28th Annual Young Playwrights Festival Produced by Pegasus Theatre Chicago New Talent On Display I must admit I walked into the Young Playwrights Festival with a little trepidation. The festival, which workshops and produces scripts from local high school students, seemed like the sort of project people would say they support and maybe donate to, … Read more
… no actor would ever say the word Macbeth in a theater – it would bring certain disaster. ….NEVER wish an actor good luck! – tell them to break a leg.
Turn off your pagers and/or cell phones BEFORE the show starts. And NO TEXT MESSAGING during the show. And DO NOT CHECK your VOICE MESSAGES and/or TEXT MESSAGES during the show. Maybe we need to do what some London theatre have started doing—making everyone check-in their cell phones upon entering the theatre.
Explore 25 influential American plays from Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller to Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, Tony Kushner and other major playwrights.
Here are the Top 12 Plays of 2014 as compiled by Tom Williams and Jacob Davis.
Enjoy!
A Nativity Story: More Than a Miracle is a Black Ensemble style show that contains enough intense emotions, frantic music and dance including terrific ballet sequences by Kathleen Turner and Anthony Williams making the stage elements interesting. Congo Square Theatre reminds us that African-American concept of The Nativity is unique, emotional, and honestly depicted through gospel music and movement.
Franz Lehár’s 1905 masterpiece The Merry Widow epitomized why operettas were the preferred form of dramatic entertainment in early twentieth century Europe. It’s a silly, light-hearted story about love that exists only to provide a context for opera singers to dance, joke, and of course, fill up an auditorium with delightful sound. Now at the Cahn Auditorium, Light Opera Works has provided a twenty-nine piece orchestra, excellent production values, and a new English-language adaptation to complement their talented singers and Lehár’s beloved music
Cinderella is, by far, the finest National Touring Equity musical to grace a Chicago stage in years! It is a wonderful, beautifully staged and a gorgeously presented musical. It has all the elements of a fabulous family experience: a marvelous, lush score by Richard Rodgers with the smart lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. It has eye-popping sets and costumes (set design by Anna Louizos, costumes by William Ivey Long). It has a new book by Douglas Carter Beane that updates and adds heart to Hammerstein’s fable.
How does theatre tastefully memorialize its losses? That question haunted author Jay Torrence when he was writing Burning Bluebeard, which is about the December 30, 1903 fire at the Iroquois Theatre on Randolph Street in Chicago in which over 600 people died. It’s an amazing story, but The Ruffians and The Neo-Futurists are clown troupes. However, since the fire occurred during a performance of a pantomime, a humorous fairy tale for children, it’s a better fit than it first appears. Burning Bluebeard is now in its third annual run, and it’s a sad, frightening, and yet often delightful piece.
Upon entering the theatre, you’ll be amazed by the set designed by Scott Pask, a longtime collaborator of director Joe Mantello. Before you is the façade and parking lot of the Hummingbird, a faded New Orleans hotel. It looks like a nasty place; there’s a rotting Honda and beer bottles strewn around the lot, a gutter pipe is cracked, the vending machine’s lights are out. But on the upper level there is a hanging potted plant, a strand of mini lights, and wind chimes. People actually live here.