Only a handful of musicals actually take place in Chicago, and they make an unusually varied group: a vaudeville about murderesses, a greaser musical that started in a Lincoln Avenue trolley barn, a Rodgers and Hart show about a nightclub heel, a holiday story about Christmas trees crossing Lake Michigan, and newer shows about the city’s history of protest. This guide collects the musicals set in Chicago. For each one we explain why the city matters to the story and link every ChicagoCritic review we have published, with the producing company or venue, the year and the rating our critic gave.
Our Rule: The Story Has to Happen Here
To make this list, Chicago has to be a setting of the story. Where a musical premiered, where its characters come from and where a famous production was staged do not count on their own. Chicago is one of the country’s great tryout and long-run towns, and many musicals that opened or ran for years here take place somewhere else. Those are not on this list.
We also draw a second line inside the list. In some shows Chicago is essential to the story: the city’s history, neighborhoods or institutions drive what happens. In others Chicago is the location: the show is set here and uses the city’s color, but its story could be moved without much damage. Each entry says which kind it is.
Chicago Musicals at a Glance
| Musical | Year | Chicago connection | ChicagoCritic review |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago | 1975 | Essential to the story | 4 reviews |
| Pal Joey | 1940 | Primary setting | 1 review |
| Grease | 1971 | Essential to the original version | 1 review |
| Raisin | 1973 | Essential to the story | No musical review |
| The Christmas Schooner | 1995 | Essential to the story | 6 reviews |
| Haymarket: The Anarchist’s Songbook | 2016 | Essential to the story | 1 review |
| Revolution(s) | 2025 | Essential to the story | No review |
| Show Boat | 1927 | Partially set in Chicago | 1 review |
| Some Like It Hot | 2022 | Opens in Chicago | No review |
Set Primarily in Chicago
Chicago by John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse (1975)
More: Read our complete guide to the true story and Chicago origins of Chicago the musical.
The city’s namesake musical comes from Maurine Dallas Watkins’ 1926 play, which she based on the 1924 Cook County murder trials of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, cases she covered for the Chicago Tribune. Kander and Ebb’s Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly use a slick lawyer and a hungry press to turn murder charges into vaudeville careers. Chicago is essential: the show’s satire of celebrity justice is aimed squarely at Prohibition-era Chicago’s jails, courtrooms and newspapers. Our critics have reviewed three national tours presented by Broadway In Chicago, which brought back Terra C. MacLeod as Velma and John O’Hurley as Billy Flynn each time, and a homegrown staging at Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace. All four earned our top rating.
Our reviews:
- Our review of the Chicago national tour at the Oriental Theatre (2011): Highly Recommended
- Our review of the Chicago national tour at the Bank of America Theatre (2014): Highly Recommended
- Our review of the Chicago national tour at the Cadillac Palace Theatre (2016): Highly Recommended
- Our review of Chicago at Drury Lane Theatre Oakbrook Terrace (2017): Highly Recommended
Pal Joey by Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and John O’Hara (1940)
Joey Evans is a charming, self-serving nightclub singer and dancer who talks his way into an emcee job at a seedy South Side club in late-1930s Chicago, then into an affair with Vera Simpson, a wealthy married woman who sets him up with a club of his own, Chez Joey. It all comes apart when blackmailers move in. O’Hara adapted the book from his own New Yorker stories, written as letters from Joey, and the original 1940 Broadway production made a star of Gene Kelly. Chicago is the location: the show’s world of small-time clubs and big-money patrons is vividly drawn, but its story of a heel on the make is not about the city itself.
Our reviews:
- Our review of Pal Joey by Porchlight Music Theatre at Stage 773 (2013): Recommended
Grease by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey (1971)
Grease was born in Chicago. It opened in February 1971 at the Kingston Mines Theatre, a former trolley barn at 2356 N. Lincoln Ave., and Jacobs modeled the students of Rydell High on the teenagers he knew at William Taft High School on the Northwest Side in the late 1950s. That first version was rougher and raunchier, with a different song list and references to real Chicago places such as Foster Avenue Beach. Rydell was the school’s name from the start, but as the show went to Broadway in 1972 the Chicago references were smoothed away, and the 1978 film moved the story to Southern California. Chicago is essential to the original version, while later versions largely removed the specific Chicago setting. Our review covers American Theater Company’s production of the original Chicago version, billed as the original grease.
Our reviews:
- Our review of the original grease at American Theater Company (2011): Somewhat Recommended
Raisin by Judd Woldin, Robert Brittan, Robert Nemiroff and Charlotte Zaltzberg (1973)
This musical version of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun keeps the Younger family in their crowded South Side apartment and keeps their fight to buy a house in a white neighborhood at the center. It won the 1974 Tony Award for Best Musical. Chicago is essential, as it is in the play: housing segregation in Chicago is the story. ChicagoCritic has not reviewed a production of the musical. Our 2013 review of the play is in our guide to plays set in Chicago.
The Christmas Schooner by John Reeger and Julie Shannon (1995)
In the late 1800s, Michigan schooner captain Peter Stossel starts carrying fir trees across Lake Michigan so that homesick German-American families in Chicago can have the Christmas trees they remember from the old country, and the voyages turn dangerous as the years go on. The story has deep roots in Great Lakes history: Christmas tree ships really did bring evergreens from Michigan to Chicago, and the best remembered of them, the Rouse Simmons, went down in Lake Michigan in November 1912. The musical premiered at Bailiwick Repertory in 1995 and played there every holiday season through 2007, becoming a Chicago tradition, later at Theatre at the Center in Munster, Ind., and at the Mercury Theater on Southport Avenue. Chicago is essential: the city’s immigrant neighborhoods and its lake trade are what the story is about, even though the Stossels’ home port is on the Michigan side of the lake. Our critics have reviewed it six times, and the reviews are a record of how a small storefront musical grew into a family ritual for many Chicago audiences.
Our reviews:
- Our review of The Christmas Schooner at Theatre at the Center in Munster (2009): Highly Recommended
- Our review of The Christmas Schooner’s first season at the Mercury Theater (2011): Highly Recommended
- Our review of The Christmas Schooner at the Mercury Theater (2012): Highly Recommended
- Our review of The Christmas Schooner at the Mercury Theater (2013): Highly Recommended
- Our review of The Christmas Schooner at Mercury Theater Chicago (2014): Recommended
- Our review of The Christmas Schooner at Mercury Theater Chicago (2015): Highly Recommended
Haymarket: The Anarchist’s Songbook by Alex Higgin-Houser and David Kornfeld (2016)
Underscore Theatre Company’s folk musical tells the story of the 1886 Haymarket affair through Lucy Parsons, the labor activist whose husband, Albert Parsons, was among the anarchists tried after a bomb exploded during a labor rally near Haymarket Square. She looks back on the bombing and the trial that followed. Chicago is essential: the Haymarket affair is one of the defining events in the city’s labor history. Underscore premiered the show at the Edge Theater in 2016.
Our reviews:
- Our review of Haymarket: The Anarchist’s Songbook by Underscore Theatre Company at the Edge Theater (2016): Highly Recommended
Revolution(s) by Zayd Ayers Dohrn and Tom Morello (2025)
The Goodman Theatre premiered this punk, metal and hip-hop musical in its Owen Theatre in 2025, with a book by Chicago playwright Zayd Ayers Dohrn and music and lyrics by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, who grew up in nearby Libertyville. A soldier and aspiring musician named Hampton Weems comes home to the South Side and gets pulled into a resistance movement, and much of the action unfolds in a Chicago warehouse during an underground protest concert. Chicago is essential: Dohrn has said he set it here because of the city’s long history of radicalism and labor and racial activism. ChicagoCritic has not reviewed a production.
What our archive shows: Chicago-set musicals have reached local audiences in very different ways. Chicago repeatedly returned through major national tours, while The Christmas Schooner became a recurring local holiday tradition across multiple Chicago-area theaters. Together, these reviews document both touring Broadway and homegrown Chicago musical theater over time.
Partially Set in Chicago
Show Boat by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II (1927)
Based on Edna Ferber’s novel, Show Boat follows the Cotton Blossom and the people on it from 1887 to 1927, starting on the levee at Natchez, Miss. In Act Two, Magnolia and her gambler husband, Gaylord Ravenal, come to Chicago. The act opens on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, then moves through a Chicago boardinghouse, St. Agatha’s Convent and the Trocadero nightclub, where Magnolia gets her start as a singer. Chicago is the location for the middle of the story, where the marriage falls apart and Magnolia makes her career, while the Mississippi River remains the show’s heart. Our review covers Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2012 staging, directed by Francesca Zambello and conducted by John DeMain, which put Kern’s score in the hands of an opera orchestra and chorus.
Our reviews:
- Our review of Show Boat at Lyric Opera of Chicago (2012): Highly Recommended
Some Like It Hot (2022)
The 2022 Broadway musical, adapted from the 1959 Billy Wilder film, begins in Chicago in 1933, where musicians Joe and Jerry witness a gangland killing. They escape by disguising themselves as women and joining an all-female band headed west, and most of the show takes place in San Diego, at the Hotel del Coronado. Chicago is the location for the opening act only, though Prohibition-era Chicago’s mobsters set the whole plot in motion. ChicagoCritic has not reviewed a production.
Chicago Musicals That Aren’t Actually Set Here
Working grew out of Studs Terkel’s 1974 oral history, and Terkel was as Chicago as a writer gets. The musical adaptation by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso premiered at the Goodman Theatre in December 1977. But the show presents its characters as American workers in general, from a mason and a waitress to a millworker and a fast-food delivery man, and it does not place them in Chicago. Our review covers the revised version that Broadway In Chicago presented at the Broadway Playhouse.
Our reviews:
- Our review of Working at the Broadway Playhouse at Water Tower Place (2011): Not Recommended
Million Dollar Quartet is a big part of Chicago’s theatrical history. It played the Goodman Theatre in 2008, moved to the Apollo Theater on Lincoln Avenue and ran there until January 2016. But its story takes place on Dec. 4, 1956, at Sun Records in Memphis, when Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins gathered for their only session together.
Our reviews:
- Our review of Million Dollar Quartet at the Goodman Theatre, with a November 2009 update from the Apollo (2008 and 2009): Highly Recommended
- Our review of Million Dollar Quartet after its move to the Apollo Theater (posted 2009): Highly Recommended
- Our review of Million Dollar Quartet at the Apollo Theater (2015): Highly Recommended
More Chicago Musicals to Come
Chicago writers and theater companies continue to put the city on the musical stage. We’ll update this guide as we identify additional Chicago-set musicals and preserve ChicagoCritic’s existing reviews alongside them.