Christopher Pazdernik directs Matthew Lombardo’s 2017 grown-ups-only update of Dr. Seuss’s yuletide classic, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. On the outskirts of Whoville, in a modest but homey trailer, a very adult Cindy Lou Who recounts her meet-cute with the Grinch and the resulting fallout. Who’s Holiday! Through 12/26: see website for full schedule, Theater […]
Category: Arts & Culture
Posted inArts & Culture
A Kate Bush catharsis
For music fans starved of live performances over the first year of the pandemic, the return to in-person shows earlier this year was a blessing, a small sense of normalcy amid a still-steady battle with the coronavirus. Despite the many additional challenges thrown up by playing through a pandemic, fans and musicians alike have eagerly […]
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A mystery on the home front
How do we contribute to making history every day? When we learn history, there’s often a huge emphasis on the leaders who make things happen, whether they are presidents, businessmen, or heads of social and political movements. But what about the people who make these movements happen: the ones who campaign for the presidents or […]
Posted inTheater Review
Too much of a good thing
Inspired by the real-life onstage/offstage marital drama of the husband-and-wife acting team, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, this Tony Award-winning 1948 musical features an engaging book by Sam and Bella Spewack and a score packed with iconic Cole Porter earworms—among them “Why Can’t You Behave,” “Always True to You (In My Fashion),” and “Too Darn […]
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The “singing mailman” with a unique gift
To write about John Prine, whose death from COVID-19 related complications in April 2020 devastated fans around the world, is an inherently intimate act. Prine’s music has always felt like a treasured good, sacred and familial. I felt that as a kid, hearing stories from my dad, who lived near Chicago in the 1970s and […]
Posted inPerforming Arts Feature
Remembering Matt Rieger: ‘a good egg for the ages’
Editor’s Note: Matt Rieger, managing director and ensemble member of the Curious Theatre Branch, died on October 27 at 50, following a recent cancer diagnosis. Rieger’s death led to an outpouring of tributes on social media, reminding many of how instrumental he had been in many roles onstage and off over his years as a […]
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The scene report from space
Elaborate hologram displays. A satellite planet. A mysterious deity. On the surface, Lane Milburn’s rollicking sci-fi graphic novel Lure doesn’t have much to do with Chicago. But Milburn drew inspiration from his old neighborhood, his punk band, his friends, and his near-decade living in the city. Lure takes place on an alternate earth, orbited by […]
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Coercive utopia
While its drama focuses on 20th-century events, the New Coordinates’ (the company formerly known as the New Colony) Love in the Time of Jonestown is uncannily contemporary—which is exactly how historical fiction should feel. Production-wise, Jonestown richly reflects our time and place. Written by Omer Abbas Salem, it’s a radio play in three parts that […]
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Parody actually
Goethe’s 1774 romantic classic Die Leiden des jungen Werthers convinced many ill-starred suitors to off themselves in the pain of unrequited love, and Richard Curtis’s 2003 romantic comedy Love Actually has surely convinced just as many yearning paramours to commit ill-advised confessions of infatuation towards their best friends’ spouses, their officemates, and their employees in […]
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Quirky true love songs
There are shows that break a writer’s heart, and brain. This is one of those shows—openhearted, genre-defying, utterly overwhelming, glorious to watch but confounding to write about. (My hard drive is littered with drafts of this short review.) Structured as a live concert, with bits of storytelling woven in (the songs are by Abigail Nessen-Bengson […]
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Hanukkah hijinks
Grab your dreidel and the whole mishpocha and head over to Strawdog Theatre Company’s annual hit show Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins. A festive and charming holiday treat in a cozy, black-box theater with blankets for kids to sit on the floor, Hershel immediately engages and warms up youth (and adults) with pre-show schmoozing, music, […]
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Eb & Belle riffs on A Christmas Carol
When the Ghost of Christmas Past visits decrepit miser Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, one painful memory the ghost has him swoop back over concerns a delightful young girl named Belle, who Scrooge was supposed to marry until greed eclipsed tenderness in his heart and she broke off the engagement. Adjusting the […]
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Tyla Abercrumbie is about more than The Chi
Playwright, actor, director, and artist Tyla Abercrumbie remembers when she was called to theater as clear as day. Blue lights beamed from a ceiling as Alvin Ailey dancers weaved and flowed with silk fabrics, making grade school Tyla feel like she was swimming in an ocean as the company of dancers performed their “Wade in […]
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Two ways of looking at ‘The Snow Queen’
For all the gleeful gore of the Brothers Grimm, I’d have to say that Hans Christian Andersen was the more disturbing creator of childhood nightmares for me, because his stories seem just close enough to things that could actually—do actually—happen to kids. Especially if you’re an anxious kid who obsesses about the consequences of not […]
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The invisible board
How are nonprofit boards dealing with crafting a vision of social justice within their organizations?