Theater on Stages & Screens

Is O'Neill Forgotten? And Six Other Ruminations on the Ever-Regenerating Genre of the Musical

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The hard part of having an aging legacy as a playwright is “being forgotten,” confesses Eugene O’Neill in the Goodman Theatre’s new musical Iceboy!, Or The Completely Untrue Story of How Eugene O’Neill Came to Write ‘The Iceman Cometh.’ The O’Neill character in the Goodman’s outlandish screwball comedy, played by TV’s Nick Offerman (“Parks and Recreation”), ought to know if he’s being forgotten. He begins each act with a survey of the audience: “How many of you have heard of me?” (The results are divided. The upper balcony has largely not heard of Eugene O’Neill; the main floor largely has.) “Boo yourselves if you’ve never heard of my play The Iceman Cometh.” (Lots of hearty boos.)

An Isolate from the People

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“It might seem harsh to say so, but the truth is that I am more and more convinced that as an all-round thinker, or, more properly, as a systematic thinker, Ibsen really doesn’t fit the bill. … But of course Ibsen is Ibsen, and I should be the last to complain that he is not Herbert Spencer.” - William Archer upon meeting Henrik Ibsen, as quoted in Henrik Ibsen: The Man & The Mask by Ivo De Figueiredo.

Following the Great Migration, and a Month's Chicago Cultural Roundup

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Whether this music came from Alabama or Mississippi or other parts of the South doesn’t matter anymore. The men and women who make this music have learned it from the narrow crooked streets of East St. Louis, or the streets of [Chicago]’s Southside, and the Alabama or Mississippi roots have been strangled by the northern manners and customs of free men of definite and sincere worth, men for whom this music often lies at the forefront of their conscience and concerns. Thus they are laid open to be consumed by it; its warmth and redress, its braggadocio and roughly poignant comments, its vision and prayer, which would instruct and allow them to reconnect, to reassemble and gird up for the next battle in which they would be both victim and the ten thousand slain.”

Spring Cleaning: A Roundup of Chicago Theater Amid the Last Two Months of Winter

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

T.S. Eliot is known for his reservations about spring. Yet the author of the line “April is the cruelest month” wrote a friend in April 1911 to tell her about how beautiful the season was. “Paris has burst out, during my absence,” Eliot wrote, “and it is such a revelation that I feel I ought to make it known. At London, one pretended that it was spring, and tried to coax the spring, and talk of the beautiful weather; but one continued to hibernate amongst the bricks … But here!” Chicago has been more like Eliot’s London than his Paris recently, but spring is almost here, so it’s time to clean out my notebook of winter stage observations from the last seven weeks of Chicago theater. After a somewhat sparse fall season for Chicago theater, with few productions that I personally found exciting, the winter has been productive. These nine shows, ranging from opera to musical theater to straight plays to one Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, show a little of the breadth and depth of the Chicago arts scene. They are organized in reverse chronological order, with the one I saw most recently first.

Tom Stoppard Grew from a Man of No Conviction: An Appreciation

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In his later plays Tom Stoppard almost always included a character who turns from a life of frivolous tomfoolery, of one sort or another, comes face to face with evil in the world, and recognizes his responsibility to become the change he wishes to see. That was in fact the trajectory of Stoppard’s writings themselves. He went from being a writer who avoided writing about politics — someone who said his favorite line in literature was “I’m a man of no convictions—at least, I think I am” — to being someone who wrote a nine-hour trilogy of plays on the origins of Russian socialism, and for whom almost every new play for two decades ended up carrying some kind of political theme. I loved this change in Stoppard as much as I’d loved what he’d written before the transformation. To hyperbolize as one does in the face of a loss, Stoppard’s writings were in a small way the spur for such an intellectual awakening in me as well. As young theater kids, my brother and I were interested in a wide variety of subjects—politics, history, literature, theater, film—but like a lot of humanities kids were not particularly awake to the joys of other subjects, like math and science. (It’s a cliché of journalists to say that the reason one chooses that field is to avoid math.) When we encountered Stoppard’s plays, particularly his best, Arcadia, we saw that our beloved art form could tell stories that heretofore it had not, finding literature in chaos theory, the “hard problem” of consciousness, mathematics, physics. He also made other subjects fascinating and entertaining in a way many have tried to imitate but none have equaled. His death over Thanksgiving weekend was as hard a blow for me as any celebrity death ever has been. To say he was my favorite playwright seems too tiny a tribute. He changed my relationship to the world. His personal evolution, his dramaturgy and my own intellectual maturation are versions of the same story.

Is Eugene O'Neill's Reputation Getting Fragile?

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“In 1956, the year Long Day’s Journey into Night premiered, the reputation of America’s foremost dramatist was at an all-time low,” wrote scholar Ralph L. Corrigan Jr. in a paper on November 7, 1956. “Most critics were content to think of the dramatist as an outdated, over-the-hill, third-rate thinker who had been lucky to write a few decent plays.”

Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey changed all that. The playwright has enjoyed a seemingly invincible reputation almost ever since that period of waning popularity. But might such a moment ever be in danger of returning? When a star-studded production of O’Neill’s Anna Christie with Michelle Williams and Tom Sturridge opens at St. Ann’s Warehouse on November 28, it will be the first time since 2020 that a major Off-Broadway production of O’Neill’s has launched, and Broadway is currently in the longest drought for productions of plays by Eugene O’Neill in the more than 100 years since it started producing O’Neill. The Great White Way has not mounted an O’Neill play since Denzel Washington’s The Iceman Cometh closed in July of 2018, making it seven years and three months and counting. And there are apparently no plans to produce O’Neill in the next season either, based on the existing lists of upcoming shows. Such a drought isn’t totally unprecedented: Broadway took a six year-plus break from O’Neill between the day Desire Under the Elms closed in May of 2009 and Hughie opened in February of 2016. But it is highly unusual. To find another break that long one must go back to the 1940s, when O’Neill was alive. For most of the century, O’Neill has been staged every couple of years on Broadway.

The Summer of the Dying Culture: Anna in the Tropics, Cabaret, The Leopard, and a Mini Midwest Theater Tour

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The best production I’ve seen in decades of going to the highly refreshing, nationally notable countryside American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin is running through late September. Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics is one of the most moving of a spate of works I’ve taken in recently about a dying culture facing change from without and within. Anna was one of three plays I saw on a sort of mini Midwest theater tour while on vacation this August, including that classic elegy to the 1930s Weimar Republic, Cabaret, at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Now that we seem to be witnessing a similar moment in our own time, in which half the country celebrates and the other half mourns sweeping changes in the power structure that alter the fabric of society as we know it, the theme is newly poignant.

The Two Noble Kinsmen by Shakespeare and Fletcher in Two Rare Productions

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

No sooner did I publish my last blog post declaring that Shakespeare completists have “perhaps no bigger challenge than finding a production of all three plays in Shakespeare’s early King Henry VI trilogy” than an even rarer Shakespeare play showed up in my neighborhood: The Two Noble Kinsmen, by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. This weekend and next it is being produced in Forest Park, Illinois by the Forest Theatre Company. As I made clear in that prior article, Henry VI is rarest in the full three-part format; it is often edited into two parts when staged. But The Two Noble Kinsmen is another holy grail for fans of the Bard. In fact, an article in the Forest Park Reviewreported that one self-described “Shakespeare completist” emailed the production’s artistic director, Richard Corley, to say she is flying in from England just to see this small, free outdoor production because she hasn’t seen it yet. “I have not talked to a single person who’s seen it before,” Corley told the newspaper.

Shakespeare's Henry VI: The Best Video Versions for the Completist

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A little research on the Internet, particularly on Reddit and in The New York Times, shows there are many Shakespeare fans trying to see every one of his plays performed somewhere, somehow, by somebody. Such completists have perhaps no bigger challenge than finding a production of all three plays in Shakespeare’s early King Henry VI trilogy. The plays are rarely produced, very long, and usually when performed chopped into two plays instead of three. This makes seeing Shakespeare’s trilogy in any form close to his intention almost impossible. I saw the plays in two parts in New York City in 2018 performed by the National Asian American Theatre Company, a credible production. But I hankered to see it in a format that, however edited, retained some character of the playwright’s three-part vision and structure. The fact is, very few of Shakespeare’s fans around the world live in a city like New York and even there it isn’t performed often. So, for completists, the DVD market is essential.

Theater as Artistic Community Journalism: Eureka Day, Purpose, Dhaba on Devon

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The 2025 Tony Awards were particularly good for regional theater this year – and for plays by, for and about the community they are staged in, a phenomenon that is rare but of which we have a few exciting examples this year. Theater today is notoriously New York-centric. The Pulitzer Prize, for example, reportedly went 85 years before a play that had not yet played in New York was picked, from the first prize ever given for drama (to Why Marry? by Jesse Lynch Williams) in 1918 to 2003’s Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, which was commissioned by and first performed at New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida (in the Miami area, not a city widely known for its theater). There have since been very few others, including Fat Ham by James Ijames, which won the Pulitzer while its first off-Broadway production (I saw it at the Public Theatre in New York) was still selling advance tickets. Thanks to the pandemic, it had only been staged in an online video production, by the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia. But even more rare is when theater functions as a kind of community journalism, in which the play is written by a local resident of the theater at which it is first staged, about that community, and staged first for that community. This has been a good year for that style of play.

The Mind-Blowing Muny Shows Musicals Are Not Just for Geeks and Elites

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Anyone who has the impression that Broadway musicals are just for theater kids, gays or Manhattan elites with hundreds to spend on a single ticket should travel to the center of the country to check out the The Muny in St. Louis. It just won the Regional Theater Tony Award this month, and I attended for the first time on its opening night on Monday June 16, a day declared “Muny Day” by St. Louis’ mayor to celebrate its new national status and the opening of the new season. What I found was that this 107-year-old, 11,000-seat outdoor theater, the oldest and largest in the country, which gives away 1,500 of its tickets every single summer night – even Broadway is dark on Mondays, but not The Muny! – to fans devoted enough to spend the day picnicking in Forest Park to get in, is unlike anything else in the country and is a place where, you might say, everyone is a theater kid.

Ranking the Nearly 50 Tony-Winning Regional Theaters

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have been to all but one of the regional theaters that have won the Tony award since it began awarding regional theaters annually in the 1970s. I have attempted a basically impossible task here, which is to rank all of them. It’s impossible because, first of all, all of them have won the award and are all (I can attest in all but one case) wonderful theaters. Secondly, no one can see all the shows produced by almost 50 theaters sprawled out across this giant country, so a ranking inevitably favors whatever random production one happens to see. Nonetheless, I have cobbled together a basis for ranking, a mix of personal preference (it’s just my opinion and someone else will and should have 50 very different rankings), a rating of the quality and originality of the programming over the years (with admittedly some theaters more closely followed then others over decades) and the theater buildings or settings, with special favor often granted to theaters with a unique mission unduplicated around the country. It is inevitable that I’ve been to some of these theaters many times, and others only once. This year’s winner, The Muny in St. Louis, is not on this list because I will be attending it this summer for the first time. Full disclosure: I am from Chicago, so I’m more familiar in some instances with the five Chicago theaters over a long term. Still, it is in a good faith effort to rank objectively that I pick as the number one regional theater…

Stages & Screens: An Introduction

Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Allow me to share a little bit about my engagement with culture that might help you find an interest in this blog:

Like a lot of writers about stages and screens, I’m something of a completist. I’ve visited all but one of the nearly 50 Tony-winning Regional Theaters around the country, seen all of Shakespeare’s plays in production on stage or screen, seen the full Century Cycle by August Wilson (and his one-man autobiographical show twice), seen and/or read almost all of the Pulitzer Prize winners in drama, seen nearly the full repertoire of operas as defined by the largest opera company in the world, the Metropolitan Opera, as well as many operas that aren’t in what might be called the canon, visited almost all of the major opera houses in the United States, visited almost all of the theaters in New York City, seen much of the 2010s supply of theater on and off-Broadway, seen all of the American Film Institute’s Top 100 American films, seen almost all of the Academy Awards’ choices for Best Picture since 1927, and seen much of the Sight & Sound Top 250 in its various iterations over recent decades.