“Welcome to the Midwest’s book processing center.” Every book you can imagine from “The Color Purple” to “The Beginnings of Western Science” makes its way here to be sorted and censored according to ...

Chicago stages have been described as petri dishes for talent development, with the city seen as a particularly fertile launching pad for the stars of tomorrow, whether in acting, comedy, writing or ...

Don’t be surprised if you recognize Charin Alvarez, as her extensive career in Chicago theater and film continues to grow. Alvarez has been acting in Chicago since 1996, and it would be simpler to ...

Oak Park Festival Theatre’s producing artistic director Peter Andersen directs this production in Oak Park’s “Secret Garden,” “where the world of the play meets the rhythms of the park.” City Lit ...

The annual international festival of body-forward theater features a sporty, sexy two-man (and one radio) locker room face-off from Argentina; an ode to Nina Simone from Scotland; and an acclaimed ...

The Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire has reinvented classic musicals and produced Chicago premieres and new works for fifty years—but they’re not out of surprises. “Our favorite shows,” says Peter ...

Is Chicago theater back? That was the sentiment at photographer Joe Mazza’s studio, where my visit to an icy, dark alleyway led to a doorway leaking warm light and frantic jazz energy. Inside, this ...

During Peter Andersen’s time as producing artistic director of Oak Park Festival Theatre, the company has seen tremendous growth in audience and artist engagement. Says Andersen, “Audiences have been ...

Take this with a grain of salt, because I don’t see every show at The Second City, but the new mainstage revue, “Don’t Quit Your Daydream,” is one of the most consistently funny shows—maybe the ...

The annual series of free, outdoor dance lessons in everything from salsa to steppin’, followed by live music, returns to the Spirit of Music Garden and parks across the city. Chicago Dance Crash ...

Now in its thirty-first season, Writers Theatre continues its tradition of staging both new works and new interpretations of the classics. Artistic director Braden Abraham says that the Glencoe ...

In my early days as a journalist I learned a really important lesson from a veteran bulldog journo: not all writers can be journalists and not all journalists can be writers. Only a special few can be ...