A predominantly black neighborhood is gentrifying. Once known as a place to score drugs, it’s now welcoming more and more middle-class residents. However, young African-American men are still loitering on the streets, harassing the newcomers as they walk past. That’s the potentially fraught setting for Tracey Scott Wilson’s “Buzzer,” now at Goodman Theatre and directed […]
Fans of Stephen Sondheim take note—a new production of “Into the Woods” has hit Chicago and the result is spellbinding! The groundbreaking theatre company The Hypocrites has inventively reimagined the Tony Award-winning play. Director Geoff Bunton brilliantly brings the musical to life by incorporating a “children at play” aesthetic, which is as fun and whimsical as […]
Gioachino Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” is a comedy that just won’t quit. The Lyric Opera of Chicago‘s sunny production, which opened February 1 at the Civic Opera House, mines the comic vein with gusto, enhancing the story’s plot with more physical antics than I’ve seen on Lyric’s stage in years. This is the opera […]
Enchantment emanates from every moment of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s evanescent production of Antonin Dvorak’s “Rusalka.” The opera tells the story of a water nymph, Rusalka, who has fallen in love with a handsome human prince, who often bathes in her forest lake. She longs to become human and with the aid of a […]
February brings a highly anticipated musical to Chicago Shakespeare, a festival of cutting-edge theater inside a garage, a musical about Chicago murders in the 1920s, and a new drama about murders in the city today. Gypsy February 6 to March 23 Two of Chicago’s most critically acclaimed shows in recent years were Stephen Sondheim musicals […]
The title character of “Luna Gale” is never visible. In the few moments when she is onstage during this Goodman Theatre production, Luna is quietly hidden away inside a baby carriage. And yet, as invisible as she may seem to the audience, the infant named Luna Gale is the force driving most of the adult […]
Ask Carrie Underwood what it’s like to have her live performance compared to an iconic film star’s. Unfair? Probably.
January brings some classic shows to local stages, led by a complex female protagonist in “Hedda Gabler” and the Weimar naughtiness of “Cabaret.” And if those stories are too serious for your tastes, head to Drury Lane for a monster moaning “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Hedda Gabler January 7 to March 16 Two consistently great […]
In “Luck of the Irish,” having its Midwest premiere atNext Theatre in Evanston’s Noyes Cultural Arts Center, the Irish don’t have much. The story is about “ghost buying” in Boston in the 1950s, a maneuver in which a white man was given money by a black man to buy a house for him in a […]
As Suzy Snowflake continues her interminable tap-tap-tapping on Chicagoland windowpanes, it’s time to turn her attention-getting acoustics into a cue to indulge in a winter escape, if only for a couple of hours. At “42nd Street,” there isn’t an UGG boot to be found. Instead, this latest musical theater offering from Aurora’s Paramount Theatre is […]
