Like the first generation Apple tablet, Broadway in Chicago and threesixty° entertainment’s “Peter Pan” flew into town with deserved graduation-season pomp and circumstance, befitting theater’s prospective next big thing. Common to most new technology, this production simultaneously wows and disappoints. The wow begins walking up to the 1,300-seat, in-the-round theater tent parked in a lot […]
It’s fall of 1959 and the school year has just begun on Chicago’s northwest side. Leaves are falling, the weather is unpredictable; it’s liable to rain any minute on the senior class at Rydell High. In the American Theatre Company’s latest production, “The Original Grease,” it does. The musical was made famous on Broadway and […]
Based on Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard,” playwright Tanya Saracho tells the story of a Mexican family’s legacy being disrupted by drug cartels. A poor carpenter becomes a hired gun. Shifting power and money is changing the roles of the working class and the privileged in modern day Nuevo Leon, Mexico. A mother and daughter return to […]
Porchlight Theatre presents the Midwest Premiere of “Meet John Doe,” a musical based on the Frank Capra film. During the Great Depression, a columnist saves her job by creating a news story. Her fake suicidal man garners the city’s attention and sells newspapers. To keep up the charade, Ann hires a John to play the […]
At a few moments during “Black Watch,” it sounds as if fighter jets are actually dropping bombs inside the Broadway Armory on Chicago’s North Side. Everything seems joltingly real—the roar of aircraft, the shock of explosions, the flashes of light. But as impressive as those effects are, what makes playwright Gregory Burke’s “Black Watch” so […]
Two North Shore natives have collaborated once again to bring innovative and captivating theater to Chicago in the Court Theatre’s production of “Orlando.” Director Jessica Thebus instills playfulness and poignancy in Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando,” which explores what it means to be a man and a woman through sex and history. “Orlando” […]
The acting is brilliant in this production in which actors play people who are trying to be actors. It’s a two-hour, no-intermission staged reality show about theatre. A community center offers a 6-week creative drama course. A free-spirited teacher takes a class of 4 through weekly acting exercises. Although the activities seem daft, the sequential […]
“How Can You Run with a Shell on your Back?” is a delightful romp for audiences of all ages. The musical, directed by Dominic Missimi, tells the story of six students, all with unique personalities and foibles, who bond together through the creative retelling of several of Aesop’s fables. Together, the kids learn the importance […]
Call out the fire trucks! The Lyric Opera’s second cast for Bizet’s “Carmen” is hot. The popular opera, which runs at the Civic Opera House through March 27, has been infused with new blood and its gripping drama flows fiercely toward its brutal finale, when Carmen pays for her sins with her life. Making her […]
Heidi Kettenring is best known for her role as Elphaba’s spoiled sister in the Chicago production of “Wicked”—but now, she’s playing a very different sister. The Evanston resident plays Elinor Dashwood in Northlight’s current world premiere of Jane Austen’s beloved “Sense and Sensibility.” As Elinor, who brings the “sense” to romantic Marianne’s “sensibility,” Kettenring had […]
