Chicago

THIS HOUSE STANDS ON FAITH AND FURY Invictus Theatre’s The House That Will Not Stand blazes with wit, grief, and grace Following the smashing success of its production of Angels in America, Invictus Theatre Co. notches up another triumph with Marcus Gardley’s Obie-winner, The House That Will Not Stand. In this (very) loose adaptation of…

PLAYING THE CARDS YOU’RE DEALT: THE PILON SHUFFLES LOVE, VALUE, AND IDENTITY Sometimes theater takes you places you never expected — or even wanted — to find yourself. For some, Red Theater’s latest production, The Pilon, might fall somewhere along that spectrum. Set in a contemporary Seattle shop that sells sports cards, nothing about it…

TOWERING TALENT ELEVATES A MUSICAL AS SCHIZOPHRENIC AS JEKYLL & HYDE THEMSELVES Next up for Halloween, and my second gothic horror in as many days, is Kokandy Productions’ presentation of the musical, Jekyll & Hyde, first produced in 1990 with music by Frank Wildhorn, book by Leslie Bricusse, and lyrics by Wildhorn, Bricusse, and Steve…

ST. SEBASTIAN PLAYERS HONORS SHIRLEY JACKSON’S EERIE INTELLECT There are more than a few reasons to head over to Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood and catch the St. Sebastian Player’s (SSP) production of The Haunting of Hill House. Chief among them is that it reintroduces us to one of the most interesting and underrated Gothic fiction…

A Bite Out of Minimalism: Timothy Griffin’s imaginative adaptation turns Stoker’s most chilling chapter into a voyage of dread, myth, and mind In 1897, Bram Stoker published a gothic horror novel called Dracula and in doing so introduced to the world a character that has fascinated and terrified humanity for over a hundred years and…

ROXIE’S BACK IN TOWN! MY KIND OF PLAY, CHICAGO IS In Jazz Age Chicago, 1924 to be precise, Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner were tried and subsequently acquitted of murder. A young Tribune reporter and aspiring writer, Maurine Dallas Watkins, covered the two (unrelated) murder cases for the paper and later used them as inspiration…