Paramount Theatre Archives

A man with dark hair and glasses, wearing a vest and a white apron, stands left with his arms folded in front of a candy counter. A young girl in a plaid skirt, jacket, and knit hat stands right. She is holding a chocolate bar over her head triumphantly.

Paramount’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory adds a touch of bitter to the sweet

by Kerry Reid November 30, 2023December 4, 2023

Whether you’re waiting anxiously to see Timothée Chalamet in Wonka (the musical prequel to Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), or are rolling your eyes in anticipatory disgust (look, after the 2005 Johnny Depp cinematic debacle, I don’t blame you for being anxious!), Paramount Theatre’s current staging of the 2013 musical Charlie and the […]

Audrey II, a giant puppet version of a Venus flytrap, is on the left. Audrey, a woman in a black dress, is on the right, talking on the phone.

Theater Review

Camp carnage

by Kerry Reid September 14, 2023October 2, 2023

Several years before they struck Disney gold with Beauty and the Beast, the musical team of composer Alan Menken and book writer and lyricist Howard Ashman stuck their toes into campy cult waters with 1982’s Little Shop of Horrors, adapted from Roger Corman’s 1960 film The Little Shop of Horrors. The film is famous, among […]

A group of kids in school uniforms stand onstage in a line. In front of them is a burly man with a beard playing guitar at the left of the photo, and a boy with another guitar standing on the right of the photo in front of them.

Theater Review

School of Rock doesn’t quite make the grade

by Jack Helbig April 26, 2023April 26, 2023

The idea of turning Richard Linklater’s brilliant 2003 film comedy, School of Rock (about a struggling guitarist/substitute teacher coaching his prep-school students on how to, well, rock), into a Broadway musical sounds like a great one. All you need is a book writer capable of preserving the wit and warmth of Mike White’s screenplay, a […]

Five actors in stand in line on a stage featuring a gloomy forest background, with fallen trees and a gray cloudy dome behind them. At left is the Baker, carrying a variety of tools and weapons on his belt. Next to him is Jack in a brown leather jacket and boots. The Witch stands center, looking outward with her arms partly raised, wearing a strapless purple gown covered with silver glittery streaks that suggest lightning. Cinderella stands to the right of the Witch in her ragged kitchen maid's clothes, holding a baby wrapped in a blanket. On the far right is Little Red in a red dress with a cloak of wolf fur over her shoulders.

Theater Review

Seeing the forest and the trees

by Kerry Reid February 15, 2023February 15, 2023

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical Into the Woods premiered three years before Robert Bly’s Iron John sent men into the wilderness as part of the “mythopoetic men’s movement,” complete with sweat lodges, drum circles, chanting, and other rituals designed to restore a pre-industrialization notion of masculinity, combined with Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” narratives. The […]

A middle-aged Latinx man and a younger Latinx woman sit together on a couch on a driveway in front of a garage door. He is holding out a box wrapped with Christmas paper to her.

Theater Review

Bullish on Bull

by Jack Helbig October 19, 2022October 19, 2022

This is a play of tiny moments and small details, a play in which characters change slowly, the way people and seasons change—silently, imperceptibly at first and then with the sudden, savage swiftness of leaves tumbling from the trees that takes your breath away. This is a play that needs your full presence as a […]

Three young Black women performing onstage, dressed in identical sleeveless light blue dresses with big lavender bows in front. They are wearing gloves. One is standing slightly forward of the others in the center.

Theater Review

Flawlessly in tune

by Jack Helbig September 14, 2022September 14, 2022

Originally conceived in the mid-70s as a vehicle for Nell Carter but opening on Broadway in 1981 with Jennifer Holliday in the role that might have been Carter’s (if Carter’s Hollywood career had not blown up), Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger’s musical about the rise of an African American girl group the Dreams (modeled on […]

The actors portraying the members of Alison Bechdel's family in Paramount Theatre's Fun Home stand together. Mother Helen is on the left, in a dark blue cardigan, followed by John in a blue jacket, Alison in a red cardigan and striped top, Christian, also in a blue jacket, and father Bruce in a gray checked suit.

Theater Review

The Bechdels, tested

by Kerry Reid August 17, 2022August 17, 2022

Alison Bechdel’s family, captured first in her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home and then in a Tony Award-winning 2015 chamber musical (music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron), feels right at (uneasy) home on the intimate Copley Theatre stage in downtown Aurora. Presented as part of Paramount’s “Bold” series of seemingly more […]

A young white male-presenting figure sits on a bed in a child's bedroom, holding a large red hand puppet in their left hand.

Theater Review

Puppet revelations

by Jack Helbig June 8, 2022June 8, 2022

Puppets are cool, but they are also creepy. Very creepy. Even the cute ones, like Kermit the Frog or Ollie the Dragon. There is just something deeply unnerving about how puppets seem like autonomous beings, even when their puppeteers are right there on stage with them. I think there is something deep and primal in […]

A Black woman in a white dress from the early 1900s sits center stage at a sewing machine. A sepia-toned photo of a woman at a sewing machine is projected behind her.

Ghost Light

Lynn Nottage makes it work

by Kerry Reid April 22, 2022April 22, 2022

If you’re up for journeys to the suburbs this weekend, it’s possible to see two plays by Lynn Nottage; Sweat, which earned Nottage her second Pulitzer Prize in 2017, is closing Sunday in Aurora at Paramount Theatre’s new Copley black-box space. (Reader contributor Catey Sullivan called the production, directed by Andrea J. Dymond, “gripping” and […]

A white woman in a flannel shirt and baseball cap sits left at a bar table. A Black woman stands to the right next to the table. Behind them is the rest of the bar and other patrons in soft focus.

Theater Review

Sweat, tears, and blood

by Catey Sullivan March 31, 2022March 31, 2022

Lynn Nottage’s gripping drama Sweat launches a new direction for Aurora’s Paramount Theater, a 1,000-plus seat, 87-year-old Versailles-on-acid space known for award-winning musicals. Directed by Andrea J. Dymond, Sweat is the first production in the new Copley Theatre, a minimalist steel-and-glass black box across the street from the larger venue. Dymond’s airtight ensemble makes the […]

Three men sit in a row at a bar turned into a car. On the right, Phil Conners is driving. Beer bottles sit before them.

Theater Review

Déjà vu all over again

by Kerry Reid February 9, 2022February 9, 2022

What musical could possibly capture our collective pandemic ennui? Perhaps a story about reliving the same gray day without surcease, surrounded by the same irritating people, with all your best intentions of self-improvement adding up to naught? BING! Welcome to Groundhog Day: The Musical. Based on the 1993 Harold Ramis film, this 2017 show (book […]

Performing Arts Feature

It’s become a different world

by Mark Larson January 20, 2022January 20, 2022

We see a show and later learn that it had to close abruptly. We can empathize with the actors’ disappointment and distress because we can visualize their faces and recall their voices. But how has the pandemic impacted those we see only briefly in the lobby as we enter or don’t see at all? How […]

Arts & Culture

Kinky Boots kicks open the Paramount doors again

by Jack Helbig September 7, 2021October 15, 2021

Once upon a time I reviewed shows every week. Can you believe that? Every week. But that was a long time ago. Back then there were new shows to review every week, a steady stream of them, some amazing, some awful, most somewhere in between. And more than one or two at a time, but […]