Chicago

English novelist Charles Dickens once actually used his hat to carry water to victims of a train wreck in Victorian England. Playwright Michael Hollinger uses that odd historical incident as the slender reed that’s the core of his comedy Mr. Dickens’ Hat at the Northlight Theatre. The Hollinger play runs about 95 minutes without an…

A SOBERING EXPERIENCE When Harry Met Rehab is a new play at the Greenhouse Theater Center that takes on the uninviting subject alcoholism. The title may suggest that the play intends a light-hearted view of the topic, and there are plenty of laughs scattered throughout the 90-minute production. But the show comes to grips with…

THIS BUGABOO WILL FOLLOW YOU HOME The Steppenwolf Theatre’s extraordinary production of Tracy Letts’s Bug was winding down its highly praised production in March 2020 when the drama was forced to close, like other theater activity, because of the pandemic scourge. Now the Steppenwolf is reviving that production for a limited run with the key…

[Editor’s Note: This week, Steppenwolf raises the curtain once again on its blistering and extraordinary revival of Bug. This time, audiences will return not to the same building they left, but to a stunning new 50,000 sq. ft. theater building and education center on Halsted Street. As the world came to a pause in 2020,…

Sister Act at the Mercury Theater is the 2011 Broadway adaptation of a 1992 movie that became a surprise box office hit, largely elevated by a star performance from Whoopi Goldberg. The show asks the audience to buy into the premise that a cabaret singer is temporarily placed in a convent disguised as a nun…

SEEING THIS REVUE MAY BE THE BEST DECISION YOU’VE EVER MADE I entered the Second City e.t.c. on opening night with a sense of unease. Two weeks earlier the Second City mainstage company, the major troupe in its cabaret theater roster, had premiered a show I thought was not up to the iconic standard of…

WHAT A GREAT SHOW CAN MEAN TO YOU What the Constitution Means to Me is back at the Broadway Playhouse after a two year pandemic hiatus. Again, it is delivering an entertaining, thoughtful, humorous, insightful, and sometimes disturbing examination of the United States Constitution, its glories and what playwright Heidi Schreck sees as the document’s…

IS LESS MOOR? The Court Theatre artistic management is giving William Shakespeare’s great tragedy Othello a startling makeover. The play has been condensed into a single 110-minute act. The physical and textual results may earn praise from many viewers for their unorthodox exploration of a complex drama. Others, myself included, may admire the risk-taking production…

YOU WILL LIKE IT In As You Like It, the new production at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the company unites William Shakespeare’s classic romantic comedy, with the Beatles songbook. And the setting has been shifting from Elizabethan England to hippy America in the 1960’s. Does it sound like a reach for still another way to…

TOGETHER IN SPIRIT MORE THAN LAUGHS After an 18-month hiatus inflicted on Chicagoland theater because of the virus pandemic, the Second City has finally opened its 109th revue, the upbeat-titled Together at Last. Second City not only had to endure the COVID disruption, but organizational and backstage turbulence seemed at times to threaten the very…

SONGS FOR EVERYBODY In the spring of 2020 the Northlight Theatre was set to present Bethany Thomas in “Songs for Nobodies,” a one-performer show that would celebrate five iconic female singers of the 20th century. Then came the pandemic scourge and the show, like all theater activity in the country, was extinguished. Thomas and “Songs…

DON’T STOP THIS WORLD The Marriott Theater is reopening for business with a revival of “The World Goes ‘Round,” a review (originally titled “And the World Goes ‘Round”) that features songs by the Broadway music and lyrics team of John Kander and Fred Ebb. Patrons expecting a predictable “and then they wrote” compilation of greatest…