Chicago

It’s the little ways you try together; cry together; lie together—that make perfect relationships         – Stephen Sondheim, Company Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, in a high stone tower, there lived a beautiful woman who hated her husband of twenty-five years and waited every day for him…

“A teasin’ squeezin’ pleasin’ kinda time.” — Shania Twain As drama goes, you can’t get more low stakes than the driving event of Hugo Timbrell’s My Life as A Cowboy, now playing at the tiny Open Space Arts theater in Uptown, and extended to March. Conor, a seventeen-year-old gay man in Croydon, a dreary suburb…

This oral history of the Irish-American journey soars when it sings A history lesson masquerading as a jukebox musical, The Irish … and How They Got That Way is the creation of Pulitzer winner Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes) who wrote the book, and wove in a selection of standards spanning centuries old folk music from…

COSÌ FANTASTIC This was my third time seeing Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte. The second was Lyric’s 2018 production. While I was concerned about the three-and-a-half-hour runtime on a Sunday afternoon, I need not have worried. I had an absolute blast! The cast was outstanding, both as to their gorgeous singing and their laugh out loud…

THIS SALOME IS NO FEMME FATALE Like its source material (Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé), Richard Strauss’ opera Salome has a reputation for being scandalous, decadent, and daring. Unfortunately, Lyric Opera’s new-to-Chicago production is none of the above. This is partly because some elements of the play (premiered in 1896) and opera (premiered in 1905) that…

A DELICATE CHAMBER PIECE THAT WILL BREAK YOUR HEART One of the advantages of a small performance space is that, in the right hands, one can set the mood even before the play has begun. In the Chicago premiere of Anna Ouyang Moench’s Birds of North America, the seating area at A Red Orchid Theatre…

FOUR UKRAINIAN REFUGEES NAVIGATE WAR’S AFTERSHOCKS IN A NIGHTMARE OF BUREAUCRACY Natalka Vorozhbyt’s darkly funny, deeply bruising play finds Trap Door Theatre at its most urgent—and most human. Four women push mobile doorjambs around the stage as the audience filters in. Their movement is slow and halting, as if moving through fog. Once the theatre…

A HOLIDAY MYSTERY WITH VICTORIAN MISCHIEF ON ITS MIND Chesterton by way of Conan Doyle, wrapped in Wodehouse-style tomfoolery Arthur Conan Doyle wrote only one Christmas-themed Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle — coincidentally, the first Holmes story I ever read — which was adapted into a charming play by Michael Menendian…

A THRILLER THAT OUTLASTS ITS TWIST Even when we know what’s coming, the tension holds Let’s talk about the cojones required to mount a production of Gaslight nowadays. Even if we assume — a tall order, that assumption — that most of the audience has not seen, or does not know, the plot of George…

THE OG CHRISTMAS GHOST STORY The Goodman puts the chills back in the chestnuts ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ In some ways, it is remarkable that Goodman Theatre’s annual production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has persisted as a theatrical tradition during the holidays. Theatre is expensive as a…

THE GODFATHER AND FELLINI MEET VERISMO Opera’s most famous double bill is back… again Hundreds of one-act operas have been produced, but few have attained the popularity of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Premiering in 1890 and 1892, respectively, they have been commonly performed as a double bill since 1893. Interestingly, this…

NO GROWN-UPS ALLOWED — SORT OF CCT’s Beatrix Potter party charms kids, critics, and everyone in between ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ “Channel your inner three-year-old, not your adult,” was the advice given to me as I settled into my seat at Chicago Children’s Theatre. To which my immediate unspoken…