Monday, May 15, 2017
C'EST SI BON! She was infamous for her 1927 "costume" in Un Vent de Folie"a girdle of bananas. In 1934 she became the first African American woman to have a major role in a film. Acquiring f…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:09PM[SHARE]Sunday, May 14, 2017
FALLING WHILE RUNNING RISKS Domesticity and danger, it seems, don't mix. The private and the public, small-scale versus big-issue matters, mingle uneasily in Time Stands Still, now in a p…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:04PM[SHARE]Thursday, May 11, 2017
LOOKING BEFORE THEY LEAP It's a night of dance discoveries. Four Chicago-based choreographers create a splendid showcase in danc(e)volve, two world premieres and two nearly new offerings at …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:51PM[SHARE]Tuesday, May 9, 2017
CHOOSING BETWEEN FAMILY AND FUTURE In xenophobic times wracked by exclusionary panics, any immigrant's odyssey speaks for millions of refugees, within as much as outside the U.S.. Truth-base…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:02PM[SHARE]Saturday, May 6, 2017
BLOOD ON THE NOTES Jazz doesn't just soothe"it can bleed. Both acts happen throughout these 150 minutes, never more so than at the end. Paradise Blue brings the lyricism of Tennessee William…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:46PM[SHARE]Friday, May 5, 2017
LACERATING LA-LA LAND It's a crash course in one man's life-long damage control: Up close, personal, and, therapeutically playful, Dylan Brody's Driving Hollywood is a liberal-minded Califor…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:28PM[SHARE]Thursday, May 4, 2017
LITTLE SHOP OF HAPPINESS Who can't love She Loves Me? This utterly unpretentious, easily adored chamber musical delivers the first word in entertainment and the last word in love. Completely…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:33PM[SHARE]Sunday, April 30, 2017
PUNCTURING PREVARICATIONS We've seen a lot of lying lately"enough to make Pierre Corneille's 1644 comedy The Liar cruelly contemporary. An uncharacteristic farce from a famously tragic drama…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:35PM[SHARE]Thursday, April 27, 2017
THINK GLOBALLY, DANCE LOCALLY Leaps of faith meet jumps for joy. Closing its 2016-2017 season with a bold new offering by Alexander Ekman, Global Visionaries is a salute to the future and th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:48PM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 26, 2017
BEFORE ANY GLASS MENAGERIE, A PRISON SWEATBOX It's not the "odor of mendacity" that wafts through this Tennessee Williams play"it's more like the whiff of tear gas. The "kindness of stranger…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:49PM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 25, 2017
DISCO DESPAIR Now festering at Chicago's A Red Orchid Theatre, 3C, David Adjmi's 90-minute one-act, is perversely perky, as zany as a zombie. With rapid-fire non-sequiturs and six crazy/need…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:13PM[SHARE]Monday, April 24, 2017
HAPPY HOAX OR LITERARY LARCENY? Can we really separate a creator from his art? Can our sense of Shakespeare feel more real to us than his characters do? These aren't rhetorical questions: A …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:32PM[SHARE]Saturday, April 22, 2017
HIVE AGAINST HIVE Bees, it seems, are humming their last. In the future,honey could well be synthetic. Appropriately debuting on Earth Day weekend, this world premiere from Chicago's Victory…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:58PM[SHARE]Thursday, April 20, 2017
A WHOLE NEW WORLD FROM BROADWAY: A MUSICAL THAT TRULY SOARS "Open sesame" indeed! It’s "Abracadabra" times ten as the arrival of Aladdin in Chi-town feels as triumphant as Prince Ali's…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:21PM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 19, 2017
SONDHEIM'S CARE PACKAGE FOR LOST LOVERS In a melodically and lyrically mediocre time like, for instance, 2017, even lesser songs by Stephen Sondheim beat half the musicals at large. In 1981 …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:30PM[SHARE]Thursday, April 13, 2017
"IT'S A FREE COUNTRY!" It's one of the seven wonders of the American theater: Few sights on stage are as magical as watching Billie Dawn wise up. This dumb-as-a-rock good-time girl slowly wa…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:40PM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 12, 2017
AN IDENTITY QUEST COMES UP EMPTY As the cops say, "Nothing to see here, folks. Move right along." Or, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there is no "there there." Both cautions apply to Goo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:57PM[SHARE]DEATH BY ANECDOTE A playwright dredges up her past at her peril. As with Goodman Theatre's current confusion King of the Yees, Sarah Ruhl's For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday is a very…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:50PM[SHARE]Sunday, April 9, 2017
FINDING FOCUS Linda Vista is billed as "an adult comedy about immature behavior." Surprisingly tender, Tracy Letts' Steppenwolf stunner examines one man's mid-life crisis from all sides and,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:57PM[SHARE]Saturday, April 8, 2017
A SPADEFUL OF SUGAR As the supplicating ballad puts it, "Let's hope she will stay." Not just the quintessentially "practically perfect" nanny, Mary Poppins is a kind of cosmic cure. Given th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:16PM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 5, 2017
260 HOOVES AND 96 FEET Pegasus would be proud: The vast White Big Top commanding the south parking lot of Chicago's Soldier Field barely hints at the $30 million "theatrical adventure" benea…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:37PM[SHARE]Sunday, April 2, 2017
TOIL AND TROUBLE There are no miniaturized marvels, no surprises sprung from trap doors, no white rabbits from a hat. Beyond Caring bears none of Lookingglass Theatre Company's vintage make-…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:55PM[SHARE]Wednesday, March 29, 2017
SGT. PEPPER'S AT 50; LET IT RAIN For baby boomers wanting to share their childhood with their kids, for all the true-blue or late-blooming fans of the Fab Four whose great regret is that the…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:50PM[SHARE]Tuesday, March 28, 2017
MORE THAN LAVENDER, BEYOND A RAINBOW Finding another noble excuse to make music, for its fourth concert this season Chicago Sinfonietta offered a sweet salute to a worthy cause. Performed to…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:56PM[SHARE]Tuesday, March 21, 2017
A SEASON OF SOAPS IN ONE SHOW An exhilarating, over-the-top, floridly artificial romp, Destiny of Desire is as wonderfully hokey as its title. A Chicago premiere, Goodman Theatre's co-produc…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:34PM[SHARE]Monday, March 20, 2017
DRAMATIZING WHAT CANNOT BE KNOWN Aerobic exercises for the cerebral cortex, Tom Stoppard's daunting dramas (The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Invention of Love) go for the gray matter. In perpetu…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:07PM[SHARE]Friday, March 17, 2017
IF ONLY SINCERITY MEANT SUCCESS You really want this play to work. It means so well and maybe so much. But it's hard to find a worthy resolution in a play about repeated, nation-wide violati…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:44PM[SHARE]Wednesday, March 15, 2017
IN SEARCH OF A STORY Loved ones seen in stasis are probably truer to most families. No clans are ever collectively happy or purposeful, only the members and not, of course, all the time. But…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:15PM[SHARE]Tuesday, March 14, 2017
ABBONDANZA! What a gem of a jewel is this rarely done masterwork! It's what Candide was to Leonard Bernstein or Porgy and Bess to George Gershwin, a folk opera to rise above mere musicals. A…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:10PM[SHARE]Monday, March 13, 2017
CANNED SPAM-ILTON For little more than an hour, Spamilton, an attention-deficit musical travesty, never lets up until we're let out. Exploding with relentless volleys of unfriendly fire, it …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:59PM[SHARE]Thursday, March 9, 2017
PLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MORE INCHES "I'm the new Berlin Wall. Try to tear me down!" That defiant dare marks the flaming arrival of Hedwig Schmidt, survivor-heroine of John Cameron Mitchell'…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:37PM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
