fall of next year. Albert, 66, has been with Court, a storied non-profit theater wit…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:45PM[SHARE]Sunday, November 5, 2017
The board of directors of Writers Theatre said Sunday that they have engaged "an experienced human resources consultant" to investigate a claim of sexual harassment made against the Glencoe …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 02:25PM[SHARE]Friday, November 3, 2017
Finding Jimmy Buffett on a hot Saturday night in July means a trip deep into the beer belly of Wrigley Field. Past Huey Lewis and the News, supportively rasping about the power of love. Thro…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, November 2, 2017
Perhaps something terrible befell America in the middle of the 1980s. A self-inflicted wound from which the nation has yet to recover: Healthy enterprise, the marriage of capital and labor, …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]"Without 'Newsies,' nobody knows nothing." Darn right, Jack Kelly. More power to ya', and to all the boys of the only Disney musical in the history of the world to venerate collective bargai…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
