In 2016, Monty Cole made his directorial debut in Chicago with Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape at now-defunct Oracle Productions—and what a debut it was. His staging of the story of Yank, a swaggering stoker on a steamship who is ultimately destroyed by a society that sees him only as a brute, brought together a […]
Category: Ghost Light
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Tonys, tech awards, and terpsichore
Lots of behind-the-scenes news in Chicago theater, and some well-deserved plaudits to note as well this week! At the Tony Awards this past Sunday, longtime Chicago sound designer and composer Mikhail Fiksel took home the top prize for his work on Lucas Hnath’s drama Dana H., which ran locally at the Goodman in fall of […]
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Latino arts organizations tell funders: ‘Here we are’
Back in 1996, the late playwright August Wilson delivered an address at the annual conference for Theatre Communications Group, the national service organization for theaters in the U.S. Entitled “The Ground on Which I Stand,” Wilson’s speech (later released as a book) took aim at racism and Eurocentrism in American theater, particularly when it comes […]
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The Studebaker gets ready to roll
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 […]
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Rogers Park gets more magical, and TimeLine gets a new executive director
There have been a series of theaters sheltered in the building at 1328 W. Morse in Rogers Park since 1912, when it opened as a vaudeville house called (logically enough) the Morse Theater. In the 1930s, it became the Co-Ed Theater, but that closed down in 1954. After being the home of Congregation Beth Israel […]
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Lynn Nottage makes it work
If you’re up for journeys to the suburbs this weekend, it’s possible to see two plays by Lynn Nottage; Sweat, which earned Nottage her second Pulitzer Prize in 2017, is closing Sunday in Aurora at Paramount Theatre’s new Copley black-box space. (Reader contributor Catey Sullivan called the production, directed by Andrea J. Dymond, “gripping” and […]
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Will the Understudy be a star in Andersonville?
Those of us who have been kicking around Chicago theater for more than a couple of decades fondly remember Scenes, the Lakeview theater-focused bookstore and cafe that provided a Clark Street hangout for all the companies producing in storefronts around the neighborhood (and their audiences), as well as a source (in those pre-Internet days) for […]
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A new home for American Blues
Like almost every long-running Chicago theater company, American Blues Theater has been through its share of ups and downs. Founded in 1985, ABT has long carried the banner for the classic Chicago-style ensemble, and they went Equity in 1988. They lost some money on a production of Keith Reddin’s Peacekeeper in 1990, but by 1993, […]
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Free Street celebrates Radical Love
Free Street Theater was founded in 1969 by Patrick Henry, an alum of the Goodman School of Drama whose vision was to create a multiracial ensemble that could tour neighborhoods and break down “the artificial barriers that divide us.” That mission has remained intact through many changes of leadership over the past 53 years and […]
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Deb Clapp takes final bows at the League of Chicago Theatres
When I was first doing theater in Chicago back in the Pleistocene era (that is, the late 1980s), the League of Chicago Theatres (formed in 1979 as the Off Loop Producers Association) seemed most notable for running the Hot Tix discount ticket booth and offering co-op advertising rates to member theaters in publications like the […]
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Steep plans a big move—just down the street
In summer of 2020, Steep Theatre announced that they were losing their longtime Berwyn Avenue home (just next to the Red Line stop). The landlord was selling the building, which contained both the flexible-seating 60-seat black box theater and the adjoining Boxcar bar and performance lounge that Steep opened in 2018. At the time, Steep […]
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Getting real about economic justice in theater
Two years ago, right before COVID-19 threw the theater world (and everything else) into a state of uncertainty, four Chicago costume designers—Theresa Ham, Elsa Hiltner, Bob Kuhn, and Christine Pascual—came together to address pay inequity and other employment issues by creating the advocacy group On Our Team. Growing in part out of the Theatrical Designer […]
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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 […]
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Prop Thtr finds new places and plans
In July of 2020, Prop Thtr, one of the oldest off-Loop companies in the city, announced that they were giving up their longtime two-venue home on Elston in the Avondale neighborhood. At the time, current Prop artistic director Olivia Lilley told the Reader, “I am very sad. I am mourning. Absolutely. But I’m also excited […]
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Fire in Oak Park and changes in Oak Brook and Jefferson Park
Oak Park Festival Theatre was one of the first companies back to live performance this year after the COVID-19 shutdown with their production of The Tempest, staged in their longtime outdoor home at Austin Gardens. They weathered that storm, only to suffer a fire on November 23 at their offices in downtown Oak Park, located […]