Illustrating fire on stage is a challenge, especially when it’s the subject of an entire play. Such is the case in “The Great Fire,” which launched the 2011-2012 season at the Tony Award-winning Lookingglass Theatre. “The Great Fire,” which is about the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, uses no open flames. Instead, a woman embodies […]
“Mary Poppins” is a headline writer’s dream. A great staging can be summed up in one word: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius. Performance not worth attending? Go fly a kite. It’s also an unequivocal showcase for the female lead, with the production’s success resting squarely on the title character’s shoulders. Consider Broadway in Chicago’s current run of the Disney […]
The musical “Follies” idolizes the days of Ziegfeld Follies while also poking fun at them. As a result, theatergoers get show-stopping numbers of the Vaudeville era as well as a deeper look at the past dreams and present follies of the characters. Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of “Follies,” by Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman, captures […]
Forget “Man of La Mancha.” The Joffrey Ballet has mounted a vividly re-imagined version of the epic story by Cervantes. In this colorful world premiere, Don Quixote remains an aging nobleman dreaming of chivalry, with a bumbling sidekick and a skinny horse. But he is also like Saint Valentine, rescuing a young woman from an […]
In “The Amish Project,” Sadieh Rifai inhabits 7 characters with an emotional dexterity that’s virtuosic. On October 2, 2006, a non-Amish milk truck driver in Nickel Mines, Pa., entered a one-room schoolhouse for Amish children with a gun, demanding that all the boys and adults leave. He bound the girls with plastic ties. When the […]
Lucia Ashton is a madwoman, but she didn’t start out that way. Like Juliet Capulet, she falls in love with someone from a rival family and is under extreme pressure to marry someone else. Lucia finally cracks under the demands of her family and the absence of her beloved, and like Juliet, she perishes. Lyric […]
Above all things, it seems, Carrie Fisher knows where to find the funny. Early on in her autobiographical one-woman show, “Wishful Drinking,” she remarks that if all the things that happened in her life weren’t so funny, they’d just be true. Fisher peppers little bon mots like this throughout her tragi-comic narratives of pill popping, […]
“Wait Until Dark” is a suspense-filled tale of a blind woman. She is trapped in her basement apartment in New York City by three criminals searching for a doll packed with heroin. A 1967 film starred Audrey Hepburn as Susy Hendrix, a young woman blinded from an accident and recently married to a mostly […]
Women pay a price for power. For Elizabeth I, that price was the permission to love—and therefore be human—according to playwright Timothy Findley, who spun this fictional story out of a historical fact: The night before the beheading of her court favorite and rumored lover, the Earl of Essex, Elizabeth was entertained by Shakespeare’s company […]
A physician once argued that three-fourths of women had ailments that could be cured by the vibrator. The doctor was quoted in “The Technology of Orgasm” by Rachel Maines. Acclaimed playwright and Wilmette native Sarah Ruhl says that this book was her inspiration for “In The Next Room (or the vibrator play).” Directed by Sandy […]
