Arts & Culture Archives - Chicago Reader

Remembering Myrna Salazar 1947-2022

by Kerry Reid August 12, 2022August 13, 2022

Next month, the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance will present the fifth annual Destinos Chicago International Theater Festival. But it will be bittersweet; the woman most responsible for making the festival a reality, CLATA cofounder and executive director Myrna Salazar, won’t be there to see it. Salazar died on Wednesday, August 3, two weeks after celebrating […]

Black-and-white image of Susan V. Booth sitting on metal steps leading up to an el station. The steps have signs warning "Stop. No Entry." She is wearing dark trousers, a long-sleeved shirt, and a pullover sweater

Ghost Light

Susan V. Booth talks about coming home to the Goodman

by Kerry Reid August 10, 2022August 10, 2022

The past two years have seen more upheavals and changes in leadership at Chicago theaters than at any time in my memory, exacerbated by the long COVID-19 shutdown. So perhaps it makes sense that Goodman Theatre went back to the future, so to speak, by announcing Susan V. Booth as their new artistic director late […]

Thirteen cast members are onstage, with a large group in the front in raggedy clothing, holding signs and otherwise assuming postures suggesting rebellion. A painted dropcloth at the rear spells out "URINETOWN."

Theater Review

A musical class clown at 20

by Dan Jakes August 10, 2022August 10, 2022

In the 20 years since Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis’s gently irreverent and thoroughly catchy musical premiered, it’s become such a beloved staple among professional and amateur companies that it’s easy to forget about the odd footing upon which the show stumbled onto the Broadway stage. Originally scheduled to debut September 13, 2001, the vaudevillian, […]

Four actors in a row onstage. Two are seated center in purple jumpsuits and cat ears. They are bookended by two characters in brown furry bodysuits, holding firearms.

Theater Review

Galaxy cats

by Emily McClanathan August 10, 2022August 10, 2022

Nerds of many stripes will feel at home entering the magical portal that is Otherworld Theatre, a Wrigleyville-based theater company that specializes in science fiction and fantasy. Fancy a butterbeer before the show? A cozy reading nook inside the TARDIS? Eclectic lobby decor ranging from classic sci-fi book covers to modern fantasy artists? This theater […]

The six members of the cast of Great Altercations stands huddled in a clump center stage. They are smiling and making various gestures (air guitar, fists, arms crossed over chest, hands waving in air, etc.)

Theater Review

Great Altercations needs alterations

by Kelly Kleiman August 10, 2022August 10, 2022

There are half a dozen exceptionally talented individuals in the new Second City e.t.c. revue, Great Altercations. But that turns out to be a problem: they remain individuals rather than forming an ensemble. Nor is this inability to cohere merely a lack of performance rhythm: as the creation of sketch comedy requires collaboration during improvisation, […]

A scene from the Broadway-bound musical The Devil Wears Prada. A young Black woman stands on the far left. A middle-aged white man and a middle-aged white woman stand facing her. We see other actors behind floor-length office windows behind them, along with racks of clothing. A large blue sign reading RUNWAY is over their heads

Theater Review

The Devil Wears Prada doesn’t quite make it work

by Kerry Reid August 9, 2022August 10, 2022

There’s a brand new dance / But I don’t know its name / That people from bad homes / Do again and again / It’s big and it’s bland / Full of tension and fear / They do it over there / But we don’t do it here. – “Fashion,” David Bowie The new Broadway-bound […]

Book Review

The extraordinary tragedy of daily life

by Dmitry Samarov August 8, 2022August 8, 2022

Wolfgang Amadeus Aleksandr “Aleks” Fa has a lot of baggage. The protagonist of Joe Meno’s new novel Book of Extraordinary Tragedies has that name, after all—which also serves as a clue about what burdens the young man. Born into a perfectionist but impoverished Bosnian/Croat/Polish family in Evergreen Park on the border with Chicago’s south side, […]

The ensemble of Laughing Song with Theatre Y, assembled on abandoned railroad tracks. Marvin Tate, a Black man, is in the foreground in a gray jacket, dark pants, and black hat smoking a cigarette. The other ensemble members sit on the tracks, with one actor in black pants and white shirt walking alongside them.

Theater Review

‘And then I laughed’

by Kerry Reid August 4, 2022August 4, 2022

At one point in Theatre Y’s ambulatory Laughing Song: A Walking Dream, Marvin Tate as George W. Johnson (the first Black American recording artist) is asked by a reporter at a press conference, “Is your laugh real, or is it fake?” It’s a reasonable question—but by the end of this four-hour show, which weaves together […]

Arts & Culture

The three Ryans

by Katie Prout August 4, 2022August 4, 2022

An interview with a trio of teenage boys who shared a passion for Godzilla and for calling each other “brother,” though it had only been an hour since they’d met.

Arts & Culture

Swimming in the atomic waters of the largest Godzilla convention on earth

by Katie Prout August 4, 2022August 9, 2022

On the reptilian superstar, family, and other monsters

On the left is an image of the cover art for Cyclorama with a background of yellow, peach, and teal. On the right is a heashot of Adam Langer, a white middle-aged blalding man in a black shirt open at the neck.

Arts & Culture

Fast times at North Shore Magnet High

by Jack Helbig August 3, 2022August 4, 2022

Journalist, playwright, screenwriter, theater critic, arts editor, and novelist Adam Langer was born in Chicago, grew up in West Rogers Park, went to school in Evanston, and spent the early part of his career here writing and editing for various Chicago publications, including the Reader, Inside Chicago, Book Magazine, and the alternative music magazine Subnation. […]

Three headshots. On the left is Myrna García, a Latinx woman, in red-and-orange patterned top. In the middle is Nick Thornton, a white male in a gray patterned top, lying on the floor and propped on his right elbow. On the right is Andrew Biliter, a white man in a dark sweater, who is looking to his right.

Ghost Light

Mudlark expands its community outreach

by Kerry Reid July 29, 2022July 29, 2022

The last time I checked in with Evanston’s youth-oriented Mudlark Theater in April 2020, they were in the midst of pivoting to online workshops and creating digital shows. The company has returned to live classes and performances since then. And now, with the help of two grants, they’re poised to further expand their focus on […]

Theater Review

The Mamalogues offers real talk with a comic edge

by Matt Simonette July 28, 2022

Late in Evanston’s Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre’s production of The Mamalogues, one character asks, “If I am my ancestors’ wildest dream, why am I still living out their worst nightmares?” The Mamalogues is a 90-minute comedy that deftly tackles that question, as three professionally successful Black women gather for a meeting of the BBSM, or “Bougie Black […]

The cast of Mercury Theater Chicago's Priscilla Queen of the Desert stands in front of the prop tour bus. The three drag performers who are at the center of the show are in the center of the photograph wearing bright sleeveless jumpsuits and exaggerated wigs, striking poses. They are surrounded by "tourists" in shorts and camping shirts, taking their photographs.

Theater Review

Queens of the road

by Kerry Reid July 27, 2022July 27, 2022

In 1994, an Australian road comedy about three drag artists heading off in a beat-up tour bus across the Outback felt like a breath of fresh air in a cinematic landscape that tended to focus stories with “gay themes” on the tragedy of AIDS, and that still tended to view being trans as a punch […]

Ross Johnson, an older white male in a gray suit, stands center stage. Two other older white males stand on either side of him. Johnson has his right index finger raised. There are two red chairs visible behind them.

Theater Review

Mind games

by Marissa Oberlander July 27, 2022July 27, 2022

More than 30 years into his second act as a mind reader and psychic performer, Ross Johnson, a former schoolteacher, is still eliciting gasps. The second performer at Rogers Park’s new Rhapsody Theater—formerly the Mayne Stage—the 77-year-old is like Mister Rogers meets Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling in his interactive one-man show. It’s hard to shock […]