Since Stephen Sondheim is generally viewed as one of the great Broadway composers of all time, with shows as popular and well-regarded as Company, Sunday In the Park With George, A Little Night Music, Follies, and Into the Woods, it is often fascinating to examine one of his shows that was a certifiable flop, for even […]
Sometimes, watching a play, I get the distinct feeling that the playwright is just trying too hard. Often, this manifests itself in stilted dialogue or in overly cheesy scenes; these are easy to notice and easy to describe. But what is wrong with Clare Barron’s You Got Older is much more complicated. In a well-acted production […]
If you go to Windy City Playhouse, a warm, comfortable theatre located on Irving Park Rd., any time before April 11, you’re going to experience something very unusual. True to the theatre’s mandate to find ways for people to connect that feel familiar and ways that are unexpected, WCP is following its fall hit Becky […]
Review by Aaron Krause; Photos by George Schiavone CORAL GABLES, Fla. — In Tony Award-winning playwright Steven Levenson’s deeply unsettling drama If I Forget, dread hovers over a family like funnel clouds over Hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico last summer.We feel an urgent need for the suffering relatives at the play’s center, living during the beginning of the 21 st […]
Review by Karen Topham; photos by Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot is a satirical play from 1945 that seems to maintain its social relevance even today. This has to do with the main villains of the piece: greedy corporate bigwigs who are willing to destroy anything to get at oil. Sound familiar? This play, like […]
Review by Karen Topham; photos by Saltbox Theatre Company There are some plays that you see that stick to your craw whether or not you care for them. There are many reasons for this, but the most common is that the hard work the company put in creates a show that gets under your skin. […]
Review by Karen Topham; photos by Michael Brosilow A Moon for the Misbegotten by Eugene O’Neill is often a problematic play to produce because it depends so much on the character of Josie Hogan. The tragic figure, Jim Tyrone, may be the ostensible main character of the show, but Josie, who is onstage for almost […]
Review by Karen Topham; photos by Micahel Brosilow When you enter Windy City Playhouse to see its new show, Southern Gothic, you are not given a program. Instead, you are handed an “invitation” to a house party hosted by Beau and Ellie Coutier of Ashland, Georgia in honor of the 40th birthday of Suzanne Wellington. The reason […]
Review by Karen Topham; photos by Rex Howard Photography In a world that is increasingly one in which citizens find the need to stand up to fight the wrongs they perceive to be occurring around them from Women’s marches to #MeToo, Donald Marguiles’ Time Stands Still ends up meaning even more than it did when he wrote it […]
Review by Karen Topham Love Never Dies, the sequel to the long-running Broadway hit Phantom of the Opera, is an ambitious, beautiful and seriously flawed musical. Its production values are off the charts high—this is a show to be seen just for the costumes and sets—and the performances are solid to outstanding, but the play […]