Matt Simonette, author at Chicago Reader

Five women in 1950s dresses stand behind a table filled with quiche dishes. They have looks of ecstasy on their faces.

Setting the stage for queer stories

by Matt Simonette September 20, 2023September 27, 2023

One of Chicago’s greatest treasures for its LGBTQ+ community and its allies is the city’s queer theater scene. As the 2023–24 season kicks in, there will be no shortage of queer stories playing out on Chicago’s stages. Uptown-based LGBTQ+ theater stalwart PrideArts got an early start, kicking off its fall season back in August with […]

Thee Ricky Harris stands left with arms upraised, wearing a white cooks apron. An ensemble of five performers in black clothing and aprons stands on the right behind Harris.

Theater Review

Cooking With Soul

by Matt Simonette September 6, 2023September 6, 2023

Near the end of Black Ensemble Theater’s (BET) superb new revue A Taste of Soul, co-emcee Qiana McNary mentions that the show’s creators hope to leave the audience both “full and hungry at the same time.” The show’s central framing device—a television cooking program veering into musical numbers, concurrently leading the audience through the history […]

A white man and a white woman and a Black man and a Black woman stand in a line smiling as they take a selfie.

Theater Review

Emotional landmines on the campaign trail

by Matt Simonette June 14, 2023June 14, 2023

Obama campaign operatives stationed in East Cleveland at the height of the 2008 presidential run felt like they were at the center of the political world. An idealistic—and existentially lost—Black gay man’s entrance into this volatile world forms the center of Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre’s production of Aurin Squire’s Obama-ology, which entertainingly depicts what an emotional minefield […]

Seven actors in evening dress are gathered around a sofa in an apartment. The three people seated on the sofa are looking at the New York Times and the four behind them are looking over their shoulders.

Theater Review

Showfolk follies

by Matt Simonette May 4, 2023May 4, 2023

I’m generally not a huge fan of material wherein creative folk in any discipline—theater, film, publishing, music—turn to their own profession for inspiration. If a movie is about filmmaking, or a novel is about a tortured novelist, or a singer crows about how hard life is on the road, I check out pretty quickly. So […]

Three Black actors, all wearing black trousers and black tank tops, stand in a row in front of a wall composes of trianguluar earth-tone tiles

Theater Review

one in two provocatively reflects on a lingering epidemic

by Matt Simonette March 2, 2023March 2, 2023

Even as the audience find their seats before the start of PrideArts’s new production one in two, they’ll get a sense that their relationship with the actors for the next 90 minutes will be an unusual one. The actors are already onstage, stretching and otherwise preparing, as the audience sits down. Following the performance, there […]

A young white male, Miles Mykkanen, stands center stage wearing a grocer's apron over a yellow vest and white shirt with a dark tie and trousers. Behind him is a green-and-red set resembling an early 20th-century grocery store, with an old-fashioned cash register on the counter and various items in jars backlit behind him.

Arts & Culture

Albert Herring balances indie aesthetic with traditional music

by Matt Simonette January 26, 2023January 31, 2023

Benjamin Britten’s 1947 opera Albert Herring (set in 1900) has been a perennial production for Chicago Opera Theater. But the new mounting opening tonight at the Athenaeum, helmed by director Stephen Sposito, promises to infuse Britten’s story with what the company is calling an “indie-film vibe.” Sposito—who was associate director for The Book of Mormon, […]

Five actors of various genders and races, wearing different kinds of lingerie, are dancing on the wooden floor of the Chicken Ranch set. Two other nondancing actors are visible in the upper left of the photo. There are wooden chairs and a vintage Victorian-era sofa visible behind them.

Theater Review

The Chicken Ranch builds a nest in Evanston

by Matt Simonette December 15, 2022December 15, 2022

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, first presented on Broadway in 1978 and memorably mounted as a film in 1982, is ironically one of the most prescient musicals for the 21st century. The story of the Chicken Ranch in fictional Gilbert, Texas, both portends contemporary cancel culture and brilliantly contrasts the ethics of prostitution, the […]

A painted storybook backdrop, including a beanstalk on the right and a cross-beamed house on the left. In the foreground are three actors. A "panto dame" (older man in drag) kneels left, and a younger woman holding a sex toy kneels right. In the center is Jack in shorts, boots, a sleeveless top with suspenders, and a cap. He appears to be doing some kind of dance.

Theater Review

Have yourself a dirty little Christmas

by Matt Simonette December 7, 2022December 7, 2022

I try not to lose myself in hyperbole, but I’m guessing Tom Whalley’s Jack Off the Beanstalk (a bawdy take on the classic British “panto”) is the only play this holiday season where the cow steals the show. Fist the Cow (Tyler Callahan), the bovine possession of the titular Jack Clapp (Joe Lewis)—whom Jack naively […]

Two women in white lingerie stand onstage. They are holding up a large arch of white feathers, which encircles their heads and bodies. Arms of other people holding the arch are visible behind them.

Arts & Culture

Buttcracker burlesque cracks traditional ballet wide open

by Matt Simonette December 1, 2022December 2, 2022

Jaq Seifert admits that the title of the holiday show they created, The Buttcracker, came to them while sitting around a campfire in 2015. “I was hanging out with some burlesque dancers,” they recall. “I had been working at a burlesque theater for a little bit as a sort of company manager. We were just […]

A white woman in a sundress stands holding a drink behind a white man wearing a green short-sleeved shirt over a white T-shirt. A crutch leans against him.

Theater Review

Southern secrets and lies

by Matt Simonette November 9, 2022November 9, 2022

Sarah Sapperstein’s Maggie the Cat commands your attention with her act one monologues in MadKap Productions’s mounting of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Skokie Theatre, directed by Steve Scott. Sapperstein’s costars take her energy and roll with it for the entirety of this show, in which a southern family unravels (and […]

Two white men sit in armchairs center. Behind them are three younger white women in 1960s flight attendant uniforms. An older white woman in a housekeeper's uniform stands on the far right. The set looks like a 1960s living room.

Theater Review

Great character work helps Boeing-Boeing take off at Saint Sebastian Players

by Matt Simonette November 3, 2022November 4, 2022

In Boeing-Boeing, the 1960 French sex comedy by Marc Camoletti (translated by Beverly Cross and Francis Evans) that’s now being mounted by Saint Sebastian Players, protagonist Bernard (Garrett Wiegel), an expat American in Paris, is juggling three different “fiancees.” He explains to friend Robert (Joshua Paul Wright), who is visiting from Wisconsin, the one central […]

Two people in a living room. An older woman in a dark dress and pearls stands behind the couch, leaning over an older man in jeans, a flannel shirt, and a baseball cap who is sitting on the couch. We can see a cornfield right behind them.

Theater Review

Unearthing raw passions

by Matt Simonette October 28, 2022October 28, 2022

Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a rural Illinois family beset by delusion and dysfunction is brilliantly brought to life by AstonRep Theatre Company. Alcoholic patriarch Dodge (Jim Morley, who brought to mind Richard Widmark in a stellar performance) is permanently ensconced on the living room couch yelling to his wife, Halie (Liz Cloud). Few […]

The ensemble of Camelot: seven actors of various genders and races. They are wearing a blend of contemporary clothes (work jumpsuits and belts) with accents suggesting medieval hoods and gowns. Some of them are wearing crowns and necklaces of flowers. Behind them is a wall of stone arches and a staircase, also covered with flower garlands.

Theater Review

Medieval love triangle, modernized

by Matt Simonette October 27, 2022October 27, 2022

Music Theater Works (MTW) ambitiously takes on some of the problems with Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s formless and dated book, keeping our focus on Arthur (Michael Metcalf), Guenevere (Christine Mayland Perkins), and Lancelot’s (Nathe Rowbotham) love triangle. In her program notes, director Brianna Borger explains, “Our Camelot envisions a troupe of revelers outside […]

Three white people in dark clothing stand in a line. A woman with long light-brown hair is on the left, holding an open wooden box filled with dice. A man with a goatee stands slightly front in the center, holding a leatherbound book to his chest. Another woman with short brown hair is on the right, holding an open book in one hand and dice in the other. They are standing in front of a plain light-blue screen.

Arts & Culture

The Twenty-Sided Tavern offers hundreds of sides to every story

by Matt Simonette October 26, 2022October 26, 2022

According to head writer David Andrew Greener Laws, who goes by the acronym DAGL, The Twenty-Sided Tavern, opening October 27 at the Broadway Playhouse, is “a game and an experience, and set in a sword and sorcery fantasy world that casts the audience as the fourth player.” Inspired by role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons […]

Four people stand in a line onstage. Behind them is a tinsel curtain and a table with a doll, a boombox, and other items. On the left is "Frau," (played by a male actor), wearing a red wig and a black jumpsuit. Next are two people dressed as Barry Gibb and Barbra Streisand, holding microphones and singing. They are in costumes and wigs from the late 70s. At the far right is a person in a green wig, wearing a buckled leather jacket and long denim shorts.

Theater Review

On a clear day you can clone forever

by Matt Simonette October 6, 2022October 6, 2022

Dr. Barbra Joan Frankenstreisand (Tyler Anthony Smith)—that ultimate hyphenate: superstar-mad scientist—has commandeered the stage at the Raven Room at Redline VR bar for what she calls a “clone-cert” to duplicate her beloved and very dead pooch. Few theater companies understand characters toeing the line between stardom and monstrousness like Hell in a Handbag Productions. Frankenstreisand, […]