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The Hammer Trinity
The Birds And The Beasts Were There: Animal Puppets in The Hammer Trinity

In The Hammer Trinity, Chris Mathews and Nathan Allen's Tolkeinesque three-part fantasy epic, there are two scenes where the entire audience rises in unison to cheer the action transpiring on stage. The villain getting his comeuppance is one, of course, but before that climactic victory, there is the moment where July of the Seven Foxes summons forth the.... Read More

One Came Home
Springtime On The Frontier: Prairie Landscaping in Lifeline's One Came Home

You'd never guess to look at the Baraboo/Dells region nowadays, but central Wisconsin was once a seemingly endless expanse of rocky glacial terrain teeming with wildlife and dotted with remote farming settlements barely hinting at the nearby state capitol. This is the setting of Amy Timberlake's One Came Home, a saga of feisty Georgie Burkhardt's search for.... Read More

A Nice Indian Boy
Star-Crossed In South Asia: Nice Indian Boy's Bollywood Connection

Despite having been written over four hundred years ago, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is still invoked by star-crossed young romantics confronted with family opposition. The myth underscoring the courtship of the interracial same-sex sweethearts in Madhuri Shekar's A Nice Indian Boy, currently playing under the auspices of the Rasaka Theatre Company, has a shorter history, but resonates.... Read More

Accidentally Like a Martyr
Mix-Master At Work: Tending Bar in Accidentally, Like a Martyr

The frontier traditions shaping our nation's culture declare a saloon to be more than simply a liquor dispensary, instead ranking alongside the town church as a community social center, serving as ballroom, hotel, dining hall and funeral parlor as needed. Its elevated status may account for the number of American plays set in barrooms, from The Iceman Cometh.... Read More

The Rose Tattoo Shattered Globe Theater
Sicilian Southern On The Gulf Coast: Dialect Instruction in The Rose Tattoo

The upper coastline of the Mexican Gulf forming the southern boundaries of five states—Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida—comprises a diversity of languages, having been at various times a port-of-entry for French, Spanish, German, Irish and Scottish settlers. The verbal landscape surrounding the Italian colony lending Tennessee Williams his setting for The Rose Tattoo encompasses the native.... Read More

A Christmas Carol at Goodman Theatre
Cratchit's Christmas Dinner: Grocery Shopping in the Goodman Theatre's Christmas Carol

Nobody talks about food more than a hungry author, so who can blame Charles Dickens for incorporating so many descriptions of sumptuous meals into his novels? A Christmas Carol revels in Fezziwig's holiday feast for his employees, in the meager-but-sufficient repast of the Cratchits and the bounty of rich comestibles enthroning the Ghost of Christmas Present.
.... Read More

Hellcab at Profiles Theatre
A Long Hellcab Ride: Richard Cotovsky Takes the Wheel Again After Twenty Years

On the list of Chicago's longest-running holiday shows, Hellcab (originally titled Hellcab Does Christmas) falls fifteen years behind the Goodman's Christmas Carol, but a few years ahead of The Christmas Schooner. What distinguishes Hellcab from its seasonal compatriots, however, is its setting. Instead of Victorian London, or a turn-of-the-century Michigan logging community, Will Kern's play looks at.... Read More

Il Trovatore Lyric Opera
Ring Dem Bells: Swinging Hammers in Il Trovatore's Anvil Chorus

People who profess to know nothing of grand opera recognize the "Anvil Chorus" from Verdi's Il Trovatore immediately—if only the Marx Brothers and Bugs Bunny versions. This rousing ensemble number (properly called "Vedi! Le Fosche Notturne"), set in a Romani encampment, features two eight-measure passages where the orchestra mimics the ring of the blacksmiths' hammers as they.... Read More

The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Irish Cats Have Nine Lives: Feline Cameo in AstonRep Lieutenant of Inishmore

The words "dead cat" will likely inspire amusement in all but the most devout aelurophiles, but in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, the untimely demise of two felines launches a chain of events that will end in their bereaved owners enacting terrible vengeance on the murderers of innocent creatures. More difficult than the quantities of simulated gore, gunfire.... Read More

Both Your Houses
Congressional Expectations: Baby On Board in Both Your Houses

Maxwell Anderson, writing in 1931, probably never anticipated married women, let alone expectant mothers, holding down executive positions in Washington DC, but when Linda Gillum—cast as Greta "Bus" Nillson, the savvy secretary who helps the idealistic crusader of Both Your Houses battle his weasely colleagues—announced that she would be visibly pregnant on opening night, the creative staff.... Read More

Brutus from The Clean House
Fight Like A Fish: Swimming Against the Current in The Clean House

"Life is a joke, so why not die laughing?" is the moral of The Clean House, as well as the rallying cry of the newlywed cancer-stricken Ana—whose recently-acquired family encompasses her doctor/husband, his ex-wife, his former sister-in-law, and their housekeeper. Her rejection of the depression associated with lingering disease is symbolized by her pet fish ("a fighting.... Read More

Jane Eyre Lifeline Theatre
An Eye For An Eye: The Wounded Hero of Jane Eyre

The Romantic sensibility reflected in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre mandates that the title character's final step toward conquering her horrific early childhood memories is the rescue of her chosen consort from his demons, the latter manifested, literally, upon his physical being. Edward Rochester, we are told, refused to flee the fiery destruction of his unhappy home until.... Read More

Ecstasy - Cole Theatre
Second-Hand Smoke: Acting Tobacco Consumption in Cole Theatre's Ecstasy

Audiences are usually willing to suspend disbelief for whiskey decanters filled with tea or beer bottles containing diluted coca-cola, but the working-class youths in Ecstasy, Mike Leigh's time-capsule portrait of England in 1979, also consume copious quantities of tobacco, a substance nowadays inspiring such alarm—despite its legal status and widespread popularity in the United States—that special care.... Read More

All Our Tragic
Tragic Repasts: Feeding the Audiences at All Our Tragic

Though the tradition dates from antiquity, for modern audiences, it all started in 1980 with the Royal Shakespeare Company's eight-and-a-half-hour Nicholas Nickleby, a sprawling adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel that launched a fashion for marathon productions of duration sufficient to require at least one extended intermission for playgoers to fortify themselves with nutrition more substantial than lobby.... Read More

Intimate Apparel Eclipse Theatre Company
Stitchery Ex Machina: Old-Fashioned Sewing in Intimate Apparel

It commands the stage picture, positioned firmly downstage center where you can't miss it—an iron-filigree, treadle-propelled Singer sewing machine of the sort nowadays most often found in rural attics, disabled and rusted-out, useful only as a trellis for climbing house plants. Not this one, however! No, this vintage homemaker's helper gleams as temptingly as when first sent forth.... Read More

Churchill
Winston In America: Ronald Keaton's Churchill Moves to the Greenhouse

He was born to privilege in a time and a society where such accidents determined his future as surely as they restricted that of other citizens. He suffered devastating changes in fortune, distinguished himself in a wide range of endeavors and lived to the age of ninety. He was English, product of a culture Americans are fond of.... Read More

The Late Henry Moss
Washing With Sam: Bathing Beauty in The Late Henry Moss

South Pacific calls for a navy nurse to wash her hair onstage while singing a song, and in The Big Funk, a captive woman is given a shampoo and shower by a bevy of servants in full view of the audience, but for The Late Henry Moss, Yadira Correa's duties for the role of the mysterious Conchalla.... Read More

Monstrous Regiment Lifeline Theatre
Rocking Out: Wearable Masonry in Monstrous Regiment

Castle walls are usually easy to replicate—you paint some plywood to look like fieldstone and mortar, or—if you want to get fancy—you paste some Home Depot fiberglass faux-fireplace surfacing material to the plywood. Lifeline Theatre's adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment, however, requires a wall to collapse into a pile of gravel at precisely the moment when.... Read More

Pippin Musical in Chicago
Tony-Award Winning Musical Pippin Coming to Chicago

Broadway In Chicago has announced that the Tony Award winning Broadway Musical PIPPIN will play Chicago's Cadillac Palace Theatre (151 W Randolph) for two weeks only, July 28 - August 9, 2015.

This all-new production of Roger O. Hirson and Stephen Schwartz's PIPPIN is directed by Tony Award winner Diane Paulus and features choreography.... Read More

Love Tapes In Chicago
Hey, Mister, Take My Picture: Audience Participation in The Inconvenience's Love Tapes

"It's a modern mating ritual," Carl explains to his photographer in the quirky comedy Love Tapes co-authored by Penn Jillette and Steven Banks. He is referring to the videotape he plans to shoot of himself, posing as a metal-rocker wearing nothing but a Fender bass guitar, and then dispatch in reply to a likewise self-produced videotape from.... Read More