This past spring and summer, hundreds of Chicago Public Schools teachers came to see Ike Holter's "Exit Strategy," a riveting new play from the little-known Jackalope Theatre about the last gasps of a Chicago school. Serving a disadvantaged population of students, the school was branded a...

In addition to the "On the Fringe" column I share with Nina Metz, I review many other individual shows for the Tribune over the year. Below are my picks for the 2014 productions that shone most brightly.

The year 2014 in Chicago theater could perhaps best be described in the words of Samuel Beckett: "I can't go on, I'll go on."

The sheer number of bang-up performances in 2014, though wonderful in itself, makes the task of deciding on the best of them especially torturous. National and international artists brought the finest of world dance to our doorstep; two Chicago giants took giant strides toward their goals;...

This week’s Theater Loop Showcase video is a stocking stuffed with holiday cheer. It’s “Dee Snider’s Rock & Roll Christmas Tale” featuring, of course, Dee Snider alongside Keely Vasquez, Christina Nieves and Taylor Yacktman with Alan Bukowiecki on keyboard.

This week’s Theater Loop Showcase video is Travis Taylor from “Camelot,” the 1960 musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, currently playing Drury Lane Theatre. 

Just in time for Thanksgiving comes this week’s Theater Loop Showcase video: Kelly O’Sullivan and Sadieh Rifai in “The Humans,” a new play by Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Karam at American Theater Company.

Let's face it: However lovely as holiday confectionery, "The Nutcracker" is sadly lacking in drama. The Act II divertissements are just the most obvious and official of the ballet's many, many distractions from the absence of story.

So, you want to take the family to "The Nutcracker." If you have little dancers of your own, your choice is probably made. But if not, or if you want to branch out, where to go? Timing, location, price, and quantity and quality of artists might all be factors in a dizzying field of options....

Applause seemed a trivial response to an experience as profoundly disturbing as Khecari's "Oubliette," Jonathan Meyer's Beckettian exercise in the elemental and the empathic. Thoughtful, beautifully crafted, it's nevertheless no well-made dance but a radical experiment in theater.

NEW YORK — Early in "Beautiful," the new Carole King musical on Broadway, the prodigious but perennially insecure title character is desperately trying to sell the song "It Might as Well Rain Until September" just by banging it out on the piano.

NEW YORK — As captain of “The Last Ship,” and the one who set this mostly autobiographical and wholly original Broadway musical on its daring course, the great songwriter Sting can take solace in his fleet of lovely melodies and sanguine lyrics, from gentle waltzes to...

NEW YORK — Born of the rubble of the Berlin Wall, marginalized, ill-used, rootless and embittered, Hedwig Schmidt surely would never have imagined her tired body would be brought to life on Broadway, no less, by a star of the magnitude of Neil Patrick Harris, a song-and-dance man of...