Kirsten Greenidge’s Morning, Noon & Night, currently receiving its Midwestern premiere at Shattered Globe Theatre, is an ambitious, mind-bending exploration of the “new normal” in post-pandemic America. Greenidge, a playwright unafraid of tonal hybridity, situates her story at the uneasy intersection of middle-class and magical realism. Under AmBer Montgomery’s direction, the production attempts to navigate the landscape of family connection, digital surveillance, and the psychic fragmentation wrought by living life through digital screens.

The play unfolds over the course of a single day in the life of Mia, a work-from-home mother teetering on the edge of burnout. Kristin E. Ellis anchors the production with a performance that captures both the brittle humor and simmering desperation of a woman expected to hold everything together. Her Mia is perpetually toggling—between Zoom meetings and grocery lists, between maternal patience and private panic. Ellis embodies the quiet terror of a generation of women asked to endure the unendurable with a smile.

Opposite her, Emefa Dzodzomenyo gives Dailyn a restless, electric presence. As the hyper-aware Gen Z daughter oscillating between existential dread and a yearning for authentic connection, Dzodzomenyo resists caricature. Her Dailyn is sharp, wounded, and achingly perceptive—someone who has inherited not only climate anxiety and algorithmic pressure but also the emotional residue of her mother’s exhaustion.

The supporting cast deepens the sense of a household under strain. Christina Gorman’s Heather, Mia’s friend and confidant, functions as both comic relief and quiet warning sign—her lingering pandemic anxieties and conspiratorial asides suggest how prolonged fear can harden into identity. Hannah Antman and Soren Jimmie Williams lend a jittery immediacy to Nat and Chloe, capturing the skittish vulnerability of teens shaped by social media’s relentless gaze. That said, both performers read slightly younger than I imagined the characters to be, which subtly shifts the dynamic; their portrayals emphasize innocence and volatility over the more self-aware cynicism often associated with girls of that age.

The production’s most striking presence is Leslie Ann Sheppard as Miss Candice, a “Donna Reed  - Father Knows Best” AI-generated avatar of curated perfection who steps out of the algorithm and into the family’s living room. Sheppard’s performance is chilling in its serenity. With a voice that soothes and a gaze that scans, Miss Candice represents not simply technology but the seductive promise of optimized living—an influencer deity promising order amid chaos. Her presence pushes the play from realism into something more speculative, even dystopian.

Jackie Fox’s set and lighting design effectively ground the story in its post-pandemic malaise. The living room, cluttered yet aspirational, feels very lived-in and slightly unraveling. The use of projections is particularly striking; at times the audience feels as though it is peering through a phone screen. Notifications flicker, curated images intrude, and the boundary between the digital and the tangible dissolves. The design serves as a digital mirror—reflecting how social media refracts reality rather than simply documenting it.

Yet for all its thematic ambition, the production occasionally exposes a disconnect between script and staging. Greenidge clearly has much to say about female rage, consumerism, intergenerational trauma, and the violence of constant connectivity. However, Montgomery’s direction seems to engage these ideas primarily at a surface level, with moments of genuine thematic revelation passing too quickly to fully resonate. The result can feel unintentionally algorithmic—significant insights obscured beneath repetitive beats.

Moreover, despite the performances and the evocative design, the stakes never quite rise to meet the play’s expansive conceptual ambitions. Whether this disconnect stems from the script, or the direction is difficult to determine, but the result is the same: the looming threat of digital colonization and familial fracture hover suggestively rather than landing with decisive impact. The danger feels atmospheric instead of urgent, diffuse rather than devastating.

Morning, Noon & Night offers a portrait of contemporary anxiety, capturing the low-grade dread of a culture caught between the longing for authentic connections and the seductive pull of curated isolation. Like the screens it interrogates, the play pulses and glitches—at times mesmerizing, at times disquieting—but always insistently present, morning, noon & night.

RECOMMENDED

When: through March 28th

Where: Theater Wit, 1229 W Belmont Ave, Chicago, IL 60657

Running Time: 90 minutes no intermission

Tickets:  $20  -  $60

773-770-0333

www.sgtheatre.org/season-35/morning-noon-night

This review is proudly shared with our friends at www.TheatreInChicago.com. 

I love when I’m surprised by a writer I assume is new to the scene, only to discover she has been honing her craft for years, quietly building a body of work the rest of us somehow missed. I love it even more when that discovery feels like striking gold. Such is the case with Kristen Adele Calhoun. A superior writer—assured, funny, emotionally and culturally precise—whose name, until now, had somehow eluded me. With Black Cypress Bayou, now receiving an unbelievable production at Definition Theatre, Calhoun announces herself (at least to Chicago audiences) as a major voice worthy of far more attention than she has received.

Under the smart, lively direction of Ericka Ratcliff, this production hums with comic electricity and emotional undercurrent. Ratcliff clearly trusts the text, allowing its humor to bloom organically while never losing sight of the deeper currents flowing beneath the laughter. The result is a staging that feels both buoyant and grounded—like the bayou itself, shimmering on the surface while concealing depth below.

The play centers on the Manifold women, and Ratcliff has assembled a quartet of actresses whose distinct comedic styles interlock beautifully. Michelle Renee Bester’s Ladybird Manifold anchors the evening with sharp timing and a steadiness that suggests stern resolve and steel. Bester understands that the funniest lines land best when rooted in truth.

Rita Wicks, as RaeMeeka Manifold-Baler, nearly steals the show with a performance that is riotously funny without tipping into excess. Her physical comedy is precise, her reactions razor-sharp. She seems to ride the rhythm of Calhoun’s language like a seasoned jazz musician, finding unexpected grace notes in throwaway lines. The audience’s laughter often arrives in waves when she’s onstage.

RJW Mays brings Vernita Manifold to life with a grounded warmth that balances the more explosive personalities around her. There is a generosity in Mays’ work—a listening quality—that allows scenes to breathe. Meanwhile, Jyreika Guest’s Taysha Hunter offers a refreshing contrast: contemporary, alert, and emotionally transparent. Guest navigates the character’s shifting loyalties and vulnerabilities with admirable nuance.

What makes this ensemble particularly thrilling is that each performer operates in a different comedic key, yet Ratcliff orchestrates them into harmony. The tonal blend—broad, dry, wry, heartfelt—shouldn’t work as seamlessly as it does. But here, it absolutely does.

In a production centering women both onstage and behind the scenes, there is an undeniable sense of cohesion and purpose. Scenic designer Alyssa Mohn, lighting designer Conchita Avitia, and sound designer Willow James conjure a fishing wharf deep in the bayou that feels at once literal and slightly mystical. Weathered wood textures, humid washes of light, and the subtle lapping of unseen water create a world that breathes. The environment is not mere backdrop; it is an active presence.

The costumes further ground the characters in time, economic reality, and personality. Fabric choices, silhouettes, and wear patterns quietly communicate history. We understand who these women are before they speak.

Ratcliff has described Calhoun as “tragically under produced.” After seeing Black Cypress Bayou, that phrase lands with force. If the rest of Calhoun’s catalog carries even half the wit, structural confidence, and emotional intelligence on display here, then Chicago theatres—and American theatres more broadly—have some catching up to do. Calhoun’s other plays, including works that explore Black Southern life, intergenerational memory, and the elasticity of family bonds, reportedly continue her signature blend of humor and haunting. One leaves this production not only satisfied, but curious—eager to track down everything else she has written.

Definition Theatre has given this play the gift every writer deserves: a production that listens, that elevates, that celebrates. Black Cypress Bayou is not simply entertaining, it is invigorating. It reminds us that discovery is one of theatre’s great pleasures. And sometimes, the most thrilling “new” voice is one who has been waiting patiently for us to catch up.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

When: through March 15th

Where: Definition Theatre@55th, 1160 E. 55^th Street., Chicago, Il.

Running time: 90 minutes no intermission

Tickets: Start at $25

312-469-0390

definitiontheatre.org

This review is proudly shared with our friends at www.TheatreInChicago.com. 

There is something almost perversely apt about staging Miss Julie inside a birdcage.

Under the direction of Gabrielle Randle-Bent, August Strindberg’s most celebrated chamber play, Miss Julie—an autopsy of class warfare disguised as seduction—arrives at Court Theatre in a production as conceptually bold as it is frustratingly self-defeating. Scenic designer John Culbert places the entire action within a giant birdcage veiled in scrim. The metaphor is unmistakable: these three characters are trapped—by class, by gender, by desire, by the invisible architecture of hierarchy. Within this enclosure they circle one another warily, predator and prey trading positions until collision becomes combustion.

And yet, the scrim that literalizes Strindberg’s thesis also undermines the very essence of chamber drama.

Chamber plays depend on proximity. They require that we see the flicker of doubt before it becomes cruelty, the calculation before it becomes command. The scrim, however gauzy, creates a barrier. We are not fully privy to the faces or the minute mental machinations of the actors. Instead of sitting in the kitchen with them, breathing the same charged air, we observe as though through glass. The concept imprisons not only the characters but the audience.

Still, the performances press fiercely against those confines.

Mi Kang’s Miss Julie is volatile and wounded, her aristocratic arrogance masking a desperate hunger for annihilation. She plays Julie not as a naïve romantic but as a woman testing the edges of her own destruction. Kelvin Roston Jr.’s Jean is taut with ambition. His Jean calculates even while seducing; every flirtation carries the weight of social ascent. The push and pull between Kang and Roston Jr. has genuine danger, their exchanges tightening like wire.

Rebecca Spence’s Kristine, meanwhile, anchors the production with moral steadiness. Kristine is the quiet witness to the carnage—a woman whose survival depends on understanding the rules rather than challenging them.

Kelvin Roston Jr. and Mi Kang in Miss Julie at Court Theatre.

The uncredited score becomes an unexpected fourth character. It begins with what sounds like a restrained string quartet—orderly, almost classical—before devolving into ear-piercing, disconnected, harsh chords. The progression feels deliberate: a descent into madness mirroring Julie’s psychological unraveling. It is invasive, unsettling, and impossible to ignore.

Raquel Adorno’s costumes subtly delineate class distinctions without ostentation. Fabric and silhouette do the quiet work of social architecture. No detail feels accidental.

This may well be Strindberg’s season in Chicago. Across town, Steppenwolf Theatre Company is mounting The Dance of Death, another of the playwright’s bruising dissections of intimacy and entrapment. That two major companies are wrestling simultaneously with Strindberg’s merciless worldview suggests a cultural appetite for dramas in which love is war and escape is illusion.

Court Theatre’s Miss Julie, guided by Gabrielle Randle-Bent’s disciplined direction, understands that these characters are caged long before the lights rise. The tragedy is that the scrim—meant to emphasize their confinement—keeps us from fully experiencing the suffocating intimacy that makes the play detonate. Strindberg wrote this as chamber music for three instruments. When we cannot quite see the musicians’ fingers on the strings, some of the music is inevitably lost.

Even so, the production lingers. Like the final discordant notes of its score, it vibrates with unease long after the cage goes dark.

RECOMMENDED

When: through March 8th

Where: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.

Running time: 90 minutes no intermission

Tickets: $60 - $90.00 Student, Group and military discounts available

773-753-4472

www.courttheatre.org

This review is proudly shared with our friends at www.TheatreInChicago.com. 

Collaboraction  Theatre Company could not have chosen a more resonant inaugural production for its new House of Belonging than Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till. In this sleek, in-the-round studio in Humboldt Park, the company inaugurates its new home by opening an old wound—one that America has never fully allowed to heal. The result is not merely a staging of history, but an act of communal witnessing, one that insists the past is not past.

Co-adapted by G. Riley Mills and Willie Round and co-directed by Anthony Moseley and Dana N. Anderson, Trial in the Delta transforms the 1955 courtroom proceedings in Sumner, Mississippi, into a visceral live docudrama. Actors emerge, take the stand, and deliver testimony drawn from the long-buried trial transcript of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the men who kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till. In this immersive setting, spectators are not allowed the comfort of distance. You are seated inside the machinery of injustice.

The production’s most devastating power lies in its restraint. This is not melodrama; it is documentation made theatrical. When NK Gutiérrez steps forward as Mamie Till-Bradley, the room seems to recalibrate its breathing. Her presence is not performative grief but moral force. Mamie’s insistence on truth—her refusal to look away, her demand that the world see what was done to her son—becomes the spiritual engine of the evening. Darren Jones’s Mose Wright, Mysun Aja Wade’s Willie Reed and Donald Fitzdarryl’s Chester Miller, embody the perilous bravery of Black witnesses testifying in a Jim Crow courtroom, where truth itself was an act of defiance.

The ensemble functions as a grim chorus of American roles: judges, clerks, journalists, sheriffs, defendants, and bystanders. Richard Alan Baiker’s Judge Curtis Swango carries the chilly authority of a system that pretends neutrality while protecting white supremacy. Tyler Burke and Matt Miles, as Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, avoid caricature; their ordinariness is the horror. Evil here is not monstrous but banal, upheld by procedure and custom. That banality is the production’s sharpest blade.

Prosecutor Gerald Chatham (John Henry Roberts, center) holds a photo of Emmett Till as he asks Till’s murderers Roy Bryant (Tyler Burke, left ) and J.W. Milam (Matt Miles, right) if they recognize their victim, as Till’s mother Mamie Bradley (NK Gutiérrez) looks on, in Collaboraction's Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till. 

Emmy Weldon’s set and Levi Wilkins’s lighting make elegant use of Collaboraction’s new 99-seat flexible studio, shaping the room into a courtroom that feels both provisional and eternal—anywhere, anytime. Shawn Wallace’s original music hums beneath the proceedings like a low current of grief and warning, while Warren Levon’s sound design places the audience inside a sonic environment of testimony, tension, and aftermath. The design team’s work never distracts; it quietly conspires with the text to tighten the emotional vise.

What distinguishes this staging from earlier iterations is how fully the new space is activated as a moral arena. The reserved jury seating—occupied by audience members—does more than gesture at interactivity. It implicates. You are reminded, without theatrical gimmickry, that verdicts are rendered not only in courtrooms but in communities, institutions, and histories. The post-show “Crucial Conversation” deepens that charge, extending the production beyond performance into dialogue—an extension of Collaboraction’s KEDA methodology in action.
KEDA—Knowledge, Empathy, Dialogue, and Action—frames the company’s belief that theatre should not end with reflection, but move audiences toward change.

Opening the House of Belonging with Trial in the Delta is a statement of values. This is not a theater christened with spectacle or escapism, but with reckoning. In a cultural moment eager to repackage or blunt the edges of history, Collaboraction insists on confrontation. The question the production leaves behind is not simply what happened in 1955, but what we have allowed to keep happening since.

Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till does not offer catharsis. It offers clarity. It reminds us that justice delayed is not just justice denied—it is justice rehearsed in different forms, across different bodies, in different decades. In Collaboraction’s new home, the walls are fresh, the tech is state-of-the-art, and the future feels open. But the story told on opening night is a reminder that belonging, in America, has always been contested—and that the work of making it real is unfinished.Top of Form

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

When: Extended through March 15th!

Where: Kimball Arts Center, 1757 N. Kimball Ave

Running time: under two hours, including a short Crucial Conversation after every performance

Tickets: $25 - $55.00 (10% discount for groups of 10 or more)

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(312) 226-9633

Patti LuPone’s long-running concert piece Matters of the Heart unfolded on the stage of the National Historic Landmark The Auditorium Theatre not as a greatest-hits parade, but as a seasoned artist’s intimate conversation with her own past. Premiering some 25 years ago at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York City, the show has aged not into nostalgia, but into something more textured: a living scrapbook of memory, mischief, heartbreak, and hard-won grace.

LuPone has always commanded a fiercely loyal LGBTQ following, and the sold-out house in Chicago testified to that enduring bond. The atmosphere felt at times like a cabaret. You could sense an audience primed not merely to applaud, but to commune. There was something for everyone here—Broadway diehards, pop romantics, and those who come for the diva energy and stay for the vulnerability.

Accompanied by a pianist and a string quartet, LuPone curated a program that balanced theatrical bravura with intimate confession. Her Broadway selections landed with the authority of a performer who has lived inside these songs. “I’m In Love with a Wonderful Guy” from South Pacific sparkled; “Not a Day Goes By” from Merrily We Roll Along unfurled in aching, mature regret. “Being Alive” from Company—the great anthem of ambivalent longing—rang with the clarity of someone who has wrestled with love and come back wiser, if not unscarred. “Back to Before” from Ragtime surged with emotional velocity, while her unexpected, intriguingly restrained take on “Easy to Be Hard” from Hair reframed youthful protest as weary, rueful remembrance.

LuPone’s comic timing remains lethal. Her wry humor bubbled up in “Shattered Illusions,” “Better Off Dead,” and “I Never Do Anything Twice,” songs that let her weaponize self-awareness and mischief in equal measure. She skewers romance and ego with relish, but never without implicating herself in the joke. This is the diva who knows her myth and plays with it. And the surprises. “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys arrived like a soft confession, stripped of pop gloss and steeped in tenderness. “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper was rendered not as a radio staple but as a promise dedicated to her family. These choices reveal LuPone’s instinct for emotional translation, taking familiar songs and making them speak in a new dialect.

Most affecting were the quieter moments, where LuPone let her guard down. In “Unexpressed,” “Alone Again (Naturally),” “The Air That I Breathe,” “Sand and Water,” “My Father,” and “Look Mummy, No Hands,” she showed a softer, contemplative side—less brassy legend, more vulnerable human being. These songs felt like pages torn from a private journal, offered up without ornament. It was here that Matters of the Heart earned its title.

LuPone, being the diva that she be, did get into a little kerfuffle this past summer with the theatre community. She apologized, took responsibility and, as these things tend to go in a resilient artistic ecosystem, everyone seems to have moved on. There are bigger issues pressing on the country today, and this evening reminded us that art’s role is not to litigate old wounds, but to open space for empathy.

In a moment when America feels increasingly brittle, Matters of the Heart lands as a small act of emotional repair. We could all use more love in this country right now—more listening, more generosity of spirit, more room for contradiction. LuPone, in all her fire and fragility, offered exactly that: a reminder that hearts break, heal, and, if we’re lucky, learn to sing again.

National Historic Landmark

The Auditorium

50 E Ida B Wells Dr, Chicago, IL 60605

312.341.2300

At the Auditorium Theatre, a building that itself carries the muscle memory of American performance history, the Martha Graham Dance Company marked its 100th anniversary with an evening that felt less like a retrospective than a living argument for why Graham still matters. This was not modern dance preserved in amber. It was modern dance breathing—angular, emotional, political, and insistently present.

Artistic Director Janet Eilber framed the evening with contextual remarks that were both generous and incisive, situating each work within Graham’s evolving artistic philosophy while emphasizing the company’s commitment to keeping these dances alive rather than embalmed. Founded in 1926, the Martha Graham Dance Company stands as the oldest modern dance company in the world, and its influence is nearly impossible to overstate. Graham shattered ballet’s decorative restraint, replacing it with contraction and release, emotional excavation, and a radical insistence that the body could think, rage, mourn, and remember. Entire generations of choreographers—from Merce Cunningham to Paul Taylor to Alvin Ailey—emerged from her orbit.

The first half of the program traced an emotional arc from love to grief to collective urgency. Diversion of Angels opened the evening with its luminous exploration of love’s many incarnations. Structured lyrically rather than narratively, the ballet presents three couples—youthful, mature, and seasoned—each embodying a different phase of intimacy. Norman Dello Joio’s undulating score supports movement that is buoyant yet grounded, joyful without sentimentality. The work’s Chicago roots add a quiet historical resonance: it premiered here 77 years ago under its current title, having debuted the year before as Wilderness Stair. Seen now, it feels ageless, its athletic lyricism and emotional clarity undimmed.

If Diversion of Angels celebrates connection, Lamentation confronts isolation and loss with ferocious simplicity. Premiered in 1930, the solo remains one of the most iconic works in modern dance. The dancer, seated and encased in a tube of purple jersey, becomes a living sculpture of grief. The fabric stretches, strains, and reshapes under the pressure of the body, creating stark diagonals and suspended tensions. The figure is deliberately abstract—neither gendered nor humanized—grief made manifest. The anecdote Graham often shared, of a woman who found permission to grieve after witnessing the work, still echoes here. Nearly a century later, Lamentation retains its power to dignify sorrow without theatrical excess.

The first half concluded with En Masse, choreographed by Hope Boykin, an Alvin Ailey alum, and receiving its Chicago premiere during this centennial engagement. Built around a rediscovered shard of Leonard Bernstein’s music—sketches believed to have been composed for Graham and later shaped by composer Christopher Rountree—the work bridges generations. Boykin’s choreography channels Graham’s collective intensity while speaking in a contemporary vocabulary. The dancers move as a charged unit, bodies surging and fragmenting, suggesting both solidarity and strain. It is a smart, muscular addition to the repertory, affirming that Graham’s legacy is not static but generative.

The second half belonged entirely to Chronicle, one of Graham’s rare openly political works and a striking reminder of her moral clarity. Created in response to her refusal to participate in the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, the work is performed by an all-women cast and pulses with defiance. Its three movements confront war, nationalism, and resistance not through literal narrative but through embodied protest—sharp footwork, grounded stances, and unyielding group formations. In today’s political climate, Chronicle feels unsettlingly current, its urgency undiminished.

What made this anniversary evening resonate was not nostalgia but conviction. The Martha Graham Dance Company did not ask the audience to admire history; it demanded that we feel it—in our bodies, in our grief, in our collective responsibility. At 100 years old, Graham’s work remains unapologetically modern, and this performance made clear that her revolutionary spirit is still very much in motion.

Celebrating Women Leaders in Dance

25-26 Season

The Auditorium
50 E Ida B Wells Dr, Chicago, IL 60605
312.341.2300

We often forget that The Taming of the Shrew is, at its core, a play within a play - a bit of theatrical mischief in which characters watch other characters pretend. Marti Lyons’s ambitious new adaptation for Court Theatre not only remembers this but revels in it. She reframes Shakespeare’s battle-of-wills as a private, immersive experience for five elite guests - figures who could easily have wandered off the set of Succession—invited to indulge in a curated world of erotica, fantasy, and power play. This is not like any production of Shrew I have ever seen. And I love it.

Lyons taps into the erotic charge embedded in Shakespeare’s text. For Lyons the struggle between Kate and Petruchio isn’t a patriarchal lesson but a provocation - an invitation to consider what people consent to in the privacy of their desires, even when those desires run counter to their public personas. In fantasy, we try on identities we might never inhabit in daylight. Could Kate, in this telling, actually be exercising her agency by consenting to a submissive role in her intimate life while fiercely maintaining her autonomy in her public life? The question lingers.

The production openly engages with bondage, discipline, dominance, submission and S&M,  - not as taboo spectacle but as a consensual system built on trust, communication, and negotiated power. This is especially evident at Petruchio’s house.  Instead of treating Kate’s submission as Shakespeare’s dreaded moral, Lyons reframes it as a conversation about desire and embodiment. The cast leans into this with a refreshing clarity: pleasure, not punishment, drives the story. Power is a game, and everyone in the room is choosing to play.

By foregrounding the play-within-the-play structure, Lyons opens a fertile space not only to re-engage with the text but to ask ourselves uncomfortable, thrilling questions about love and control, submission and domination, agency and desire. It is rare for a Shrew to feel so sensual and so intellectually alive.

Much of the production’s force comes from its ensemble. As Katherina, Melisa Soledad Pereyra embodies fire, humor, and hunger—a woman who knows her own body and mind. Her chemistry with Jay Whittaker’s Petruchio is the engine of the evening: two equals circling, sparring, testing limits until the battle between them becomes a dance. Netta Walker’s Bianca is no docile ingénue; she claims her place with confident wit. Samuel Taylor, Nate Santana, and Dexter Zollicoffer bring sharp comedic flavor to Hortensio, Lucentio, and Gremio, while Ryder Dean McDaniel anchors Tranio with duplicitous cunning. The supporting cast - Alex Weisman, Monica West, and others - soften and sharpen the edges of the world as needed.

The design team conjures a world where erotic imagination thrives. Jackie Fox’s scenic design refashions Court Theatre into a sensuous playground of marble black-and-white tiled floors, sculpted statues, expansive botanical murals, and imposing wooden doors. Kotryna Hilko’s costumes heighten the atmosphere with daring textures - leather for Petruchio, jewel-toned gowns for the women, jacquard damask for the aristocrats - each piece balancing revelation and restraint, structure and seduction. Every visual element underscores Lyons’s central argument: desire is a kind of performance, and every performance is a negotiation of power.

This Taming of the Shrew pulses not with brute domination but with the sensual, exacting choreography of consent. Lyons doesn’t blunt the play’s jagged edges; she sharpens them into tools of erotic inquiry. Her staging invites us to feel the heat of what is given freely, the tautness of what is deliberately withheld, and the exhilaration of boundaries tested - then mutually defined.

Court Theatre’s production doesn’t simply reinterpret Shrew; it challenges us to reinterpret ourselves. By grounding the story in erotic power exchange and consciously negotiated dynamics, Lyons’s adaptation pushes us to confront the desires we rarely articulate. What do we relinquish willingly? What pleasure do we find in surrender? And what power do we claim by choosing when—and to whom—we yield? In Lyons’s hands, the theatre becomes a chamber of self-interrogation, where the line between performance and private longing thins, and we’re invited to examine the fantasies that shape us as intimately as any script.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

When: through Dec 14TH

Where: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.

Running Time: 2 hours, 30 minutes 15 minute intermission

Tickets: $60 - $90.00 Student, Group and military discounts available

773-753-4472

www.courttheatre.org

New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen has birthed countless New Yorkers, none more recognized than 15-time Grammy Award winner Alicia Keys. Her life and artistry is now on display in  Hell’s Kitchen, the 2024 Tony award winning musical that arrived at Chicago’s Nederlander Theatre with a pulse as electric as the city it portrays. This is not your traditional jukebox musical. Hell’s Kitchen is a vibrant coming-of-age story where Keys’ music and Kristoffer Diaz’s book blend into a dramatically coherent whole.

The show’s beauty lies in its simplicity. Keys’ songs—familiar, melodic, emotionally direct—gain new shape and meaning when reframed for the Broadway stage. Unlike many jukebox musicals that force a narrative between pre-existing hits, Hell’s Kitchen succeeds because the music is truly part of the storytelling. Songs burst forward from moments of conflict, hope, and self-realization.

Hell’s Kitchen grounds its coming-of-age story in a web of relationships that shape and challenge young Ali, played with vivid intensity by Mya Drake. Questions of identity, belonging, and the messy beauty of adolescence come alive through her interactions with the adults and peers orbiting her turbulent world. Kennedy Caughell, as Jersey, embodies the protective-but-exasperated single mother whose love is both a shield and a boundary Ali keeps trying to outgrow. Ali’s tentative steps into first love—with JonAvery Worrell’s tender, conflicted Knuck—reflect the musical’s exploration of risk, desire, and the thrill of discovering your own heart for the first time. Mentorship emerges through the luminous presence of Roz White’s Miss Liza Jane, whose soulful, heartbreaking performance of “Perfect Way to Die” becomes a moment of clarity and grounding for Ali, reminding her that art can be both refuge and truth.

Family fracture, forgiveness, and urban resilience—are sharpened by the presence of Desmond Sean Ellington as Davis, Ali’s charismatic yet unreliable father. His complicated reentry into her life forces Ali to confront the emotional cracks she’d rather outrun. Chicago’s own Rashada Dawan brings strength and warmth to Crystal, adding texture to the story’s portrait of a community that raises, corrects, and ultimately protects its young people.

Hell’s Kitchen illustrates that growing up is rarely linear; it’s a dizzying blend of rebellion, discovery, heartbreak, and hope. Each character becomes a catalyst on Ali’s path toward finding her voice—both literally and spiritually, making the musical not just a story of one girl’s awakening, but a testament to the many hands it takes to shape a life.

The production’s physical world is equally alive. Scenic designer Robert Brill constructs a shifting jungle of steel girders and moving balconies that evoke a city in constant motion and perpetual construction. The set rises, retracts, and reconfigures like the city breathing. Lighting designer Natasha Katz amplifies this effect, creating a cityscape that refuses to sleep. Peter Nigrini’s projection design layers in close-up neighborhood imagery—street signs, building façades, glimpses of densely packed blocks—giving the illusion of living within a compact, ever-changing metropolis.

Choreographer Camille A. Brown infuses the show with organic motion, ensuring dance erupts naturally from each scene. Her work is sharp, grounded, and filled with communal energy, yet always tethered to character and environment rather than spectacle for spectacle’s sake. The costumes, period-specific, complement the choreography’s sense of youthful turbulence.

What ultimately makes Hell’s Kitchen resonate is its emotional clarity. It is a musical about becoming—about the messy, joyous, painful years when identity is still elastic and the world feels both infinite and suffocating. Keys’ music underscores these feelings with sincerity, and Chicago’s production honors that sincerity with a heartfelt, high-voltage performance.

Hell’s Kitchen is not just a tribute to a neighborhood or an artist; it is a celebration of the resilient young people who learn to sing above the city’s roar.

Highly Recommended
When: Through November 30
Where: James M. Nederlander Theatre 24 W. Randolph Chicago
Tickets: $50 - $149
Info: www.broadwayinchicago.com/shows/hells-kitchen/

America’s greatest sin is its obsession with race and skin color. From the first toll of the Liberty Bell, the nation has measured who is free and who is owned by the color of their skin. In Marcus Gardley’s The House That Will Not Stand, now given a rich and haunting revival by Invictus Theatre Company, that obsession becomes both a weapon and a wound. Gardley resurrects the forgotten world of Creole New Orleans—where wealth, whiteness, and womanhood are tangled together in knots—and transforms it into something exquisite, unsettling, and deeply human.

This production marks Invictus’s first offering since their remarkable Angels in America, and it stands as an equally compelling successor. Guided by the skillful direction of Aaron Reese Boseman, The House That Will Not Stand unfolds as both a gothic ghost story and a poignant parable about the boundaries of freedom in 1813 New Orleans—a city poised between the fading opulence of French colonialism and the strict racial divisions of the emerging American regime.

Britt Edwards commands the stage as Beartrice Albans, a proud free woman of color who has built her wealth and status through the plaçage system, a quasi-legal arrangement allowing Creole women to become the common-law wives of white men. With her lover, Lazare (played by the excellent Ron Quade), freshly dead and his body still on display in the parlor, Beartrice fights to protect her three daughters and her legacy as her world begins to crumble.

Those daughters—each beautifully rendered—embody the next generation’s struggle for identity. Kaylah Marie Crosby’s Agnès glows with youthful yearning, dreaming of love as a path to freedom. Sierra Coachman’s Maude Lynn retreats into rigid piety, while Aysia Slade’s Odette exudes charm and sharp wit, a realist surviving through grace and guile. Together, they capture Gardley’s kaleidoscope of womanhood—three shades of resistance against their mother’s rigid control.

Jimiece Gilbert’s Marie Josephine, the proverbial “crazy aunt in the attic,” turns her confinement into revelation. Her mad visions bridge the world of the living and the dead, anchoring Boseman’s ghostly approach to the story. Her voice, equal parts anguish and prophecy, reminds us that this is not just family melodrama—it’s historical haunting. Sandra Adjoumani brings a sly, spectral energy as La Veuve, the perpetual widow.

Meanwhile, Shenise Brown’s Makeda, the enslaved servant, gives the play its spiritual gravity. Her connection to African ancestry and unseen forces makes her both witness and conscience. Brown’s performance glows quietly, her stillness and humor cutting through Beartrice’s bluster with earthy wisdom.

Boseman’s direction leans into Gardley’s gothic sensibility. He treats the house as a living ghost, filled with whispers, candlelight, and secrets too heavy to contain. Scenic designer Kevin Rolfs has crafted a stunning 1800s New Orleans mansion divided into multiple playing areas: the elegant sitting room, the cool upstairs bedroom, the claustrophobic attic of Marie Josephine, and even the alcove where Lazare’s body lies in state. Levi Wilkins’s lighting balances warmth and eeriness, evoking both haunted house and holy shrine, while Terri Devine’s costumes—from black brocade mourning dresses to shimmering African prints and head wraps—are, as the name suggests, simply divine.

Still, not every element lands perfectly. While Edwards delivers Beartrice’s fiery pride with conviction, she occasionally overplays the register—spending much of the evening at full volume. Some lines blur in the shouting, and Gardley’s intricate text, already rich with historical and cultural nuance, sometimes gets lost. A few accents also stray, making the language harder to follow.

Gardley’s play doesn’t just dramatize America’s obsession with race—it excavates it. The story unfolds in the very region where mixed-race identities were codified into law, a world not far removed from the history of Pope Leo XIII’s own Creole ancestry. Gardley asks what happens when power, beauty, and belonging are measured by the shade of one’s skin—and Invictus answers with a production that is both eerie and elegant, steeped in laughter and lament.

In The House That Will Not Stand, ghosts are not just memories; they are the architecture of a nation still learning how to live with its past.

Highly Recommended
When: Through December 14
Where:  Invictus Theatre @ Windy City Playhouse, 3014 W Irving Park Rd, Chicago
Tickets: $25 - $38
Info: Invictustheatreco.com

TimeLine Theatre opens its 29th season with the world premiere of Hundreds and Hundreds of Stars, a deeply personal and politically charged play written by and starring Sandra Delgado. Under the careful direction of Kimberly Senior, the production folds an intimate family drama into the broader context of immigration under the Obama administration — a time when the tension between belonging and legality became a defining national paradox.

Delgado plays Clara, a woman whose life reads like a quintessential American story: educated in U.S. schools, an unemployed professional, a mother, an ex-wife paying alimony, and the devoted caretaker of her aging, recently widowed father. Yet, she carries one crucial distinction — Clara was born in Mexico. In the eyes of the government, despite her decades of living and contributing to the United States, she exists in a fragile legal limbo. It is this tension — between a lived sense of home and the precarity of status — that fuels Delgado’s heartfelt and sometimes haunting narrative.

The story unfolds in 2015, the final years of the Obama administration, when the nation’s immigration policy embodied contradictions. While Obama extended compassion through programs like DACA, his administration also deported more immigrants than any before it. It’s within that fraught atmosphere that Clara’s life unravels. As she plans an overseas trip, a bureaucratic hiccup exposes a youthful misstep from her past, threatening her livelihood, family, and even her right to remain in the country she calls home. What follows is both a bureaucratic nightmare and a spiritual reckoning, as Clara gazes skyward — toward “hundreds and hundreds of stars” — seeking guidance, belonging, and deliverance.

Senior’s direction is restrained and elegant, allowing Delgado’s writing to shimmer through the emotional and political layers of the story. The ensemble’s performances are uniformly grounded and generous. Ramón Camin gives Papi, Clara’s father, a stoic dignity — a man bound by nostalgia yet dependent on his daughter to navigate his new reality. Joshua David Thomas brings humor and restless charm to Ruben, Clara’s cousin, who juggles nursing school and low-level marijuana dealing with a kind of defiant optimism. Charlotte Arias’s Stella, Clara’s tween daughter with dreams of Paris, radiates a mix of giddy excitement at learning a new language and the tender angst of adolescence, embodying a generation eager to explore the world yet uncertain of their place within it. Charin Alvarez, playing every other woman in Clara’s orbit — from her attorney to her mother — threads the production together with wit, wisdom, and warmth.

Visually, the production achieves a graceful fluidity. Regina Garcia’s open set transforms seamlessly into apartments, offices, and memory spaces with minimal rearrangement, while Christine Binder’s lighting washes scenes in mood and emotion — from sterile bureaucratic glare to dreamlike luminescence. Willow James’s sound design and music further enrich the experience, grounding the play’s political urgency in emotional resonance.

Hundreds and Hundreds of Stars succeed because it is not a lecture on immigration policy, but a human portrait drawn from it. Delgado reminds us that behind every policy statistic — behind every deportation — lies a web of families, debts, dreams, and love stories. Clara’s story is one of endurance and faith, a meditation on identity and the invisible lines that divide “citizen” from “other.” In blending the personal and the political, TimeLine Theatre has once again illuminated how history lives — and aches — within the human heart.

Highly Recommended

When: Through November 9th

Where: Lookingglass Theatre, 163 E. Pearson Street

Running time: 90 minutes

Tickets: $40 - $95

(773)-287-8463

www.Timelinetheatre.com