Nov. 29, 2017 Warning: Do not read this prior to seeing the play. Major spoilers are included. It will ruin the experience for you. When the audience gets to the end of the 100 minutes or so of Tracy Letts’ The Minutes, they pretty much need to stop and take a breath. It is a brilliant play, to be […]
Early in Steppenwolf Theatre’s latest play, The Minutes by Tracy Letts, the newest member of the town council of Big Cherry is called upon to start the week’s meeting with an invocation. At first a bit taken aback—separation of church and state, anyone?—he obliges, muddling through a lengthy epistle to the Lord in praise of the […]
If your Christmas has been over-Caroled and your Nuts have all been Cracked and you’re just searching for something totally different from your holiday entertainment, you’ll find it at the Greenhouse Theatre Center, where Other Theatre has returned with its third incarnation of the gay camp Christmas musical Barney the Elf that, if one can judge from the reaction […]
Over a million and a half patrons have seen the Goodman Theatre’s annual production of A Christmas Carol since it first opened forty years ago. For many, it was their first experience with live theatre, and there could hardly be a better one. For all of those years right through to today, the Goodman’s Carol remains the […]
The magic onstage at the Paramount Theatre’s Broadway-quality production of Elf the Musical doesn’t even wait for the show to begin. Parents with young children will surely appreciate the projected elves that pop up in almost all of the set’s “windows,” drinking hot chocolate, winking, or waving at the audience. Watching for them is surely a […]
Probably the most difficult thing to do on stage is a one-man (or woman) show. In any normal play, you have other people to play off of or times when you are out of the focus or off stage entirely; you are not the sole source of energy. In a one-person show, everything is on […]
The most important things in life, according to Mitchell J. Fain of This Way Outta Santaland (and Other Xmas Miracles), are “a roof over your head, someone to love you, and a story to tell.” On this opening night of his new production—he did 252 shows of The Santaland Diaries over the last eight year with tremendous […]
Any lit major, actor, director or English teacher—and I’m four for four in that count—will tell you without a moment’s hesitation that the most important literary figure in Western history is the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, a man we don’t know all that much about but whose legacy includes some 39 plays, 154 […]
Since censorship of the press is a huge issue in this country right now, with the President telling his followers that anything he doesn’t like is “fake news,” a journalist about to go on trial in Washington, DC for doing his job, and the end of net neutrality about to give corporations control over what we […]
There are times when a musical theatre presentation comes up and just grabs you, slithers under your skin, and will not let you go. Shows like Sweeney Todd come to mind, where the fate of the main character(s) is horribly dark and tragic yet you somehow can feel sorry for them at the same time, broken […]