When we first started planning this special winter arts issue, there was reason for cautious optimism about live performances. But as December turned to January and the Omicron surge hit, several companies did what they’ve been doing for almost two years: they made new plans. Bridgette M. Redman profiles playwright Cat McKay, whose show Plaid […]
Category: Arts & Culture
Posted inArts & Culture
Building 63rd House
On August 5, 1966, near Marquette Park, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was attacked while leading a protest to demand housing desegregation. Several blocks away from this spot stands 3055 W. 63rd, a formerly abandoned post office that turned 100 years old in 2020. This is the location where Blue Tin Production (a […]
Posted inPerforming Arts Feature
Putting on the plaid
It’s not unusual to pick up labels in life; some you’re born with, some you achieve, some are thrust upon you. Cat McKay’s labels have come to her by all three methods as she wends her way through a theater career taking her from Ohio to London to Chicago. Some labels she’s collected are fighter, […]
Posted inPerforming Arts Feature
Welcome to Venus
Back in December, there was a shining sliver of time when it looked like we—as individuals, as artists, as arts institutions—were forging a clear, or at least clear-ish, path forward. Hundreds of people were back at work on live, in-person shows. A Christmas Carol burned bright at the Goodman. The Snow Queen got a shiny […]
Posted inDance
Kia Smith is a south-side diplomat of dance
At Chicago Dancers United’s Dance for Life festival last August, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion stage reverberated with layers of rhythm. Each row of dancers formed a different section of intertwining phrases—movements playful and powerful that recalled the musicality of jazz. The piece, South Chicago Dance Theatre’s Architect of a Dream, was the work of Kia […]
Posted inPerforming Arts Feature
It’s become a different world
We see a show and later learn that it had to close abruptly. We can empathize with the actors’ disappointment and distress because we can visualize their faces and recall their voices. But how has the pandemic impacted those we see only briefly in the lobby as we enter or don’t see at all? How […]
Posted inTheater Review
Talking democracy to death
If you think Congress is inept in a crisis now, just wait till you see what 2465 has in store! In Brendan Pelsue’s dystopian dramedy, Wellesley Girl, the U.S. has been reduced to three (or maybe four, if you count abandoned Wellesley) towns in Massachusetts—the only places on the eastern seaboard where, thanks to MIT […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Communicating from beyond
Have you ever felt like a thing was made especially for you at just the right time? This was my overwhelming impression as soon as I walked into the Art Institute’s Ray Johnson show. I didn’t know much about Johnson prior to a deep dive I took, prompted by this exhibition’s sprawling collection of his […]
Posted inTheater Review
City Lit stages the OG of Westerns
City Lit’s original stage adaptation of Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian focuses on the experience of two easterners adjusting to the rough-and-ready way of life in pre-statehood Wyoming in the 1880s. One is “The Virginian” (he has no other name), the foreman on a ranch owned by a wealthy cattle baron. The other is […]
Posted inTheater Review
Sinister spinsters
Jen Silverman’s The Moors is a brilliantly executed pastiche of everything from Wuthering Heights (the gloomy insalubrious environs of the title) to Rebecca, complete with a menacing parlor maid/scullery maid named either Marjory or Mallory, and suffering from either an unwanted pregnancy or typhus, depending on what room you catch her in. (Played to perfection […]
Posted inLit Feature
Let’s get lit
Here are some book-related, word-inspired, and otherwise literary Chicago events to help kick off 2022. Each event is open to the public, but registration or tickets might be required (and you’ll want to support the writers by buying their books!). Wed 1/19, 6:30 PM: City Lit Books co-presents its regular Poetry Salon in an online […]
Posted inTheater Review
A 21st-century Oklahoma!
Director Daniel Fish’s controversial 2019 Broadway revival of the classic musical Oklahoma! has come to Chicago for a two-week run at the CIBC Theatre. I don’t know how Fish’s innovative rethinking of the work (first developed at Bard College’s Fisher Center in 2015, and then produced off-Broadway at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2018 prior to […]
Posted inGhost Light
Remembering Gustavo Mellado; Silk Road announces new paths
As a year filled with many losses in Chicago’s theater community wound down, word came in late December that Gustavo Mellado, a founding ensemble member of Teatro Vista, had died at age 69. A December 29 tribute on the company’s Facebook page noted that Mellado was “a wonderful actor with a beautiful singing voice,” and […]
Posted inTheater Review
Ghostly grief
In January of 2020, Black Button Eyes Productions presented the Chicago premiere of Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrow’s quirky musical ghost story Whisper House, about an 11-year-old boy living in a haunted lighthouse. Now the company—whose motto is “We help magic invade reality”—has returned to song-driven supernatural storytelling with Mary Rose, an original musical based […]
Posted inArts & Culture
From the Dan Clowes Collection
If you head down to the basement of Chicago Comics, past the endless rows of back issues and vintage titles waiting to be priced, you’ll find 15 white boxes. They contain a pretty standard collection of 60s and 70s comics—Thor, Conan the Barbarian, X-Men, MAD magazine. But these comics have a special allure. They belonged […]