Thursday, April 27, 2017
A quiz for you, theater-loving reader: When was the last time a professional Chicago theater company produced "Chicago," a musical that burnishes the city's scandalous reputation each and ev…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Most works of art dealing with the post-traumatic stress suffered by those who served and saw action overseas have dealt with the war in Vietnam or the wars in Iraq. The so-called Greatest G…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 25, 2017
An indefatigable, unstinting and intellectually voracious artistic director who reinvented Chicago's most audacious and aggressive theater for a new era, Martha Lavey wrestled the Steppenwol…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:39PM[SHARE]If you are one of those people who know every note of "Jesus Christ Superstar," the anthemic rock opera penned as a concept album by a couple of pimply upper-class Brits named Andrew Lloyd W…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:55PM[SHARE]The rights holders of the sitcom "Three's Company," which aired on ABC from 1977 through 1984 and starred the late John Ritter as a man who lived with two single women and pretended to be ga…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:54PM[SHARE]Monday, April 24, 2017
Alas for imperial Russia and the family of Czar Nicholas II, the 17-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna was murdered in 1918 by the Cheka, Vladimir Lenin's secret police. But since p…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]So when William Shakespeare wrote Sonnet 18, he must at some point have screamed to himself, "Shall I compare thee to a ... What? What? What's the word? What the flippin' heck are thou more …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:02PM[SHARE]Sunday, April 23, 2017
Malted milk balls, chocolate bars, sweet jars and other candied treats of all delights are stacked high in the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. You'd expect that " right? " at a musical called "Charli…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]Friday, April 21, 2017
In 1980, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Canadian government concocted a bizarre but ultimately successful scheme to rescue six American diplomats trapped in Tehran, following the fa…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, April 20, 2017
As the redoubtable Bette Midler seamlessly transitioned from the perils of a chronic onstage coughing fit to the received joy of yet another standing ovation the other night, United Airlines…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]The gleaming white teeth of Adam Jacobs have done many sparkly trips around the rialto since their owner opened on Broadway atop "Aladdin," the most frenetic and intentionally cartoonish of …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 03:55PM[SHARE]Moss Hart. Jerry Adler. Alan Jay Lerner. Trevor Nunn. Bartlett Sher coming in 2018 on Broadway. Most directors of major productions of "My Fair Lady," it's fair to say, have come from a back…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 19, 2017
Spring has sprung in Chicago. High time, then, for a Stephen Sondheim revue. Porchlight Music Theatre is obliging, not with a revival of "Putting it Together," nor "Side by Side by Sondheim,…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:44PM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 18, 2017
How did a Yiddish playwright born the youngest of 10 children in Kutno, Poland, the child of Hasidic Jews who frowned on secular education, come to write a lesbian love scene so thrillingly …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]Monday, April 17, 2017
When it comes to credible depictions of small-town Pennsylvania, "Groundhog Day the Musical" is about as veracious as a woodchuck named Phil is a qualified rodent meteorologist. This British…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]Three artists with strong connections to Chicago are at the center of a planned spring 2018 revival of "Carousel," the much-beloved musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Jessi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 09:03AM[SHARE]Friday, April 14, 2017
Which is the biggest tourist attraction in the Midwest? For years, that honor has gone to Navy Pier with about 9 million visitors a year. On Travel & Leisure's 2014 list of America's most-vi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, April 13, 2017
The two young people who flail around in the first act of Bathsheba Doran's compassionate and ultimately complex play, "The Mystery of Love & Sex," which opened Thursday night at Writers The…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:30PM[SHARE]Chicago Shakespeare Theater announced most of its 2017-18 season of theatrical productions Thursday " including the first programming at The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare, its newest indoor th…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 12:00PM[SHARE]The quest is not exactly investigative journalism worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, but determining how long a commercial show plans to stay in town can take some serious detective work. Take, for…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 12, 2017
To a large extent, "King of the Yees" is the kind of young play that a talented, smart and very funny writer such as Lauren Yee needs to write before she can move on to the greatness that su…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 11, 2017
In 2003, director Amanda Dehnert (who now teaches at Northwestern University) staged an infamous production of "Annie" at Rhode Island's Trinity Repertory Company that ended with the titular…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:43PM[SHARE]Monday, April 10, 2017
The boutique "Mary Poppins" at the Mercury Theater is stacked with talent. Matthew Crowle, who plays the chimney sweep Bert, warbles a Broadway-level "chim chiminy," and is fully in touch wi…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:50PM[SHARE]Sunday, April 9, 2017
Dick Wheeler " he prefers to go by his last name " is a heterosexual white male, halfway to an antique. He was once a Chicagoan, a photographer at the Sun-Times, no less, and surely a loyal …
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 07:00PM[SHARE]Thursday, April 6, 2017
"Every woman has the right to be beautiful," cosmetics titan Elizabeth Arden famously observed, speaking from somewhere behind her elegant Red Door, through which a wealthy-enough woman coul…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]In 1986, an energetic playwright, lyricist and director named Howard Ashman and a young composer named Alan Menken had a New York hit with a satirical off-Broadway show called "The Little Sh…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 04:46PM[SHARE]In 1985, the great director Peter Brook staged a theatrical version of the Sanskrit epic known as "The Mahabharata" and often described as the world's longest epic poem. First staged in Fran…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 01:30PM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 5, 2017
At one point in Tuesday night's "Odysseo" " the tented equestrian extravaganza that variously imports the essence of the steppe of Kazakhstan and the damp of the Naeroyfjord of Norway to tha…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 05:24PM[SHARE]Playwright, actor and Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member Tracy Letts has two plays coming to the theater this year: "Linda Vista," which opens this weekend, starring Ian Barford, and then "…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 10:32AM[SHARE]Monday, April 3, 2017
To make a cinephile smile, merely mention "Amelie." Who can recall the French film from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the one in which Audrey Tautou stars as a young woman who overcomes her own enfanc…
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune Subscription at 08:00PM[SHARE]Sunday, April 2, 2017
When your British farce is so old-school that you'd swear the whole pox of a post-colonial schoolhouse crumbled at least two generations ago, you need a title that helps justify why the pick…
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