NOW E.T. REALLY CAN GO HOME A justified hit, bright as any of the lights on Michigan Avenue, Lookingglass Theatre Company’s exhilarating adaptation of Antoine de St-Exupery’s classic and cautionary children’s tale may well run through the winter. Despite its total lack of holly or mistletoe,   David Catlin’s ingenious dramatization of this whimsical philosophic classic…

ONCE AGAIN, ATTENTION MUST BE PAID British playwright Nina Raine’s Tribes, which played Off-Broadway last year and has been produced regionally, depicts an oppressively intellectual British family, rich with colorful eccentricity and denied dysfunction. However, the real context for Steppenwolf Theatre’s bold new winter show’”no holiday play in any way’”is silence, the non-negotiable world that…

WAY BETTER THAN A PARTRIDGE IN A PEAR TREE Redmoon’s seasonal performances are not events or even experiences, but passages to a fleeting world of contemporary fable, complete with masks, music, machines, puppetry, and particularly in this years’ Winter Pageant, dance.   Forty multi-talented performers take the stage to tell a pigeon’s tale: An unpresuming bird…

A WAY TO GOOSE UP YOUR HOLIDAYS There’s not much of a mystery in Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Goose. Michael Menendian and John Weagly’s adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” stays faithful to the source material, an unusually light tale involving the consulting detective….

OLD LECHERS GET NO RESPECT Merrily set at Christmastide at the height of the swing era, Barbara Gaines’ sumptuous Navy Pier staging of Shakespeare’s slightest comedy is hilarious, certainly funnier than it has any right to be. As always with this company, it’s also as gorgeous to behold as to hear. Its nearly three hours…