Arts & Culture Archives - Chicago Reader

Seven Black men in black suits and white shirts performing onstage. The man int he middle is on knees with a microphone in his left hand. They all have their right hands raised.

Song and dance, but not enough story

by Catey Sullivan May 26, 2022May 26, 2022

Here’s the TL;DR version of what to expect from Ain’t Too Proud, the new jukebox musical about soul/blues/disco/rock hitmakers The Temptations, whose catalog of songs spans the 1960s and the height of the Motown era through the disco beats of the 1970s and beyond. The music—featuring more than 30 tunes from the Motown catalog—is irresistible […]

A diner set. A young Black waitress in a yellow uniform stands next to a Black man seated at a table in the forefroung. We see three other Black men behind them; one in a booth on the left, a younger Black man standing by the register, and a man behind the register.

Theater Review

Diner dialogues

by Kelly Kleiman May 25, 2022May 25, 2022

This is an impeccable production of a play whose weaknesses outweigh its considerable strengths. It’s the 1960s episode of August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, tracing a century of life in the African American Hill District, and urban renewal shadows everything. (Jack Magaw’s set presents this vividly.) The diner where the play takes place is nearly empty […]

Five older women stand in a line on the deck of a ship, with a wintry mountain backdrop behind them.

Theater Review

Cruise control

by Dmitry Samarov May 25, 2022May 25, 2022

Margaret Knapp directs the world premiere of Martha Hansen’s first play (presented by Light and Sound Productions) about five women on an Alaskan cruise—each hoping to sight something other than a bunch of glaciers. Bailey (Hansen) is a chattering busybody looking for a first love late in life, Cora (Judi Schindler) is sliding into dementia […]

Richard III, played by a woman, is seen from the back, advancing with a sword on a young Black man. The scene is lit with a greenish hue.

Theater Review

Tyrant times

by Dmitry Samarov May 25, 2022May 25, 2022

Steve Scott directs a storefront production of Shakespeare’s wallow into the nature of unadorned power-lust and demagoguery. With a minimal set—a couple benches, steps with a recess to indicate the space for a throne—and little in the way of choreography or any other theatrical gimmickry, Promethean Theatre Ensemble leaves the Bard’s words to work their […]

A young woman stands holding an infant with a screen projection of lightning behind her. A group of musicians sits in a pit on the stage before her. The scene is drenched in blue light.

Theater Review

The incredible journey

by Kerry Reid May 25, 2022May 25, 2022

Six years ago, Brian Quijada and Teatro Vista teamed up to present Quijada’s solo show, Where Did We Sit on the Bus?, an endearing and poignant portrait of growing up in the Chicago suburbs as the child of Salvadoran immigrants. The title of that show came from a question young Brian had for his third-grade […]

Two Black men sit on stage, turned slight away from each other. The light is shadowy, with suggestions of tree limbs hanging overhead.

Theater Review

Southern spells

by Dan Jakes May 24, 2022May 24, 2022

A good play, suggests Tony Kushner in his 1995 anthology Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue, “should be overstuffed.” Memorably comparing well-constructed theater to lasagna, he writes that a work of theater “should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been” and, at its best, “has a bursting […]

Vintage photograph of the audience at the Studebaker

Ghost Light

The Studebaker gets ready to roll

by Kerry Reid May 20, 2022May 25, 2022

Last August, I caught up with Jacob Harvey just as he was taking over as the new (and first-ever) managing artistic director of theaters for the Fine Arts Building. At the time, he noted that with the loss of the Royal George as a midsize rental house, the soon-to-be-remodeled Studebaker Theater in the Fine Arts […]

An Asian man sits left, looking at a Chinese woman. Both are in what appears to be traditional Chinese clothing of the 19th century.

Theater Review

The price of exposure

by Sheri Flanders May 20, 2022May 20, 2022

In Viola Spolin’s seminal work Improvisation for the Theater, the very first exercise listed is named “exposure.” During this exercise, a group of actors are divided into halves and instructed to simply look at others and allow others to look at them. This deceptively difficult task often challenges new performers greatly; not only do they […]

Two young women sit at a table. The woman on the left has a bandaged face and holds a coffee mug. The woman on the right is looking up and sitting in front of a large open book.

Theater Review

Take shelter

by Katie Powers May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

In the Chicago premiere of Sarah Treem’s When We Were Young and Unafraid with AstonRep, a group of multitudinous women navigate domesticity, violence, and identity in a cultural landscape that both oppresses and empowers. Set in 1972, just before the Roe v. Wade decision and 22 years before the passage of the Violence Against Women […]

Three people in exaggerated blonde wigs and blue dresses in a row.

Theater Review

Dictator dictation

by Melissa Renee Perry May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

The energy in the Den Theater last Thursday was electric, as The Secretaries, written by Omer Abbas Salem and directed by Laura Alcalá Baker, made its highly anticipated debut with First Floor Theater. The dark comedic play was first developed through Goodman Theatre’s Future Labs and marks Salem’s first full production as a playwright in […]

At left, Jem Finch in khakis and a plaid shirt stands next to the front porch. Atticus Finch is seated on a bench center, wearing tan pants, a vest, shirt, and tie, holding a pad of paper. On the right is Scout Finch in denim overalls, sitting on the porch, and on the far right is Dill Harris in blue pants and a plaid short-sleeved shirt.

Theater Review

This bird has flown

by Kerry Reid May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

Aaron Sorkin’s gonna Sorkin, even when he’s working off someone else’s material. In his new adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, now in a short touring stop with Broadway in Chicago, the creator of A Few Good Men, The American President, and The West Wing goes back to the courtyard drama/political grandstanding that […]

Two women in white fencing clothes. The woman on the left is white, and is in a kneeling crouch. The woman on the right is Black, and is looking down at the other woman, holding her fencing sword pointed down.

Theater Review

Babes with blades

by Kerry Reid May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

Whether by design or happenstance, Writers Theatre has focused on the theme of women in competition and collaboration this season. In Eleanor Burgess’s Wife of a Salesman, two actors portraying Linda Loman and the “woman from Boston” in a contemporary riff on Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman wonder why their characters in the play-within-the-play […]

Four actors in early 20th-century clothing stand in a row, looking at a newspaper headline.

Theater Review

Immigrant song

by Kerry Reid May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

If you’re a fan of Henry Louis Gates’s Finding Your Roots on PBS, then you can probably relate to Annabelle Lee Revak’s impulse to create a musical out of the World War I-era letters of her great-great-grandfather, Joe Loula. As in Gates’s program, the most interesting details in Revak’s Notes & Letters with Underscore Theatre […]

Blback woman with white robot puppet in left foreground. White woman in mustard-colored jumpsuit kneeling slightly behind puppet on left, with look of joy on her face.

Theater Review

The play about the baby

by Kerry Reid May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

Reproductive rights cuts both ways: the government deciding that you may not have a child comes from the same authoritarianism that tells you that you must continue an unwanted pregnancy. Given current grim news about the impending SCOTUS decision overturning Roe v. Wade, that thought is unavoidable when viewing Zoe Kazan’s dystopian After the Blast. […]

Four people in folding chairs onstage enacting the Tea Party. The first two are men in suits with hats, then Alice in a white dress and black-and-white striped stockings, with a man in a pink and white pinafore at the far right. The men all have their hands raised in the air, while Alice looks on with delight.

Theater Review

Chess, circus, and the game of life

by Kimzyn Campbell May 19, 2022May 19, 2022

Here is a riddle for you: What do a game of chess and life have in common?* Inside the tidy, rule-driven universe of a chess board, seven-year-old Alice stumbles upon the inexplicable and absurd rules of a new world. Every fledgling chess player will empathize as Alice is met with surprise after surprise in this […]