Two of Chicago’s theater companies will face Tony tonight in the annual awards ceremony in New York. The Chicago Shakespeare Theater is up for best regional theatre. And the Steppenwolf Theatre Company is up for seven Tony’s for their production “August: Osage County,” which is playing on Broadway. Those seven nominations include Best Play, Best Direction, Best Leading Actress, and more. Download your printable ballot to follow-along. The Tony Awards will be broadcast tonight on......

They say Shakespeare wrote over 30,000 unique words in his complete works and his vocabulary is estimated to be about twice that. The average person today knows roughly 12,000 to 20,000 and only uses a tenth of that. Thanks in part to the Internet, those numbers are fast becoming outdated. English has always been composed of a mish-mash of different languages and other words, and now Paul Payack, who runs Global Language Monitor (GLM), estimates......

We've been digging SceneUnseen's photos all week. Al fresco dining during a free Pritzker Pavilion show (a.k.a. stuffing your face while the Joffrey Ballet grooves) On any given weekend, there's always something new and worth seeing on a Chicago stage. Tried-and-true shows like Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and Improvised Shakespeare, perfect for treating out of town guests to a laugh. Friendly, helpful people are running the tawniest art galleries. Free......

What started as Chicago actor and director David Blixt’s creative inquiry into the Capulet-Montague feud quickly became so much more. The Master of Verona, Blixt’s debut novel set in 14th Century Italy, explores Italian political life, conspiracy, the life of Dante, and the possible backstory for Romeo and Juliet. While directing the aforementioned Shakespeare play years ago, he found its all-consuming resolution fascinating and troublesome, hinting at but never revealing the source of the families’......

A few minutes walk from Bubba Gump, Shakespeare Theater and the IMAX is this weekend’s Exposition of Sculpture Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) Chicago, bringing around 100 similarly eclectic galleries to Navy Pier’s Festival Hall. Considering the show’s artistic star power and the stacks of bills changing hands, Friday afternoon seemed positively mellow. Visitors seemed more intent on finding that perfect trinket for their living room or personal adornment than investing in the next Picasso.......

Driving or hitching to Oak Brook to hear an Edgar Allen Poe recitation probably isn’t topping your weekend plans. But with “The Madness of Edgar Allen Poe,” the First Folio Shakespeare Festival sweetens the deal. They stage the performance of a few of Poe’s more frightening short stories, and the charming but creepy true account of the author’s courtship and marriage of his teenage cousin Virginia, at the historic Mayslake Peabody Estate. Poe might have......

Batman flew off to Hong Kong. Here's what he'll be missing: Coming up: As we’ve mentioned, Kumail Nanjiani is a funny, funny man. Now he’s ditching us for New York. Send him off Thursday night at The Hideout, where he’ll pay tribute to Jonathan Messinger and his new book. It’s your last chance to see Kumail before he gets mega-famous or chewed up by the Gotham comedy scene. The young performers at Thirteen Pocket Productions......

By Any Other Name?...

The best excuse to see TV stars sans makeup, The Tenth Annual Chicago Improv Festival continues through Sunday at The Athenaeum, Park West, and sites all over the north side. (Yes, south siders, they do hate you, get over it…) Chicagoist attended the opening show Monday night at the Cultural Center, featuring the only three performers dedicated (or crazy) enough to perform at all 10 festivals: Joe Bill, Susan Messing, and Mark Sutton. They brought......

Chicagoist has been watching Geoffrey Baer’s tours on Channel 11 for a while now, but when we sat down to preview his latest tour of the Fox River Valley and Chain O’ Lakes, we weren’t sure what to expect. We haven’t spent much time in this area, and we weren’t sure we cared much about it. But, true to form, Baer kept us interested all the way from the rowdy Blarney Island bar to Mies......

Last weekend, we caught Robin McFarquhar: Stage Combat, Text-to-Fight, a lecture about and demonstration of stage combat presented by the Chicago Humanities Festival. Dr. McFarquhar teaches theater movement at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and has worked with the Steppenwolf, Court, and Goodman theaters and on Broadway. He choreographed the combat in the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s current production of "Hamlet," playing through November 18. For Dr. McFarquhar, there’s more to stage combat than meets the......

September is traditionally the start of Chicago’s theater season. But since there’s no real off-season, we can simply take heart that local houses big and small are rolling out their big guns and, for the next few months, we’ll never have an excuse not to get our butts in the seats. The theater community has all sorts of personalities, here are just a few: This weekend The Grand Dame: Shakespeare Theatre Hamlet by You Know......

A few Chicago theaters are on vacation but this summer’s slowdown is much subtler than past years. The Reader lists over a dozen shows opening this weekend and, between now and autumn, more than a dozen local outdoor productions may indulge our insatiable need to slather on the SPF65, don our big floppy hat, and watch actors sweat in the great outdoors. Performing Shakespeare in the park remains a rite of passage for thousands of......

As its name suggests, Theater on the Lake combines two of our favorite Chicago attractions. There’s nothing quite like seeing a fantastic show after an evening lakefront stroll. But there’s also nothing quite like wondering what the hell you just saw while darting through puddles and thunderstorms to get back to the bus. Thankfully, most of our memories attached to the shed at Fullerton and LSD belong to that first category. And this year’s lineup......

Reina Hardy - Way Off Loop, the viola project...

Tonight, the League of Chicago Theatres celebrates the first anniversary of “Theater Thursdays.” The weekly series lures younger professionals to the theater on a traditionally slower night by offering drinks, appetizers, and discussions with knowledgeable professionals. The reception and munchies return to the Goodman Theatre tonight for William Shakespeare’s Pericles. Fitting too, since that’s where it all began last January. Tickets are $40, pre-show starts at 6pm for a 7:30pm curtain. Pericles is one of......

They’re giving Navy Pier a makeover. Cripes. It’s like the makeover for Paula Jones: we guess it couldn’t hurt, but it doesn’t really help, does it? Chicagoist holds little affection for Navy Pier. Sure it’s better to have businesses there than the wasteland that preceded it, but did it have to turn into a mall? The Trib article describes the original vision in 1995 as “an entertainment district and exposition center.” Right. Ever tried making......

It's been ten years since the Joffrey Ballet, nearly broke and in an artistic rut, left their Manhattan home for Chicago’s broad shoulders—and deep pockets. Forty seasons into their existence, the troupe was still working to put down roots and cement their national identity. Ten years prior, founders Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino were stirring up the dance world with productions more athletic and overtly sexual than typical ballet. Ten years since, the company has......

Nominees for the 2005 Joseph Jefferson Awards for Equity Theaters, or Jeff Equities for short, have been announced. The nominees are selected from a pool of shows that impressed members of the Jeff Nominating Committee (a.k.a. “Jeff Recommended” productions). You can peruse the full list here. The Jeff Committee loves the big splashy musicals. Beauty and the Beast, a classic fairy tale, and Sweeney Todd, a classic cannibal tale, received 7 and 6 nominations, respectively,......

Despite the swirl of scandals that threaten to envelop Mayor Daley, one bulletproof accomplishment cited by his defenders is the revitalization of Chicago’s downtown area. Over the past week, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times have examined the changes in the Loop and beyond. The Chicago Sun-Times carried a five-part series entitled The New Downtown that traces the progression of downtown from the unveiling of the Picasso sculpture in 1967 to the present. Arguing that......

Note: This is Part 2 of an occasional series. Part 1 can be found here. Theater companies have been working overtime lately, killing a forest to print their brochures and flooding inboxes with exciting emails—You Just Can’t Miss This Season!, We’ve Got Stuff You Can’t See Anywhere Else!, and Its’ Our Anniversary! Are You Going To Stand Me Up On Our Anniversary?!?! It’s a lot of clutter and noise, but it’s far more interesting than......

Yesterday Roger Ebert received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Congratulations, Roger. You’ve finally arrived. Bill Zwecker’s got all the news that’s fit to print in a press release this morning about the ceremony. Apparently, this was the first time that a star was given to a critic. Finally! Pointing out people’s flaws has been legitimized! By an organization that honors people whose friends have $15,000 dollars to spare! Let freedom ring! Ebert’s......

Sure to please Adrian Monk, the obsessive-compulsive genius detective from the TV show Monk, drivers in Chicago will be able to clean up their cars for FREE. Compliments of USA, the network Monk is on, free car washes will be available to the first 120 customers on Friday, July 1, July 8, and July 15. Head over to one of these locations: Car WashLocationTimes White Glove Car Wash1415 W. Shakespeare Ave., Chicago Noon - 2:00......

Now that grills across the city are sparking up with more frequency, Chicagoist has taken it upon itself to offer some helpful selections of beers and wines as well as some tasty cocktail recipes to complement your grilling experience and start you out on those baby steps to being a wonderful host- or an above average bartender. If last week was a preview of what August has in store for us, you might want to......

The Goodman Theatre (that's r-e 'cause they're fancy) has announced their 2005-6 season. In the Albert will be the musical Purlie, based on the play Purlie Victorious by the late Ossie Davis; Shakespeare's Pericles directed by Mary Zimmerman; 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist The Clean House; and The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove, from Regina Taylor, the director of last year's sensation Crowns. In the Owen, it's Stephen Lang's one-man show Beyond Glory and Crumbs from the......