Entertainment

Used to be that smaller live theaters did not run year-round. That changed in the last five years. Ok, there is nothing scheduled for August, but Chicago keeps producing excellent theater while drumming up season subscriptions for 2023/24…

Austin, Texas. What do you associate this deep in the heart of Texas city with?
It’s a destination people think of as bachelor or bachelorette parties, the ubiquitous SXSW Film, Music and Tech festival, ACL – the live music event spread over two weekends…

Endings are fiendish things. In the old days, fictional endings were clearly defined, wrapped up, tied with ribbon and fastened in a neat bow. Shakespeare’s endings were unambiguous: tragedies ended in mass death, comedies ended…

Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin are at it again. Last year’s follow-up to the seven year run of Grace and Frankie was, 80 For Brady, a whimsical quest to meet and ogle superstar footballer, Tom Brady. Even with the addition of co-stars Sally Field…

The email subject line included a heart emoji – “♥Calling Taylor Swift Fans” – and offered presale access to The Eras Tour, scheduled in nearby Tampa for shortly before my 70th birthday. “Maybe this could be an early present to myself,” I thought. And was it ever…

All musical forms progress as new instruments, new technology, and new innovators come on the scene. Modern opera has bad rap because some of it contains music written using the 12-note scale, uncomfortable to most ears…

Last spring, I wrote about the explosion of black on the live stage. In 2022, all the new plays opening on Broadway were written by black playwrights and starred black performers. Locally, in Chicago, the explosion is sustained by the four-to-six-week schedule of new performances throughout the year. All Black Productions Most theater groups average […]

The gaunt, stricken faces on the characters of Director Sarah Polley’s Women Talking tell us a great deal about despair. Living within the confines of an isolated religious colony, they have, over the course of their lives, been repeatedly sprayed…

Living in Chicago, you automatically qualify as a Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) fan. Many of his famous commissions still stand, some owned by single families, or open to the public and owned by churches (Unitarians), communities…

If theater is about the suspension of disbelief, then puppetry is a double suspension of disbelief – the story is told not by an actor, but by a doll or costume controlled by a puppeteer. Done well, it works in a magical way. The creative skill…