Chicago

SIMPLY SUBLIME What a wonderful way to kick off Black History Month in the Windy City. The Goodman Theatre is revisiting a thoroughly engaging production of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean. For a three-hour-plus play, there wasn’t a wasted second. Originally staged back in 2003, what a wonderful twentieth year celebration offering this is….

RELENTLESS: A BOLD DEBUT As the snow falls, a fire is currently smoldering centerstage at Theater Wit. This slow-burning ember is better known as the World Premiere, Relentless. Playwright Tyla Abercrumbie’s ferocious, fierce, determined and monolithic three-hour play is definitely a conversation starter. This parable confronts the societal pandemic of racism that has plagued this…

THE SECRET IS OUT: COUNCIL IS A WINNER The First Folio Theatre has come up with an unexpected winner in David Rice’s world premiere adaptation of Agatha Christie’s light novel of international intrigue The Secret Council, originally titled The Secret Adversary when it was first published in 1922. Andrés Enriquez and Melanie Keller The novel…

FIREFLIES SHINES BRIGHT AT NORTHLIGHT Fireflies at the Northlight Theater takes audiences back to the fraught year of 1963 in the Deep South, where racial tensions burn hot, as black people attempt to assert their Civil Rights in the face of violent, often deadly white resistance. Playwright Donja R. Love has concentrated his single-act drama…

FIREFLIES FAILS TO TAKE FLIGHT The old adage, behind every great man is an even greater woman, has never been truer than in the new play, Fireflies, now being staged at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. A thinly veiled, fly on the wall look at a day in the life…

WASHING AWAY DOUBTS ABOUT GREAT THEATER And now for something completely different for the holiday entertainment season, a one-man show called Dishwasher Dreams performed by a Bangladesh actor and playwright named Alaudin Ullah. For about 90 continuous minutes at the Writers Theatre, Ullah escorts the audience on a memory trip through his life as a…

AN UPDATED AND STILL OUTDATED KISS In William Shakespeare’s 16th-century comedy The Taming of the Shrew, a wandering fortune hunter named Petruchio does battle with a fiery independent woman named Katherine. The woman’s wealthy father, weary of dealing with his bumptious daughter, hires Petruchio to woo and wed Katherine for a considerable reward. Petruchio proceeds…

Pretty Woman: The Musical is an adaption of the 1990 motion picture that made a star of Julia Roberts as Vivian, a Hollywood prostitute who wants out of her life on the streets. Providentially, and illogically, Vivian meets starchy unmarried billionaire business man Edward Lewis and turns his cold heart to love in time for…

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,…