Review: Pullman Porter Blues/Goodman Theatre
RECOMMENDED Director Chuck Smith has taken Cheryl L West’s play about three generations of African-American porters working on a luxury Pullman train bound from Chicago to New Orleans on June 22,...
View ArticleReview: Smokefall/Goodman Theatre
RECOMMENDED I kept thinking about the story of my parents’ oft-discussed first meeting—at a dance hall in Fargo, North Dakota sometime at the dawn of the JFK era—as I watched one of the best plays of...
View ArticleReview: The World Of Extreme Happiness/Goodman Theatre
RECOMMENDED In the couple of years since I saw “The World of Extreme Happiness” as part of Goodman’s New Stages festival, the humor has become a little sharper, the production has grown notably...
View ArticleReview: A Christmas Carol/Goodman Theatre
RECOMMENDED Thirty-five years ago, Goodman Theatre debuted its first production of Charles Dickens’ holiday classic at the suggestion of now-executive director Roche Schulfer, and changed the face of...
View ArticleReview: Teddy Ferrara/Goodman Theatre
RECOMMENDED A suicide is always a tragedy. And in the hands of various interest groups and media outlets, as agendas are pushed and stories are filtered or distorted, a tragedy can become a travesty....
View ArticleReview: Pullman Porter Blues/Goodman Theatre
RECOMMENDED Director Chuck Smith has taken Cheryl L West’s play about three generations of African-American porters working on a luxury Pullman train bound from Chicago to New Orleans on June 22,...
View ArticleReview: Smokefall/Goodman Theatre
RECOMMENDED I kept thinking about the story of my parents’ oft-discussed first meeting—at a dance hall in Fargo, North Dakota sometime at the dawn of the JFK era—as I watched one of the best plays of...
View ArticleThe Players 2014: The Fifty People Who Really Perform in Chicago
Once was the time, when it came to performing arts, that Chicago was a great place to come from. But thanks to the constant upward trajectory of our community, Chicago is now a great place to come from...
View ArticleReview: Buzzer/Goodman Theatre
RECOMMENDED At its best, theater uses its characters and their stories as vessels for big ideas, for provocations that make audiences think about new concepts, or to consider old notions in new ways....
View ArticleReview: Venus in Fur/Goodman Theatre
RECOMMENDED Playwright David Ives has made his reputation with smart translation-adaptations of classic French works, most recently his retooling of Moliere’s “The Misanthrope” as “The School For...
View ArticleBrigadoon It: Rachel Rockwell’s Goodman Debut Brings a Classic Out of the Fog
By Dennis Polkow Director and choreographer Rachel Rockwell seems to be the lady with the golden touch, the one with an uncanny talent for taking old classic shows that you thought you knew and giving...
View ArticleReview: Brigadoon/Goodman Theatre
RECOMMENDED A few days ago, a friend and I were joking about the plot of Lerner and Loewe’s “Brigadoon” when he quipped, “What a silly story,” then, quickly realizing what he was saying in the same...
View ArticleReview: Smokefall/Goodman Theatre
RECOMMENDED At a point early on in Noah Haidle’s moving morality/mortality tale, troubled father Daniel (a world-weary Eric Slater, effectively straddling inner sadness and external buoyancy) reads...
View ArticleReview: A Christmas Carol/Goodman Theatre
RECOMMENDED Goodman Theatre has perfected the holiday show in its annual production of “A Christmas Carol,” with superb, consciously colorblind casting, terrific scenic design by Todd...
View ArticleReview: Rapture, Blister, Burn
At one point in the first act, twenty-one-year-old Avery Willard (played with comic bravado and youthful vulnerability by Cassidy Slaughter-Mason) explains her lack of interest in “First-wave Feminism”...
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Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Players 2024: The Fifty People Who Really Perform for Chicago
As the curtain rises on 2024, whether we're in the front row or the balcony, we are trepidatious. If anything uplifts the performing-arts realm of Chicago to a thriving state, it's the talent and...
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