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Chicago

  • Dance Preview: 30 FEET TOGETHER, 6 FEET APART (Chicago Tap Theatre streaming ONE performance only July 26 at 3 CST)

    By Eve Meadows | July 21, 2020
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    SOMEONE’S TAPPING AT YOUR DOOR LET THEM IN! For one performance only — Sunday, July 26, at 3 p.m. — Chicago Tap Theatre (CTT) will present 30 Feet Together, 6 Feet Apart live on its streaming platforms from the historic Athenaeum Theatre in Chicago. It’s a celebration of the power and necessity of dance and…

  • Theater Preview: CHICAGO’S RAVEN THEATRE (Season 2021)

    By Tony Frankel | July 7, 2020
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    THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS CHICAGO’S RAVEN THEATRE REVAMP ITS 2020-21 SEASON This fall’s planned revival of  Jerome Lawrence  and  Robert E. Lee’s  drama  Inherit the Wind  directed by  Ian Frank has been cancelled. Instead, the three-play season will kick off next February, 2021, with Jonathan Harvey’s  sweet and charming coming-of-age play  Beautiful Thing.  Mikael Burke  directs this touching story of two boys living in London who…

  • Theater Preview: THE MAGIC PARLOUR AT HOME (New Virtual Show by Chicago’s Dennis Watkins)

    By Tony Frankel and Lawrence Bommer | June 25, 2020
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    JUST AS MAGICAL REMOTELY Is stuff magical only because it can’t be explained? Perhaps it’s more than just the absence of logic, probability, or reason. There’s a presence too: Magic evokes a child-like sense of wonder in the oldest adults, rewarding their imagination more than their ignorance. At least that’s the working philosophy of House…

  • Theater Preview: BEETHOVEN — LIVE FROM FLORENCE (Hershey Felder)

    By Gregory Bernard | June 21, 2020
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    BEETHOVEN TO APPEAR LIVE IN YOUR HOME Dramatizing Dr. Gerhard von Breuning’s factual memoir, Aus dem Schwarzspanierhaus  (Out of the House of Black-Robed Spaniards, Beethoven’s last residence), Hershey Felder brought Ludwig van Beethoven to life on stage through the eyes of the Viennese Doctor Breuning who spent his boyhood by the Maestro’s side. Featuring some of…

  • Theater Feature: MERCURY THEATER CHICAGO TO CLOSE PERMANENTLY

    By Tony Frankel | June 16, 2020
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    A SAD DAY FOR THEATER Executive Director, L. Walter Stearns and partner Business Manager Eugene Dizon announced today the permanent closure of Mercury Theater Chicago after ten years and 25 productions, due to the uncertain future in the performing arts (and beyond) caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the incredible financial hardship that has come…

  • Virtual Theater: TEENAGE DICK (Theater Wit in Chicago; Third Extension)

    By Tony Frankel | May 16, 2020
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    DICK EXTENDS Chicago’s Theater Wit announced a third and final extension today of Teenage Dick, its long-running critically acclaimed virtual production of Mike Lew’s devastatingly funny new play inspired by theater’s most famous disabled character — Shakespeare’s Richard III — like audiences have never seen him before: scheming his way through the brutal, no-holds barred…

  • Virtual Theater: TO MASTER THE ART (Timeline Theatre, Chicago)

    By Tony Frankel | May 11, 2020
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    STARVING FOR THEATER? FEAST ON THIS! It’s not just for Chicagoans anymore. Time and again, we have trumped that Chicago theater is the most exciting in the country. Not just because of the array and number of companies, but the affordability. Theater artists in Chicago do theater for theater’s sake — and for ours. Case…

  • Theater Preview: SONDHEIM @ 90 ROUNDTABLE (Porchlight Music Theatre Virtual Series)

    By Tony Frankel | May 7, 2020
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    CELEBRATING A PASSION FOR SONDHEIM Welcome to a new, free virtual series to celebrate Stephen Sondheim as an American icon while celebrating his 90th birthday year. Sondheim @ 90 Roundtable, created and hosted by Chicago’s Porchlight Music Theatre Artistic Director Michael Weber, gathers talents from Chicago, Broadway and the world of theater to offer episodes…

  • Theater Review: THE HEALING (formerly titled LEGENDS) (Black Ensemble Theater)

    By Lawrence Bommer | March 6, 2020
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    SINGING AGAINST HATE If it takes a village, the Black Ensemble Theater creates one nightly. Actually, it’s a “healing circle” that’s literally at center stage and figuratively at the heart of Legends the Musical: A Civil Rights Movement, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Written and directed by founder Jackie Taylor, this generous new work departs from…

  • Opera Review: THE QUEEN OF SPADES (Lyric Chicago)

    By Barnaby Hughes | February 27, 2020
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    WHAT A QUEEN! Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikosky’s ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker are both beloved and celebrated, yet his operas are scarcely known. Indeed, we don’t get much Russian opera at all, at least in Chicago. Lyric produced Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in 2017, while Chicago Opera Theatre produced his Iolanta in 2018 and Rachmaninoff’s Aleko…

  • Theater Review: THE BOOK OF MORON (Tour)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 26, 2020
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    STAND-UP MEETS SELF-HELP It’s a singular solo show: Creator of The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron, satirist Robert Dubac now delivers Book of Moron, an 85-minute riff on reality and all its threats. Delivering rapid-fire, hit-and-run observations about contemporary consciousness, this driven lecturer imagines himself coming out of the coma of everyday existence to embark on…

  • Theater Review: DEX & ABBY (Pride Films and Plays)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 25, 2020
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    PUPS ‘N’ STUFF MAKES A DOGGONE DRAMA “Love me, love my dog. [Then I’ll love you:}” That’s the operating assumption between Dex & Abby, a cross-species comedy/love play. At 130 minutes of industrial-strength sentimentality, this Chicago premiere from Pride Films and Plays will test your tolerance for anthropomorphized antics. It’s the feel-good story of comfort…

  • Theater Review: KILL MOVE PARADISE (TimeLine)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 20, 2020
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    POSTHUMOUS EMANCIPATION The painful premise behind Kill Move Paradise is that there’s no justice on this side of the grave. So author James Ijames goes to the other side. He creates a kind of Elysian Fields for four young black men cut down wrongly and early. It’s up to this 2017 valedictory, inspired by the…

  • Theater Review: GRAVEYARD SHIFT (Goodman)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 17, 2020
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    APPROXIMATING AN ATROCITY It’s an evil not to be exorcised. As the excellent HBO documentary My Name Is Sandra Bland showed, a tragedy resonates — Bland was found hanged in a prison cell in Prairie View, Texas, the dump-of-a-city to which she returned for an exciting administrative teaching position. A popular poster of videos (“Good…

  • Theater Review: SUMMER: THE DONNA SUMMER MUSICAL (National Tour)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 14, 2020
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    DISCO’S ONCE AND FUTURE DIVA As the song says, “Dim All The Lights” — or set them to scorching splendor. Anyway, the giant mirror ball is back, scintillating and scattering flecks of light throughout the Nederlander Theater. The ensemble is gallivanting in sequin suits and skirts. The song is “Last Dance,” the final exaltation in…

  • Dance Review: THE TIMES ARE RACING (Joffrey)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 13, 2020
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    FEATS OF RACING FEET Just when we’ve forgotten what green looks like, a mid-winter shakeup in Chicago seems essential. Supplying that stimulus in quantum doses, the winter program of the Joffrey Ballet is warming up the Auditorium Theatre through February 23 with five well-contrasted ballets by four enterprising choreographers, a mixed repertory that features three…

  • Opera Review: MADAMA BUTTERFLY (Lyric Chicago)

    By Barnaby Hughes | February 10, 2020
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    A BUTTERFLY BOTH VULNERABLE AND MARVELOUS Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904) is another one of those incredibly popular operas, like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, that is rendered increasingly difficult and problematic by the passage of time. Cio-Cio-San, the titular Madama Butterfly, has often been seen as a strong, independent, even heroic, woman. And in some respects…

  • Theater Review: EMMA (Chicago Shakespeare Theater)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 7, 2020
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    EMMA PLOTS, THIS TIME IN SONG Nobody knew better than Jane Austen how love could get lost in the social maze of Regency England, where social distinctions quickly become psychological barriers. Any successful matrimony required sexual politics and emotional intrigue. There were too many artful simulations of actual affection for the real deal to compete…

  • Theater Review: BUG (Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 6, 2020
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    BUG GETS UNDER YOUR SKIN Nineteen years ago, A Red Orchid Theatre launched the Midwest premiere of  Bug by Pulitzer-winner Tracy Letts. It unleashed a ferocious Michael Shannon and a self-destructing Kate Buddeke in the title roles. Back then I thought the play just an excuse for excess — the shock effects of wacko lovers dissolving…

  • Theater Review: RIVERDANCE (25th Anniversary Tour)

    By Lawrence Bommer | February 5, 2020
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    STILL STEPPING This Irish extravaganza is celebrating its 25th  anniversary, a quarter century of Celtic thunder as thousands of feet have pounded countless floorboards. What  Stomp offered to percussive street-dancing and Forever Tango did for Argentina’s national cooch dance, Riverdance breathtakingly delivers to Irish dance and its cultural spin-offs. Wowing rapt crowds in a tour to mark…

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