La Lupe is in the house. She’s a diva, if you didn’t know. The diva is overwhelming, as divas usually are. The diva is needy and capricious—dare we call her a tyrant?—but the diva also commands our respect, our attention, and finally, our love. This particular diva is inspired by the life of Lupe Victoria […]
Category: Arts & Culture
Posted inTheater Review
All you need is As You Like It
If England is famous worldwide for two things, it’s the Beatles and Shakespeare. Weaving these two very different artists together in a play may make you cry “zounds!” but methinks there is more in common betwixt these British poets than one may expect. The Chicago Shakespeare Theater is ready to welcome audiences to live shows […]
Posted inTheater Review
Putting the pieces together in First Folio’s The Jigsaw Bride
Playwright Joseph Zettelmaier has a history of taking largely forgotten, sometimes nameless characters and putting them in the dead center of the iconic tales they support. It’s a potentially grim business, digging up backstories (and futures) for (no)bodies the world only knows as incidental to someone else’s story. But anyone passingly familiar with the commercial/critical […]
Posted inTheater Review
Less is Moor in Court Theatre’s stripped-down Othello
Othello is usually viewed as “Shakespeare’s Race Play” and somewhat rightfully so—after all, the Bard almost never wrote Black characters. In our society race overshadows everything, so much so that much discourse around Othello tends to obstinately revolve around whether or not the play is “racist”—as if an inanimate object were able to take offense […]
Posted inTheater Review
Poe finds a Pleasant Home in Oak Park
Given the choice of presenting an evening of Edgar Allan Poe’s better known stories and poetry (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven”) and writing a play about the tormented alcoholic author and his obsessive pre- and post-mortem love for his first cousin/child bride Virginia, David Rice did both, weaving together dramatic readings of Poe’s […]
Posted inTheater Review
In the weeds with Rick Bayless and Windy City Playhouse
It’s #influencernight at the Contumacious Pig restaurant, and if you’re on payroll at a restaurant or an Instagrammer with 5,000 or more followers, you know what that means. If not, read on. The scene is the aforesaid purveyor of pork (and sundry sides), the night the amateur eaters are afoot, the head chef has doffed […]
Posted inGhost Light
Chita Rivera lights up the stage for Porchlight
The word “icon” gets tossed around pretty liberally, with every eye-catching ensemble on the red carpet at awards shows declared an “iconic” look. But if anyone deserves that designation, it’s Chita Rivera. The 88-year-old theater legend is in town tomorrow night for Porchlight Music Theatre’s annual fundraising gala, where she’ll receive the company’s ICON Award […]
Posted inTheater Preview
Ghost trusters
It doesn’t matter where you are in Chicago. There are dead people somewhere in the ground below you. The millions of Indigenous peoples that flourished for millennia. The countless millions who trampled in next. And next. And next. All those bodies. All that energy. All those stories. Chicago is literally steeped in them. And in […]
Posted inDance
Home is where the heart is
Twenty months and one (ongoing) pandemic since their last performance at the Auditorium Theatre, their home of 20 years, the Joffrey Ballet launched its new tenure on the stage at the Lyric Opera House with a dazzlingly triumphant program of three new works by Chanel DaSilva, Nicolas Blanc, and Yoshihisa Arai and a classic by […]
Posted inTheater Review
Grimm examines fairy tales with a twist
If Cheers and Into the Woods got together for an unprotected hookup, the end result might be a bit like Michael Dalberg’s Grimm, now in a world premiere with Theatre Above the Law under Josephine Czarnecki’s direction. The conceit is that the characters from the Brothers Grimm fairy tales (Little Red, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, […]
Posted inHistory
Queer history through the eyes of the Reader
“Y oung Hyde Park male seeks other young males to get it on with.” A phone number followed, along with the young man’s availability: days, as well as Friday and Saturday. The Chicago Reader’s first explicitly gay content came not in a blistering exposé, music feature, or show review, but in the classifieds, the backpages […]
Posted inTheater Review
Puppets and pandemic precautions clash in House of the Exquisite Corpse
After a long pandemic hiatus, it is once again demon puppet time at the Chopin Theatre, where Rough House Theater Company’s cabaret of ghouls returns for House of the Exquisite Corpse, a revamped, social-distanced take on its 2019 immersive play-slash-haunted-mansion Halloween special, The Silence in Harrow House. Co-artistic director Mike Oleon’s showcase spaces six puppet […]
Posted inTheater Preview
October ushers in bride of Frankenstein story at First Folio
Playwright Joseph Zettelmaier is a maker of monsters, a horror artist who retells classic tales with an emphasis on what makes these constructs human. First Folio Theatre, which has produced five of Zettelmaier’s plays in the past (including horror tales The Man-Beast, The Gravedigger, and Dr. Seward’s Dracula, along with two non-horror pieces, Salvage and […]
Posted inTheater Review
Amnesia wreaks havoc with a gay relationship in 4000 Days
If your partner met you today—instead of whoever you were on the first date—would they still fall in love? Peter Quilter’s queer 2016 dramedy makes literal an anxiety that looms over long-term couples, then dangles a sinister but merciful proposition: if you had a chance to walk away with a clean emotional slate, would you […]
Posted inTheater Review
A somber Thanksgiving unfolds in The Humans
Redtwist Theatre presents Stephen Karam’s celebrated family holiday drama to open its new season. It’s Thanksgiving 2015 on New York City’s Lower East Side and the Blake family has gathered at younger daughter Brigid’s rundown apartment to celebrate. As with virtually every family ever, each member nurses grudges, guards secrets, and leaves much of what […]