Author: Kevin Curran
Free Skate
Rink Life – Lucky Plush Productions
With a name like Rink Life, you’d be forgiven for expecting the show to include roller skates and an upbeat pop soundtrack. When the first pair shuffles onto the floor at Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theatre barefoot and providing their own accompaniment a capella, you may also be forgiven for wondering what you’ve gotten yourself into. But in stripping away those obvious trappings, Lucky Plush’s new show manages to focus on what really matters and the result is a lovely evening that combines the joy of movement and the quiet importance of connection.
Read More
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Three Stories Up – Theatre in the Dark
On a rainy afternoon in Vancouver, a local transit police officer comes home to find her husband, also a police officer, murdered. For reasons she can’t understand, the police department wants to dismiss it as a suicide. She starts down a dangerous path to her husband’s last case and the network of criminal informants he worked with. Many plays have tackled the noir mystery, but non in quite the way that Theatre in the Dark does. This show is staged in pitch black darkness.
Read More
A Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore
Poe – Theatre Above the Law
Theatre Above the Law is celebrating Halloween by re-staging it’s adaptation of several Poe tales, set in a macabre cabaret.
Read More
What Would You Do?
Blonde Poison – Agency Theatre Collective
In World War II Berlin, a Jewish woman named Stella Kubler collobarated with the Nazis to help find other Jews in hiding, in exchange for her family’s safety. With blonde hair and blue eyes, she could pass for German. Stella, called ‘blonde poison’ by the Gestapo, is the focus of a new play by Cindy Henkin, presented by The Agency Theatre Collective.
Read More
Trial by Jury
Bloody Bathory – The Barrens Theatre Company
In the early 1600s, in an isolated castle in the forests of Hungary, Countess Elizabeth Bathory is reputed to have murdered literally hundreds of her servant girls for the purposes of bathing in the blood of virgins to maintain her youth and beauty. It sounds like a story made up to scare children, but there was a real Countess and she was really convicted for countless murders, and bricked up in a room in her castle and left to die. Of course, the murder accusation may have been a plot cooked up by the monarchy to take her castle from her and eliminate a huge debt it owed to her family, but details, details, right?
Read More
Another Story
Comfortable Shoes – The Neo-Futurists
Most of us are probably familiar with the story of One Thousand and One Nights. The king has promised to execute his wife Scheherazade at dawn, so she tells, but does not finish a story, hoping he will spare her another night and another and another. It works, and a new show at the Neo-Futurarium, written and performed by ensemble member Ida Cuttler, uses it as a jumping off point to explore how and why women have to tell their own stories over and over again.
Read More
Murder on the Moors
The Hound of the Baskervilles – City Lit Theatre
Sir Charles Baskerville has died under seemingly mysterious, but not necessarily suspicious circumstances. Found dead on his estate in Devon, his death could be chalked up to ill health, except for a legendary curse that has haunted his family for generations about a hellhound summoned by the evil deeds of a Baskerville ancestor. The great detective Sherlock Holmes doesn’t believe in curses, but when Sir Charles’ nephew arrives from America to claim his inheritance, he receives a threatening letter, warning him to stay away from the estate. Holmes must figure out who may have killed Sir Charles and stop them before they kill again.
Read More
Come Hear the Music Play
Cabaret – Cowardly Scarecrow Theatre Company
Cabaret is a snapshot in time. In the early 30s in Berlin, an English girl, Sally Bowles, dreams of stardom and wealth while performing in a seedy nightclub. Cliff, an American writer, is lazily making his way through Europe, hoping it will inspire his novel. Watching over all of it is an enigmatic master of ceremonies at the club, who seems to be the only one aware of the coming storm. Willkommen.
Read More
Yoinks
Oh Sh#t! It’s Haunted! – The Factory Theater
In The Factory Theater’s latest production, and one appropriately premiering in time for Halloween, Oh Sh#t! It’s Haunted! is the story of four Chicago friends who find themselves roped into exploring their neighborhood’s local haunted house, complete with a creepy recluse owner and someone plotting something that they’ll get away with if not for those lousy kids.
Read More
Harsh Lessons
Blue Stockings – Promethean Theatre Ensemble
It is 1896 and four students assemble for they hope will be the first class of female students to be granted degrees at Cambridge. They have to convince the school to first even hold a vote on the issue, let alone win that vote. To do so, they will have to be perfect, and not just academically, and it still may not be enough. This is the setting for Jessica Swale’s play Blue Stockings, getting its Chicago premiere with Promethean Theatre Ensemble.
Read MoreRECOMMENDED SITES
