Albert Williams, author at Chicago Reader

A street view looking south down Michigan Avenue at the Fine Arts Building

‘125 is feeling very good’

by Albert Williams September 20, 2023September 21, 2023

Because Chicago is so well known for its “Magnificent Mile” retail district—North Michigan Avenue between Oak Street and the Chicago River—it’s all too easy to overlook, or take for granted, the importance of what can be called the city’s cultural corridor: Michigan Avenue stretching south from the river to Roosevelt Road. What an extraordinary array […]

a Black man on a ship holds up a lantern to examine a symbol on a wooden crate

Film

Review: The Last Voyage of the Demeter

by Albert Williams August 11, 2023September 25, 2023

Norwegian filmmaker André Øvredal directed this predictable, gruesome, but unscary horror tale, which is inspired by chapter seven of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, known as “The Captain’s Log.”

Two men and a woman sit onstage. The man in the rear is seated sideways on a chair. The woman is leaning against the chair, and the other man is curled up on the floor with his head in her lap.

Theater Review

‘Storefront Sondheim at its best’

by Albert Williams July 7, 2023July 19, 2023

UPDATE JULY 19: Due to a fire next door to the Reginald Vaughn Theater, Blank Theatre will be presenting their closing weekend performances of Merrily We Roll Along in concert readings at City Lit Theater Company, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr. Performances are Fri-Sat 7:30 PM and Sun 3 PM. Contact info@blanktheatrecompany.org for information on exchanges […]

a stressed-looking Indiana Jones in his signature hat, with two people standing behind him

Film

Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

by Albert Williams June 20, 2023September 25, 2023

Dial of Destiny is action-packed and breathlessly paced, to be sure.

A young woman in a white habit sits left. A woman in a brown sweater and skirt kneels before her, clutching her shoulders. A nun in full black-and-white habit stands behind them.

Theater Review

Faith and memory

by Albert Williams June 8, 2023June 28, 2023

John Pielmeier’s 1979 drama Agnes of God—whose title is a reference to “Agnus Dei,” Latin for “Lamb of God”—is an intriguing if somewhat murky mystery that asks both “whodunit” and “whydunit.” Inspired by real events, the plot concerns a 21-year-old novice nun, Agnes (Soleil Pérez), who is suspected of killing her own newborn infant. Agnes […]

At left we see a white woman with red hair, wearing a long red gown. She is holding a sword. Next to her is a bearded white man in a tan tunic and black trousers and boots, also holding a sword. On the right is a line of three men in gray tunics and trousers, challenging them with swords. At the far left is a throne covered in garlands of flowers. A furskin is beneath it, and red banners hang on the walls behind it.

Theater Review

Guineverean legend

by Albert Williams March 30, 2023March 30, 2023

Idle Muse Theatre Company’s The Last Queen of Camelot, scripted and directed by Idle Muse artistic director Evan M. Jackson, plays like an Arthurian fantasy graphic novel come to life. Jackson’s take on the tale of legendary sixth-century British King Arthur Pendragon (Joel Thompson) focuses on Queen Guinevere (Caty Gordon-Hall), Arthur’s wife through an arranged […]

two old white men look at each other, with a bookshelf in the background

Film

Review: Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb

by Albert Williams January 13, 2023February 14, 2023

This engrossing 2022 documentary chronicles the 50-year-and-counting collaboration between two literary lions: political biographer Robert Caro, who turned 87 on October 30, 2022, and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, who turned 91 on April 29, 2022.

Theater Review

Villainy and vindication

by Albert Williams November 2, 2022November 2, 2022

Every superhero saga needs a villain, and Mark Pracht’s new play The Mark of Kane—an origin story for the comic-book character Batman—provides one in the figure of Bob Kane. In Pracht’s account, Kane was an ambitious freelance illustrator who, in 1939, came up with the concept of a crime-fighting vigilante who could fly with the […]

Theater Review

Democracy under siege

by Albert Williams October 27, 2022October 27, 2022

Invictus Theatre Company delivers a solid, sometimes stirring, and strikingly relevant rendition of William Shakespeare’s 1599 tragedy. It’s the story of Marcus Brutus (played by Invictus artistic director Charles Askenaizer, who also directed), a well-intentioned aristocrat in the waning days of the ancient Roman Republic, who joins a plot by his fellow senators to assassinate […]

Theater Review

The Scottish play, abridged

by Albert Williams October 13, 2022October 13, 2022

Director Dusty Brown, who makes their Chicago directing debut with Three Crows Theatre’s storefront staging of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, has trimmed the tragedy down to a fast-paced, intermissionless 105 minutes of blood-drenched storytelling. (“Macbeth has sword/dagger violence, onstage murder, and discussions of murder. Recommended for children 12+ due to all the murder happening onstage,” reads a […]

A man with dark hair and a thin mustache stands left. He is wearing a tuxedo shirt and trousers, with his bow tie hanging around his neck. His left hand stretches out toward a woman in a formal blue sleeveless dress; her hand is also stretched toward his. Purple drapes hang behind them, with a collection of potted plants scattered around the stage

Theater Review

Sexy screwball comedy with a twist

by Albert Williams October 5, 2022October 5, 2022

“Extraordinary,” muses Amanda, the heroine of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, “how potent cheap music is.” Her rueful observation, uttered while she is standing on the terrace of a hotel where she is staying, is in reference to a song playing in the ballroom below. The melody is described in Coward’s script as “a sentimental, romantic […]

A white man in a dark suit, holding a test tube, stands left. On the right is a Black woman in a plum-colored Victorian skirt suit, looking toward him. A table with a glass tumbler is in front of them.

Theater Review

Split personality with a twist

by Albert Williams September 28, 2022September 29, 2022

Idle Muse Theatre Company’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is good, dark Halloween-season entertainment, especially if you’re a fan of the Hammer/Amicus/American International Pictures-style of lurid rethinkings of Victorian horror classics. Adapted by Michael Dalberg and directed by Morgan Manasa, this production ups the sex-and-violence aspects of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 […]

A pub setting. On the left, a young blonde white woman wearing a yellow apron sits holding a pewter tankard. Behind the bar stand two more young white women. A young dark-haired man in a white shit stands looking upward, his hand extended, as if he's in the middle of telling an exciting story.

Theater Review

A ‘fully flavoured’ Playboy

by Albert Williams July 13, 2022July 13, 2022

“In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple,” wrote Irish playwright John Millington Synge in the preface to his 1907 comedy The Playboy of the Western World. By that standard, Playboy is a very good play—indeed, one of the greatest and most entertaining works in 20th-century English-language […]

Close-up on a young white woman with dark hair, encircled with a wreath of flowers and greenery. Her arms are outstretched as she looks to the left with a look of anguish on her face.

Theater Review

An Antigone for our times

by Albert Williams June 29, 2022June 29, 2022

The central characters of Redtwist Theatre’s current production are a conservative male government leader determined to impose his laws on everyone around him and a radical young woman passionately driven to defy those laws as unjust. This is no up-to-the-minute new drama about abortion rights in America, but rather a Greek tragedy from the fifth […]

The cast of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Invictus Theatre, shot slightly from above. Honey is in a green sweater, dancing with a smile on her face, at left. George is standing behind the sofa, arms crossed, wearing a yellow cardigan. Nick is seated on the sofa in a gray suit, looking glum, while Martha, in a low-cut red blouse, sits next to him laughing

Theater Review

Living room absurdism

by Albert Williams May 17, 2022May 17, 2022

It may be difficult to comprehend today just how shocking Edward Albee’s drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was when it premiered in October 1962, the same week that the Cuban missile crisis began. While the atomic fireworks the world feared never happened, Albee’s three-act, three-hour-plus masterpiece detonated an explosion that rocked American culture to […]