Who Are You Calling Chicken? Fighting Fowl in Year of The Rooster

Plays set in rural Oklahoma are rarely expected to be cheerful, but Eric Dufault's Year of The Rooster compounds the hopelessness by locating its economic and existential despair within the brutal culture of competitive cock-fighting. Though usually associated with Latin countries and illegal in the United States, this blood sport—its promoters remind us—was invented by the same.... Read More

Ten Isn't Enough: Chicago Theater in 2015

It's the changing of another year, and that means retrospectives on the departing season—but how can anyone reduce our city's eight hundred-plus plays to a puny "top ten" list? When I think back on 2015, I recall several moments that don't fit the usual categories. Here, then, are my choices for recognition:

STEREOTYPE-FREE ZONE AWARDS.... Read More

Hellcab's Endless Journey: Re-Tailoring Kern's Urban Odyssey

There's this taxicab driver in Chicago, you see, and today is Christmas Eve. From this simple premise, Will Kern forged a play (originally titled Hellcab Does Christmas, but soon re-christened just Hellcab) that appeared year-round from 1992 to 2002 under the auspices of the legendary Famous Door Company. The 1997 film version allowed audiences worldwide to follow.... Read More

Hamilton coming to Chicago

The blockbuster Broadway musical HAMILTON - with book, music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda - will play its first engagement outside New York this fall in Chicago. Performances begin September 27, 2016, at Broadway In Chicago's newly named The PrivateBank Theatre (formerly the Bank Of America Theatre).

With book, music and.... Read More

What's That Voice? Baritones Unbound Celebrates the Everymen of Music

The show is called Baritones Unbound, but who first erected those boundaries? Was it the age of Romanticism that declared all heroes had to be young, blond and sing in tenor range? Was it the memory of the family patriarch's authoritative tones that rendered chest-based vocalizations the province of elders and villains? And when twentieth-century values bestowed.... Read More

What Time Is This: Recreating Period Authenticity in The Time of Your Life

Some plays can be relocated to other periods and locales with relative ease, but others are inseparable from their original milieu. Try to imagine Of Mice and Men or Cat On a Hot Tin Roof anywhere but where their authors decided to set them.

What makes the ambience of William Saroyan's The Time of.... Read More

Spontaneous Coward (Noel, That Is): Unplanned Noel Coward Festival Welcomes in the Holidays

"All of Noel Coward's plays feature characters in—or out of—love." observes Derek Bertelsen, director of Pride Films and Plays production of Design For Living. While no one would ever mistake Coward's flagrantly unconventional lovers for your standard-issue Jack-and-Jill sweethearts, the cheerful amorality reflected in the English author's comedies appears to be responsible for Chicago's fall season boasting.... Read More

Million Dollar Quartet To Close After 7 Year Run

With almost 3,000 performances, Million Dollar Quartet, Chicago's longest-running Broadway musical, is set to close on January 17, 2016. The Tony Award winning rock 'n' roll musical has been breaking box office records at the Apollo Theater, 2540 N. Lincoln Avenue where it will run for only a short time longer.

.... Read More

Fun Home, The SpongeBob Musical, Finding Neverland Coming to Chicago

Broadway In Chicago announced the upcoming 2016 season line-up. Broadway In Chicago's 2016 season will include the 2015 Tony Award-Winning Best Musical FUN HOME, the Pre-Broadway World Premiere of THE SPONGEBOB MUSICAL, 42ND STREET, BULLETS OVER BROADWAY, THE SOUND OF MUSIC and FINDING NEVERLAND. The Broadway In Chicago 2016 Season line-up, including performance.... Read More

Going Down Swinging: Training the Pugs in Sucker Punch

Despite the conspicuous presence of athletes wearing padded gloves and silk trunks, Roy Williams' Sucker Punch is a play about fighting, and not just boxing. When the slum-dwelling citizens seeking refuge from poverty and violence in Charlie Maggs' shabby gymnasium aren't mixing it up in the ring, they're practicing in anticipation of achieving their moment of glory,.... Read More

Equity Jeff Awards 2015 Recipients

Two theatres in their first year of Equity eligibility received the most awards at the gala 47th Annual Equity Jeff Awards held at Drury Lane Oakbrook which celebrated a season of outstanding productions.

Newly Equity eligible, The Hypocrites earned six awards for "All Our Tragic", an epic 12-hour adaptation of the 32.... Read More

Diva Stunt-Double: Vocal Shape-Shifting in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice

The Rise and Fall of Little Voice is British playwright Jim Cartwright's modern-day fairy tale: its princess is a shy young woman dubbed "Little Voice"—or L.V.—by her boisterous mother, and her prison tower, the shabby public-housing apartment that they share. To muffle the sound of her careless parent's nightly carouses, Little Voice withdraws to her room and.... Read More

Singing Like A Seagull: Ukulele Music in Sideshow's Stupid F**king Bird

Its technical name is "tenor archtop ukulele"—not the cigar-box toy we associate with raccoon-coated roaring-twenties college boys and backyard tiki parties, but a relative of the lute, the mandolin and a pre-World War Two jazz guitar. So why is a character from a fin-de-siècle Russian classic playing mid-eighties pop tunes on one? Well, it's because this isn't really.... Read More

Prayer and Kitchens: Cooking with Steppenwolf in Grand Concourse

Nearly everything that happens in Heidi Schreck's Grand Concourse occurs in a kitchen—not a cozy gingham-curtained sanctuary of the kind often recreated in storefront theaters, but a stainless-steel urban-industrial scullery where meals for hoards of homeless diners are prepared daily by Sister Shelley and her assistants. Joey Wade's design for this oasis offering food for the body.... Read More

Pachydermal Puppetry: Creating the Hindu Elephant God in A Perfect Ganesh

The reason behind Terrence McNally's A Perfect Ganesh being so rarely performed is not its now-outdated fantasy of India, but that its story's narrator and facilitator is the Hindu deity Ganesha, remover of obstacles and, thus, patron of lovers and travelers. Why should so benevolent a spiritual icon present problems? Ganesha, you see, boasts a human body.... Read More

Angry Birds: Skyward Battle Cries in Conor McPherson's The Birds

The "bunker play" literary genre proposes a microcosmic society characters confined in restrictive quarters under duress arising from an outside threat. In Conor McPherson's The Birds (adapted from the short story by Daphne DuMaurier), what precipitates his three refugees securing shelter in an abandoned house on the New England coast are a series of concerted attacks by.... Read More

Gateway Theater: Windy City Playhouse Welcomes First-Time Audiences

It's probably the most glamorous storefront theater in Chicago, its façade recalling a Sinatra-era Hollywood lounge. Buildings of this vintage are nowadays most often found in the suburbs, refurbished with an eye to providing weary grandparents with nostalgic memories.

That's exactly what the Windy City Playhouse is not, though. Its quarters in what was.... Read More

The Saints Go Marching On: Indispensable Theater Volunteers Continue Their Mission

They are most often seen at the theaters, performing front-of-the-house chores—checking coats, dispensing refreshments, passing out playbills, tearing tickets and guiding patrons to their seats. They are usually dressed in smart black-and-white ("full penguin" jackets at the Symphony Center, business casual khakis and henleys at Theater Wit, by request of its owner, Jeremy Wechsler). The majority of them.... Read More

Back-Porch Picnic On Fire Island: Cooking With Terrence McNally in Lips Together, Teeth Apart

Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart is located in and around a luxury beach house in the swankiest part of New York's Fire Island, occupied on a Fourth of July weekend by two couples sunk in their respective funks despite the revelry surrounding them. The Eclipse Theatre Company's production occupies a third-floor studio with a stage measuring.... Read More

TLC In The CCTV Room: Red Handed Otter's Night Shift

Patrons of A Red Orchid's off-the-street theater are accustomed to scenery unfolding like pop-up puzzles on a shallow stage featuring only a little over a hundred square feet of walk-around floor space. Even so, the scenic design for Ethan Lipton's Red Handed Otter, set in a basement security center for an unnamed property (most likely a mall),.... Read More