Tag: TRG Calendar Sidebar

There’s no place I’d rather be come New Year’s Eve than in a Second City audience. That said, this year’s edition of the company’s Dysfunctional Holiday Revue at Metropolis is a tad uneven–which means you’re only in stitches, say, 90 percent of the time. Some of the best moments come when unsuspecting audience members are […]

After architect David Adler graduated from Princeton in 1904 he went to Germany and then to France to study firsthand the historical styles he would later adapt in designing his elegant American country homes. While overseas he began to collect picture postcards–not the usual naughty Parisian lady stuff, but photographs and drawings of the great […]

Nobody strings lights on a branch better than the Chicago Botanic Garden, where clusters of white-lit trees sprout in gorgeous electric detail as part of the garden’s annual Celebrations! A Festival of Flowers, Lights & Music. I dropped in on a frigid night last weekend to take a look, but just as I was admiring […]

Salt Creek Ballet, the west-suburban outpost of classical dance, has seasoned its cast of more than 100 local performers with a few guest stars and a member of the family for its 17th annual production of The Nutcracker. The ballet opens this weekend in Hinsdale and plays subsequent Saturdays in Aurora and University Park. Directors […]

Barbra Streisand put a brand on Funny Girl that makes the Fanny Brice role daunting for any other performer. Heidi Kettenring, who has the job in the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire production that opened this week, isn’t letting that rain on her parade. Though the influence of the diva is unmistakable, Kettenring, a more spontaneous […]

There’s nothing in the 132nd edition of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus more thrilling than standing in the parking lot outside Allstate Arena while the massive underbellies of one jetliner after another graze your head on their way to O’Hare. It almost justifies the $11 parking charge. Nothing justifies the muddy sound […]

Porchlight Music Theatre’s production of Promises, Promises, a fall sensation at the Theatre Building Chicago, is moving to Arlington Heights. This spoof of corporate power games anticipated Frank Loesser’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in its hard look at office politics and sexual one-upmanship. Based on Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment, […]

What to wear for the portrait? Mary Cassatt must have put the question to herself before she picked the gold-ribboned bonnet and shapely blue-green dress she immortalized in her watercolor self-portrait from about 1880. That work, along with William Zorach’s sketch of Edna St. Vincent Millay in a provocative silk robe and Charles Dana Gibson’s […]

Think you might be haunted? Local psychic Ruth Berger knows the warning signs: an inexplicably cold area in your house, mysterious sounds like knocking or banging or someone calling your name, and TVs and radios that pop on by themselves. Shaking beds are a sign, but only if you’re sleeping. If you have a sudden […]

For the last two decades, Bob Hercules, co-owner of Chicago’s Media Process Group, has worked in commercial television so that he could afford to make documentaries like Did They Buy It?, a study of American media coverage of Nicaragua’s 1990 elections that won the Chicago International Film Festival’s 1991 Gold Plaque. Hercules, who lives in […]

This year’s edition of the Highland Park Historical Society House Tour is a one-man show for a hometown boy. Architect Robert E. Seyfarth was born in Blue Island in 1878, but moved to Highland Park in 1912. Between 1909, when he opened his own office, and his death in 1950, Seyfarth designed 54 Highland Park […]

As of last week food writer Paul Zeissler was still working on the menu for A Roman Orgy of Food. The eighth in a series of historical and literary eating events at Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore (past spreads included “Food on Campaign” and “Dining With the Saints”), the feast will offer food popular from 27 […]

Jeffrey Solberg thinks Naperville’s ready for some resident professional theater. “There’s a population of 138,000, high income and education levels, and a downtown core with restaurants and clubs,” he says. “It’s a microcosm of Chicago out here.” Solberg, a Des Plaines native who produced a half dozen off- and off-off-Broadway shows in New York in […]

William Russo was 29 years old in 1958 when Verve Records asked him to arrange Duke Ellington’s stage musical Jump for Joy for a recording that would feature alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. Russo had Ellington’s blessing for the project, but no access to the original music for the 1941 show, which he had never seen. […]

Actor Rick Miller says he’s changed his one-man farce, MacHomer: The Simpsons Do Macbeth, since Reader critic Jack Helbig wrote about it three years ago. Helbig was enthusiastic, noting that the show, which Miller had developed at fringe festivals, “combines Miller’s two loves, Shakespeare and silliness: his somewhat shortened adaptation transforms the dark, murder-filled Scottish […]