Chicago Broadcasting Network

Following on the heels of the success of The Beatles and Rolling Stones, another group of four working-class lads from the outskirts of London called The Kinks made their mark on the history of Rock and Roll. Their first big splash on both sides of the pond was “You Really Got Me” featuring an iconic, fuzzy, five chord guitar riff. This energetic jukebox musical, “Sunny Afternoon,” enjoying its North American premiere here in Chicago, is based on the story of the Kinks as told by lead singer and songster Ray Davies, filtered through the adept hand of playwright Joe Penhall. Theater review by Reno Lovison.

A story of reproach, remorse and reconciliation. The Winter’s Tale has something for everyone. This Shakespeare play performed by Invictus Theatre Company in Chicago has something for everyone. It is both tragedy and romantic comedy with sorrow, absurdity, mirth and fantasy.

Goodman Theatre’s GeNarrations program is a FREE storytelling program that engages adults aged 55 and over in writing and performance workshops that nurture the creative spirit.  Genarrations participants were then encouraged to write their own stories based on themes of lies and betrayal.

This podcast is base on a recent reading of participants from the Wille Whyte Park location on the 1600 block of Howard Street in Rogers Park.

Puccini’s popular opera La Bohème at Lyric Opera of Chicago is a story of youth, passion, love and loss where idealism comes face-to-face with life’s realities such as poverty, illness and death. Yes, this is the opera where the young lady with the bad cough dies at the end.  Listen to our synopsis and podcast review.

Music Theater Works production of “Guys and Dolls” at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie is good old fashioned mid-century style musical theater fun.  The story lampoons the idea of middle class morality, lambasting both the good guys and bad guys for taking themselves so seriously.

Guys and Dolls has been performed by numerous companies over the past fifty-plus years but still seems to resonate with both young and more mature audiences because the music is memorable and the show is fun.

In this hilarious musical riff on Romeo and Juliet at the Skokie Theater, Romeo has awakened from a 400-year slumber to find his beloved Juliet long turned to dust. Instead, he finds a teenaged American tourist Bernadette Penza whose mother Camille has brought the family to Italy to get in touch with her Veronese roots. Camille is a descendent of Juliet’s family and Bernadette the very image of Romeo’s lost love. In a desperate attempt to be reunited with her, Romeo follows the family back to Brooklyn finding himself embroiled in a gangland feud.

Hedda Gabler is the self-absorbed, only daughter of a military officer who has an overblown grandiose sense of her own importance, and a lack of empathy for others. She feels trapped in a world of bourgeois values full of expectations she cannot control. It is her perception that the men around her seem to enjoy much more freedom to pursue their own public and private interests with less scrutiny and fewer consequences.

Ibsen's well-crafted story reveals the inadvertent dangers of social pressure and a lifetime of pain that comes to a logical conclusion through events taking place over roughly 48 hours. 

A sparsely furnished motel room dominates the stage. Along the perimeter an empty swimming pool, an imposing neon MOTEL sign, a massive telephone pole and bits of scrub grass suggest this is essentially the bottom of the barrel in the middle of nowhere somewhere at the end of the line. The massive sky in the background adds to the fact that this is a story of two people stuck in a small room focused on their problems while there is a whole big world outside, that like me, really doesn’t care.

“Glassheart” is a modern-day reimagining of the well-known tale of Beauty and the Beast playing through February 23rd 2025 at CityLit Theater on Chicago’s northside near Bryn Mawr and Sheridan Road. 

What are you willing to sacrifice to be the light in someone else’s life? Are you able to look past the superficial and artificial barriers that cause us to disregard and reject those who may be deserving of affection?

Review by Reno Lovison

Holidays have a unique way of punctuating our lives. Through this activity we assess alliances, trade information, and mark the passage of time.

In The Long Christmas Dinner written by Thorton Wilder, presented by TUTA Theatre in Chicago we join an affluent Midwestern family, sometime in the not-too-distant past, at their Christmas table.  

What is unusual is that, this is not just one dinner, it is a sequence of similar dinners seamlessly stitched together in a linear fashion, showing a progression of events that affect this family over multiple generations.