The Winter's Tale at Oak Park Festival Theatre

Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended

"...This is a great play for the summer—despite its title—because The Winter’s Tale is as much about the coming of spring as it is the dreary desolation of December. At least that is what director Kevin Theis emphasizes in this high-spirited, lighthearted production. All that is positive, sweet, and redemptive in the play—the openhearted expressions of friendship, the warmhearted comic turns, the full-throttle romance in the second half—works like a charm."

Chicago On Stage - Highly Recommended

"...A production's raison d'etre, though, is just one small aspect of its merit. Fortunately, Theis is also more than capable of delivering an excellent interpretation of this complicated and somewhat awkward play. The Winter's Tale starts out as a devastating drama about a monarch who, Othello-like, has begun to believe that his very honest and loyal wife is having an affair, and ends up being a breezy, magical celebration of love. This in a play in which a leading character becomes dinner for a marauding bear, a plot element that actually kickstarts the comic side of things. As I said, it's complicated."

NewCity Chicago - Highly Recommended

"...Well-cast and imaginatively staged by adapter and director Kevin Theis, Oak Park Theatre Festival’s telling of “The Winter’s Tale” is a consistently engaging and occasionally enthralling way to spend a midsummer evening. The outdoor production has its slow spots and rough patches, but it captures the unsettling strangeness of this late Shakespearean romance, which veers recklessly between comedy and tragedy and ends in a kind of Elizabethan magical realism, stretching the viewer’s suspension of disbelief to the breaking point."