Goodman’s “Candide” is Memorable for Its Music

Mary Zimmerman’s imagining of Voltaire’s “Candide,” with the score of Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway musical, opened at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago Sunday evening. It is a very fine show with a strong cast, plenty of laughs and, of course, superb songs. The first question about “Candide”—often done as an opera and rightly so—is who will […]

Goodman's 'A Christmas Carol' Truly Sings

Think you’ve seen enough productions of “A Christmas Carol” to last a lifetime? Don’t be so sure. The Goodman Theatre in Chicago, which has presented Charles Dickens’s perennial salute to Christmas annually for more than three decades, has a surprise for you. Adapter Tom Creamer and director William Brown have given us a fresh retelling […]

"Fake" at Steppenwolf: A Play that Gets Real on Evolution and Religion

Has the missing link ever been found? In 1912 a skull supposedly unearthed in Sussex, England seemed to prove that man had evolved from the ape, supporting Charles Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” published more than half a century earlier. That’s the crux of the new, thought-provoking drama “Fake,” which opened at Steppenwolf on Sept. […]