Back in 2016, I climbed up the narrow stairs at the Den Theatre in Wicker Park to see a young solo performer embody the residents of a memory care center in Dallas. Based on John Michael’s own two-year stint as an activity planner at such a center, Dementia Me took the form of a birthday […]
Category: Ghost Light
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Laugh Factory prepares to go All In with accessibility in comedy
The very phrase “stand-up comedy” is arguably ableist: even though there are many working comedians who use wheelchairs or who have other disabilities, comedy clubs (like a lot of entertainment venues) still have a ways to go to address issues of accessibility for patrons and performers alike. But Nicholas Dunnigan is hoping to change that […]
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Susan V. Booth talks about coming home to the Goodman
The past two years have seen more upheavals and changes in leadership at Chicago theaters than at any time in my memory, exacerbated by the long COVID-19 shutdown. So perhaps it makes sense that Goodman Theatre went back to the future, so to speak, by announcing Susan V. Booth as their new artistic director late […]
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Mudlark expands its community outreach
The last time I checked in with Evanston’s youth-oriented Mudlark Theater in April 2020, they were in the midst of pivoting to online workshops and creating digital shows. The company has returned to live classes and performances since then. And now, with the help of two grants, they’re poised to further expand their focus on […]
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Brett Neveu’s Eric LaRue will hit the big screen with some help from a friend
Twenty years later, I still get chills when I think about the final line in Brett Neveu’s Eric LaRue, his drama about the aftermath of a school shooting, in which the mother of a teenage boy who killed three of his classmates tries to come to grips with the monstrous deed. Apparently I’m not the […]
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Swinging for the Fences with Monty Cole
In 2016, Monty Cole made his directorial debut in Chicago with Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape at now-defunct Oracle Productions—and what a debut it was. His staging of the story of Yank, a swaggering stoker on a steamship who is ultimately destroyed by a society that sees him only as a brute, brought together a […]
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Tonys, tech awards, and terpsichore
Lots of behind-the-scenes news in Chicago theater, and some well-deserved plaudits to note as well this week! At the Tony Awards this past Sunday, longtime Chicago sound designer and composer Mikhail Fiksel took home the top prize for his work on Lucas Hnath’s drama Dana H., which ran locally at the Goodman in fall of […]
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Latino arts organizations tell funders: ‘Here we are’
Back in 1996, the late playwright August Wilson delivered an address at the annual conference for Theatre Communications Group, the national service organization for theaters in the U.S. Entitled “The Ground on Which I Stand,” Wilson’s speech (later released as a book) took aim at racism and Eurocentrism in American theater, particularly when it comes […]
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The Studebaker gets ready to roll
Last August, I caught up with Jacob Harvey just as he was taking over as the new (and first-ever) managing artistic director of theaters for the Fine Arts Building. At the time, he noted that with the loss of the Royal George as a midsize rental house, the soon-to-be-remodeled Studebaker Theater in the Fine Arts […]
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Rogers Park gets more magical, and TimeLine gets a new executive director
There have been a series of theaters sheltered in the building at 1328 W. Morse in Rogers Park since 1912, when it opened as a vaudeville house called (logically enough) the Morse Theater. In the 1930s, it became the Co-Ed Theater, but that closed down in 1954. After being the home of Congregation Beth Israel […]
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Lynn Nottage makes it work
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 […]
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Will the Understudy be a star in Andersonville?
Those of us who have been kicking around Chicago theater for more than a couple of decades fondly remember Scenes, the Lakeview theater-focused bookstore and cafe that provided a Clark Street hangout for all the companies producing in storefronts around the neighborhood (and their audiences), as well as a source (in those pre-Internet days) for […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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Deb Clapp takes final bows at the League of Chicago Theatres
When I was first doing theater in Chicago back in the Pleistocene era (that is, the late 1980s), the League of Chicago Theatres (formed in 1979 as the Off Loop Producers Association) seemed most notable for running the Hot Tix discount ticket booth and offering co-op advertising rates to member theaters in publications like the […]