On June 8, 2015 the Chicago Shakespeare Theater celebrated its 2015 Gala at Navy Pier, raising $1.2 million for Chicago Shakespeare in Urban Communities initiatives. Three hundred and fifty of Chicago’s civic, corporate and cultural leaders attended the event benefitting CST’s award-winning engagement programs including Team Shakespeare education initiatives and Chicago Shakespeare in the Parks. […]
What do Shakespeare and rap have in common? A lot more than you might initially think—at least according to the Q Brothers. GQ and JQ, a pair of clever, creative Chicago brothers, have traveled the world writing, directing and performing witty, entertaining shows. From musical hip-hop “add-RAP-tations” of Shakespearean plays to freestyle kiddie concerts about […]
We all know how “Othello” ends. The love story between the mighty Moor of Venice and his gentle Desdemona comes to the same tragic conclusion in Shakespeare’s 1693 drama, Verdi’s 1887 opera, the 1995 Hollywood film and in the ballet, choreographed by Lar Lubovitch for American Ballet Theatre in 1997. A revival of that story […]
The last time Robert Falls directed a Shakespeare play at the Goodman, where he serves as artistic director, he transplanted “King Lear” into a landscape that resembled war-torn Yugoslavia. It was a shocking, riveting, gut-wrenching and epic experience. Now, Falls is taking a similarly transformative approach to another Shakespeare work, “Measure for Measure.” Although […]
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 […]
Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is all mists, moonbeams and mischief, and Benjamin Britten’s opera of the same name, running at Lyric Opera of Chicago through Nov. 23, delivers them with twinkling merriment. From a chorus of singing sprites costumed like the dear little creatures from the “Close Encounters” spaceship to an Oberon who rides […]
