One of our objectives is to write occasional feature articles on theatre, theatres, and theatre people. You’ll find them archived here.
Top Acting Performances 2018 2018 was a year filled with extraordinary acting performances, and it is inevitable that most of them will not make an end-of-the-year list. You might think that I overlooked a stellar piece of work, but generating conversation about this great year in Chicago theatre is what these lists are all about. So […]
Stella Adler said that “the theatre is a spiritual and social x-ray of its time.” If that is the case, what did Chicago theatre in 2018 tell us about our world? This year’s best shows in Chicago spoke of a world where racial tension is still strong, where women’s empowerment is clear but inconsistent, where […]
By Lauren Van Hemert Last month, the Tony Award-winning musical Jersey Boys kicked off its 13th touring season. Next month the show stops at The Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts as part of North Carolina Theatre’s season. The jukebox juggernaut is the story of Franki Valli and The Four Seasons, the doo wop […]
By Joe De Rosa Last Saturday, I took my thirteen-year-old son to see Ghosts of War and Letters Home, two plays produced by the Griffin Theatre company in rotating repertory at the Den Theatre. I know taking a middle-school boy to a pair of shows that aren’t exactly young adult theater might seem like kind […]
Watching Writers Theatre’s Smart People and the Goodman’s An Enemy of the People back to back this weekend, I was struck by how much these dissimilar plays have in common. Written over 130 years apart and dealing with very different topics (Lydia Diamond’s Smart People focuses on race and Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy is about the environment and government corruption), there is […]
by Aaron Krause, American Theatre Critics Association member With reviews of Othello, Red Velvet, Kill Move Paradise, and Be Here Now Theater and history buffs have a rare chance in Cincinnati to witness Shakespeare like they’ve never experienced in school. Chances are, you never studied Othello in the modern, painfully-timely manner Cincinnati Shakespeare Company (CSC) is presenting the Bard’s tragedy. […]
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 […]
Step into the world of Timeline Theatre’s “Boy” and you walk through an exhibit about the innateness of gender into a theatre divided between two huge wall units packed to the gills with memorabilia of childhoods spent in the wrong one, courtesy of the more than a dozen artists involved with the play who are […]
This week marks a rather unusual event in Chicago theatre. With the premiere of Flamingo and Decatur” (see review), the city is now playing host to a world premiere of a play produced not by one of our 200+ native companies but by a theatre company from Fayetteville Arkansas, Block St. Theatre. I sat down […]
With the same caveats as my Top 10 Productions list—I’ve only had the site going for three months, so this list can only cover the final quarter of 2017—here are some of the finest performances I have seen in the sixty-something shows I have reviewed. First, in alphabetical order, the Top 10: Dana Black (Alice, […]