In January 2020, I checked in with Jenny Magnus about Rhinoceros Theater Festival (better known as Rhino Fest), the city’s longest running fringe theater festival. “The world is really hard right now,” Magnus said at the time. “All we have is each other and the intention to do something good. Aid and comfort. We just […]
Author Archives: Kerry Reid
Posted inCity Life
Visceral dance, free planets, and laugh therapy
Looking for some fun? We’ve got you covered for the next seven days, read on! FRI 3/25 It’s the tenth annual presentation of Jeezy’s Juke Joint: A Black Burly-Q Revue. Billed as the “only Black burlesque festival in the world,” this variety show celebrates a rich and diverse lineage of Black nightlife performers. In addition […]
Posted inGhost Light
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, […]
Posted inTheater Review
Chit-chat on the high wire
In his 1940 memoir, A Smattering of Ignorance, composer-raconteur-pharmaceuticals enthusiast Oscar Levant recalls a train journey he took with his idol, George Gershwin. After offering the talkative Gershwin a sleeping pill (“with the air of a man offering a friend an after-dinner mint”), Levant was mildly surprised that Gershwin commandeered the more comfortable lower berth […]
Posted inCity Life
Jump into spring with these Chicagoland events
The spring equinox (the moment when the sun is exactly above the equator and day and night are of equal length) for this year starts at 10:33 AM on Sunday 3/20, and brings our chance to check out Chicagohenge (if you go to the Loop, you might see the sun framed by our skyscrapers). And […]
Posted inTheater Review
Meta Miller
Eleanor Burgess’s Wife of a Salesman, now in a world premiere at Writers Theatre under Jo Bonney’s direction, starts out with a “what if” premise: namely, what if Linda Loman, the long-suffering wife of Arthur Miller’s tragic American Everyman, Willy, met “the woman in Boston” with whom her husband had an affair and asked her […]
Posted inTheater Review
Far from a drag
It’s been nearly 50 years since the first iteration of La Cage aux Folles flew from the nest in the form of Jean Poiret’s 1973 play of that title. Since then, there’s been a 1978 French film, remade in Hollywood in 1996 as The Birdcage (starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane) and an oft-revived 1983 […]
Posted inCity Life
Poetry, radical love, and snacks
Another slate of both online and in-person events for this weekend and beyond. For anything that makes you leave your house, please be smart and check both the weather report (hello late winter and early spring Chicago with your fickle ways!) and the venue’s safety restrictions (to mask or not to mask, tis one of […]
Posted inGhost Light
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 […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sea changes
In his preshow speech, Court Theatre artistic director Charles Newell asked the audience how many had ever seen Henrik Ibsen’s 1888 play The Lady from the Sea before. “We’re at Court Theatre and we’re doing an Ibsen play only four people have seen,” he responded. That alone helps make the case for this production, which […]
Posted inTheater Review
Don’t look back
Hadestown, the 2019 Tony Award-winning musical that grew out of a 2010 concept album by Anaïs Mitchell, is an earnest and goodhearted show (now in a short run with Broadway in Chicago) that in some regards left me cold. (Or maybe lukewarm, as I imagine the temperature in purgatory might be.) This gloss on Greek […]
Posted inCity Life
International Women’s Day, Alvin Ailey, and meatballs
You can eat beef, watch movies, and learn about graffiti this week. No reason to be bored in Chicago! Check out these online and in-person events. FRI 3/4 Yesterday was International Sex Workers’ Rights Day, which began in 2001 to call attention to the unique labor risks and concerns of pleasure providers. In honor of […]
Posted inTheater Review
Cracking the code
First performed by Lookingglass in 1989 (with Ana Gasteyer in the original cast) and then in an expanded run at the now-gone Goodman studio theater in 1993, adapter/director Mary Zimmerman’s The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci is one of the landmark productions in Chicago theater history: long before she won the MacArthur “genius” grant and […]
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best reason to be glad to be back at the theater (no matter what’s onstage)
The audience Between Monday, March 16, 2020 and Saturday, July 10, 2021, I saw exactly zero live productions—probably the longest dry spell of theatergoing since my teens. In the 16 months between Theater Wit’s Teenage Dick and Theatre Above the Law’s Henchpeople, I saw loads of digital productions, caught up on a ton of television […]
Posted inPerforming Arts Feature
How the hell did Lesley Nicol get to Chicago?
Most Americans know British actor Lesley Nicol as Mrs. Patmore, the plainspoken cook who presided over the kitchen at Downton Abbey through six seasons and two films. (The newest film in the series, Downton Abbey: A New Era, opens in May.) But before finding international success as the downstairs doyenne in Julian Fellowes’s portrait of […]