Results tagged “victorygardens”

It seems like every other day we're reading about yet another theatrical project that makes us wonder if the success of Glee has caused some kind of collective brain short-circuiting. [Ed. note: I can't wait for Glee to die. How has no one else noticed it's just a cross between American Pie and the 4th season of Ally McBeal?!] Read for yourself.

Year Zero is a play of many firsts: The first of two plays presented in the first cycle of Victory Gardens’ “Ignition Festival,” and the first play to open in the theater’s brand-new Studio Theater. Created “to introduce exceptional new writers of color under the age of 40 to Victory Gardens,” the festival presents an exciting opportunity for playwrights and audience alike - unfortunately, we just weren’t that excited.

Thinking about Love Person, a story told in English, American Sign Language (ASL), Sanskrit and projected emails, instant messages and supertitles, we were more than skeptical. At best, it sounded overly ambitious. At worse, it sounded like a hot mess. We never would have guessed it would be one of our most exciting and gratifying theatrical experiences in recent memory.

Gorilla Tango Theatre, 1919 N. Milwaukee Ave., Fridays and Saturdays through 12/20, 11:30 p.m., $16

There are no shortage of opportunities to see a theater performance in Chicago, and that certainly applies to children’s theater or theater based on children’s literature. A number of of these productions have enjoyed some popular success as well. This goes to show that these performances are not attended only by dutiful schoolchildren, but are considered to be viable options in the Chicago theater scene, due to the effort and imagination that goes into adapting children’s literature for the stage.

Select Media Fest 6 (warning: flashy link) kicks off tonight and runs through November 17. Public Media Institute’s celebration goes sci-fi, transforming their exhibition space into the CPS1 space colony. This year’s interstellar gatherings include a Saturday night film screening at the Hideout, the SANDWITCH zine’s Sunday night launch, and weeklong discussions of democracy at Loyola. A festival pass is $25 and no program costs more than $10. Dance Chicago continues through early December at...

Before we go to the listings, we want to bid farewell to the Tribune's Kevin Pang, who's heading over to the Tempo section. But he leaves the food beat with a profile of Peter Engler, the city's foremost expert on mother-in-law sandwiches, street food and other south side cheap eats. Shaw's Crab House concludes this year's edition of their "Royster with the Oyster" festival with their annual tent party at their Hubbard Street location tonight....

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...

April, the cruelest month, brings with it north-side commuters’ personal hell. But delays on the CTA’s red, brown, purple and blue lines aren’t just chewing up your time and stoking our comments sections for the next couple years. They’re a threat to the local theater industry, specifically that massive cluster of storefronts barely a stone’s throw from the el tracks. Through early 2009, making that 7:00 curtain may involve unnecessary drama. But if you make...

Discussions about Black History Month have become as complex as discussions about race. Debating the labels ‘black’ and ‘African-American’ lead to debates about biracial identity and, recently, whether Senator Obama, Joe Biden’s “first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” friend, is actually African-American. In the same vein, Black History Month has increasingly been relabeled African-American Heritage Month and African Heritage Month, terms emphasizing the present and future as...

Suzan-Lori Parks has a lot of time on her hands. Four years ago, she started an ambitious project to write a play everyday for an entire year. Now she’s managed to convince more than a dozen U.S. cities and regions to perform them all over the next year. The Chicago theater community certainly wouldn't pass up the opportunity to present 365 plays by a Pulitzer Prize winner, and so 365 Days/365 Plays kicks off tonight...

All year we’ve been hearing the hype and the promises. This week, two Chicago cultural institutions invite the public to see the results of their high profile face lifts. The venue once known as the Chicago Historical Society regularly provided modest, helpful insights into local and regional history. Now it’s been renovated and renamed the Chicago History Museum, sporting 16,000 shiny new square feet for robust programming, heeding Burnham’s command to “Make no small plans.”...

Note: Part 1 of this series is here.

Victory Gardens Theater is shedding its identity crisis. Up until now, it was entirely possible to see show after show by the Lincoln Avenue hub’s resident companies without ever discovering a VG original. That’s too bad, since they’ve been breaking Chicago playwrights like Charles Smith and James Sherman for over 30 years. They also cast that guy from CSI years before he was popular and that guy from The Cosby Show years after he sported that Gordon Gartrelle knockoff.

College is a social powder keg. Students meet classmates from places they’ve only seen on a map. Members of the entitled class share rooms with the scholarship students. Freshmen meet people who look different, worship different, and think different and, if they’re humanities majors, engage theories about what it all means. Professors and administrators don’t make things any easier. Forests are sacrificed for underinformed theses about “the other” in literature and society. We shouldn’t be judged by the color of our skin, unless financial aid or heritage awards are at stake. Racial discrimination is petty and wrong, but so are some of the remedies dreamt up to combat it.

City officials have been known to capture the excitement of a cultural festival by declaring “Today we are all Irish!” to a crowd in Beverly or “Today we are all Polish!” to Jefferson Parkers. It’s amusing to think we’ll hear a Commissioner proclaim “Today we are all gay!” when the Gay Games open Saturday night, but Mayor Daley expressed his more than symbolic support earlier this week, thanking the out and proud (and commerce seeking)...

Small and smallish theaters routinely provide some of the best entertainment value in the city. Seems like no one understands that better than the side project, who has turned one of Chicago’s most intimate performance spaces, the side studio, into a Rogers Park destination. Opening in 2000 as a 20-seat venue that would expand to 32 seats a year later, the studio has hosted a steady stream of imaginative productions for a mix of friends, friends of friends, and theater nuts who read deep into the performing arts listings. The side project helps perpetuate this city’s reputation for immediate, in-your-face theater. Late night and off-hours, the space hosts spirited, cash-strapped groups, often on the experimental side: this was where the world (and Chicagoist) first saw Sock Puppet Showgirls.

Our search for fine British plays continued on the North Side where we took in a timely neighborhood drama and a comic slice of life. Osama the Hero, Dog & Pony Theatre “We do what we’re told, told to do.” – Peter Gabriel A community on edge from a terrorist threat and a fear mongering media goes ballistic when a bomb detonates in Mark’s (Brian Rickel) garage, killing his wife. Gary (Jarrett Sleeper), an awkward...

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...

Jimmy Carrane, Comedian

Chicagoist loves "free" so we were happy to hear about these three upcoming free events.