Review by Karen Topham, ChicagoOnstage, member American Theatre Critics Association. I’m going to answer the biggest question right off the bat. For those who may not have already heard, the filmed version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is in fact utterly captivating. Directed by the Broadway stage director Thomas Kail, it manages to capture all of […]
Review by Karen Topham, ChicagoOnstage, member American Theatre Critics Association. Note: This show, originally slated to be performed live at Theater Wit, is available online instead due to coronavirus. For a discussion of theatres responding to coronavirus restrictions, click here. 16th Street Theatre was about to open Methtacular, a revival of a one-man show by […]
“I know someone like you understands the importance—the all-consuming social importance of live theater.” — Mark Lew, from Teenage Dick As the coronavirus crisis worsens and states, including Illinois, are instituting “shelter-at-home” proclamations, Americans are having to learn how to deal with a social and cultural situation they have never faced before. Quarantines are adversely […]
Review by Karen Topham, ChicagoOnstage, member American Theatre Critics Association; photos by Charles Osgood. Note: This show, originally slated to be performed live at Theater Wit, is available online instead due to coronavirus. I was planning to review Theater Wit’s new production of Mike Lew’s Teenage Dick long before the coronavirus changed the world, forcing […]
Review by Karen Topham, ChicagoOnstage, member American Theatre Critics Association; photos by Liz Lauren. Note: This play has been canceled due to the coronavirus; however, the cast and crew worked hard and deserve to be reviewed anyway. I voted for Jane Byrne in 1979, when she successfully ran to replace the utterly ineffectual Michael Bilandic […]
Review by Edward Rubin, member of American Theatre Critics Association, NYC’s Drama Desk, and the Outer Critics Circle; photo by Monique Carboni Surprise of all surprises, the 1969 movie “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” thanks to The New Group and Pershing Square Signature Center, is back in the news again—this time, not […]
Review by Karen Topham, ChicagoOnstage, member American Theatre Critics Association; photo by Edison Graff for GFour Productions. Like A.R. Gurney’s classic Love Letters, Dan Clancy’s Middletown, now playing at the Apollo Theatre, is designed not to be performed with a full set, props, and costumes but on a bare stage with actors reading from scripts. […]
Review by Edward Rubin, member of American Theatre Critics Association, NYC’s Drama Desk, and the Outer Critics Circle; photo by Carol Rosegg In or out of drag, whether on stage or page, the 65-year-old actor-playwright Charles Busch, with some forty years of show business under his belt, is a force to be reckoned with. His […]
Review by Karen Topham, ChicagoOnstage, member American Theatre Critics Association, photo by Tom McGrath, TCMcG Photography. In all these years, I have never before seen a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (just another of my many failings as a theatre critic). I knew, of course, what the titular “profession” is, but that’s […]
Review by Karen Topham, ChicagoOnstage, member American Theatre Critics Association, photo by Emily Schwartz. In an era in which the very nature of truth is being questioned on an almost daily basis, Interrobang Theatre’s revival of the 1995 one-man play Here Lies Henry, featuring a character who is a self-proclaimed liar, feels completely appropriate. I […]