Emily McClanathan, author at Chicago Reader

Three performers dressed as burlesque versions of toy soldiers stand left, facing off against three performers dressed as burlesque mice. A person in the background between them holds up a placard reading ROUND 1.

The Buttcracker plays it naughty and nice

by Emily McClanathan December 7, 2023December 7, 2023

Fast becoming a staple of Chicago’s alternative holiday entertainment scene, The Buttcracker: A Nutcracker Burlesque is back for a seventh year of tinseled twerking and tasseled twirling. Dreamed up around a campfire by artistic producer and playwright Jaq Seifert, the queer-friendly, sex-positive show celebrates bodies of various sizes, shades, ages, and genders in an exuberant […]

A woman in a Puritan style of dress stands holding a broomstick. She appears to be smirking.

Theater Review

Witch casts half a spell at Artistic Home

by Emily McClanathan November 9, 2023November 9, 2023

In Jen Silverman’s 2018 play, Witch, the devil goes down to a quiet English village and finds a lot more than he bargained for, including a supposed witch who is surprisingly resistant to selling her soul. Loosely based on The Witch of Edmonton, a 1621 play by Thomas Dekker, William Rowley, and John Ford, Silverman’s […]

Three young women in white clothes kneel and crouch in the background. Slightly in the foreground, second from right, is an older woman in a sleeveless black dress, clutching a white cloth tied into a noose.

Theater Review

All about their mother

by Emily McClanathan November 3, 2023November 13, 2023

The four sisters in Teatro Vista’s ¡Bernarda! often complain about the heat, but the stifling Spanish summer is no match for the passions roiling under their mother’s roof. This stylish, sexy new adaption of Federico García Lorca’s 1936 play, The House of Bernarda Alba, is written by Emilio Williams, directed by Teatro Vista producing artistic […]

Book cover is bright pink with white and yellow text. There are doodles around the cover and on the right there is a handful of colorful gel pens held together with a scrunchie.

Books Issue

For all the 90s church kids

by Emily McClanathan September 5, 2023September 1, 2023

I didn’t expect a book with chapter titles like “Nothing’s Funnier Than Naked” and “Welcome to Ass Planet” to make me tear up on public transit, but Lillian Stone’s Everybody’s Favorite: Tales From the World’s Worst Perfectionist accomplished this feat. Amid the bodily humor, cringey anecdotes, and irreverent one-liners, the Chicago-based comedy author and reporter […]

Book Review

Family secrets with a touch of the supernatural

by Emily McClanathan June 22, 2023June 26, 2023

In Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home, a new collection of seven short stories by Ana Castillo, family secrets inspire several characters to travel to Mexico and retrace their relatives’ footsteps. Sometimes the answers they find feel like “flying sacks loaded with surprises that hit you right in the chest and [leave] you gasping for air.” Others […]

a white man poses for a photo between two library bookshelves

Film

Doug Adams wrote the book on the Lord of the Rings scores

by Emily McClanathan May 31, 2023May 31, 2023

At Howard Shore’s invitation, Doug Adams—a Chicago-based author and musicologist—observed, documented, analyzed, and eventually illuminated the composer’s work in a 400-page book titled The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films.

A group of six women of various ages and races are seated together on the floor photographed from above.

Arts & Culture

London Road centers voices of survivors

by Emily McClanathan April 19, 2023April 19, 2023

British imports are common enough on Chicago’s stages. The plays of Simon Stephens regularly appear at storefront theaters; Court Theatre will revive Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead next season; and Six continues its Broadway reign following its 2019 North American premiere at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. But it’s safe to say that Chicago audiences […]

Theater Review

White saviorism: the musical!

by Emily McClanathan April 5, 2023April 4, 2023

The Book of Mormon is back in Chicago, slightly rewritten since it last played here in 2018 but still the same wildly irreverent take on that most quintessential of homegrown white American religions: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After the hit musical opened on Broadway in 2011, it played in Chicago four […]

A bearded white man wearing a vertically striped black-and-white shirt with a belt and black trousers stands center, holding a vodka bottle up in one hand, with a gun held in his other hand down by his side. He is surrounded by nine other people of various races, ages and genders, who are looking on at him from benches and porches. He appears to be in a courtyard of some kind. At the rear we see a couple of people in "peasant" garb with musical stringed instruments. At the right is a seated woman in a black dress, wearing a scarf around her eyes like a blindfold. She is bent over at the waist. At the left are men in overcoats, and one who appears dressed as a soldier.

Theater Review

Soviet slapstick

by Emily McClanathan March 30, 2023March 30, 2023

Heading into opening night of Dying for It at Artistic Home, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Moira Buffini’s adaptation of The Suicide, a 1928 satire by Soviet playwright Nikolai Erdman that was banned by Joseph Stalin. Frankly, the subject matter sounded a bit niche—or maybe I was just feeling rusty on Soviet history […]

The book cover shows an abstracted body, its limb unconnected, and with no head.

Arts & Culture

Steeped in history

by Emily McClanathan March 24, 2023March 22, 2023

In the most famous lines of his 1855 poem “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman writes, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” After reading S. L. Wisenberg’s insightful new book, The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home, it’s clear that she, too, contains […]

A blonde woman sits left, wearing a knit cap and a light outer coat. Her hands are balled up in excitement and she smiles as she talks. An older man with gray hair sits looking at her, his hands in his lap and holding a cell phone. He is bearded and wears dark trousers, jacket, and a blue shirt.

Theater Review

Quantum romance

by Emily McClanathan March 2, 2023March 2, 2023

Simon Stephens’s play Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle is set up as a classic story of culture clash: a quirky, talkative woman from New Jersey strikes up a conversation with a reserved Londoner in a train station, ignoring all social cues that he’d rather be left alone. But when she arrives at his butcher shop a […]

Six actors of various races and genders stand in a row against a white backdrop. Five of them are wearing light-colored clothing. Mi Kang, who plays protagonist Lucy Snowe, is dressed in a dark Victorian-like dress in the center.

Arts & Culture

Beyond Jane Eyre

by Emily McClanathan January 25, 2023January 25, 2023

Although Charlotte Brontë’s Villette has long been overshadowed by Jane Eyre—its “more popular younger sister,” in Sara Gmitter’s words—the 1853 novel takes the spotlight at Lookingglass Theatre next month in a world premiere adaptation written by Gmitter and directed by Tracy Walsh. Based on a period of bereavement, homesickness, and unrequited love in Brontë’s own […]

Evan Hansen, wearing a striped blue polo shirt and a cast on his left arm inscribed CONNOR, stands left. A middle-aged man and middle-aged woman sit at a table behind him, alongside a younger woman.

Theater Review

Searching for an emotional connection with Dear Evan Hansen

by Emily McClanathan December 15, 2022

I’ve now seen the North American tour of Dear Evan Hansen twice in Chicago, and both times I’ve come up short trying to feel the emotional connection that so many fans have with this show. My first viewing was before the pandemic, and I hoped it might hit differently in 2022. After all, the musical […]

Four girls of various ethnicity and race, dressed in school uniforms, sit cross-legged around a Ouija board.

Theater Review

Miami death trip

by Emily McClanathan November 2, 2022November 2, 2022

Teenagers tend to be reckless, sure, but few would gather in a spooky tree house to summon the spirit of Colombian drug cartel leader Pablo Escobar. But then, most aren’t as hardcore—or foolhardy—as the members of the Dead Leaders Club, a group of private school girls in Miami who dabble with supernatural forces in Our […]

Two Latinx women sit on the rug in a living room. A blue couch is behind them. Marc (Melissa DuPrey) sits behind Cynthia (Lisandra Tena), who seems to be in emotional distress. Marc has her hands on Cynthia's back.

Theater Review

Stranger things

by Emily McClanathan September 26, 2022September 27, 2022

What if the person you love—the one you want to spend the rest of your life with—were to confess a secret so bizarre, so disturbing, that it makes you question whether you know them at all? How do you truly accept every part of a person when you can’t begin to understand one of their […]