Jonathan Harvey

Long before The Streets and Lady Sovereign made British rap fashionable, there were Pet Shop Boys. Most people don't think of the dance-pop duo as a rap act, but lead singer Neil Tennant begs to differ, calling the new-wave classic "West End Girls" an...

Michael Matthews is the best Chicago director of whom you've never heard. Whenever this fellow takes the helm at the Circle Theatre of Forest Park, this spectacularly uneven troupe raises its game so dramatically, you wonder if you somehow took a wrong...

Theatre on the Lake has announced its lineup for the 2002 summer season. This year's nine-week slate opens with "All the Stage is a World," a theater-skewering revue by The Second City. The Hypocrites production of Frederico Garcia Lorca's "Blood...

The press release for "Dope" reads like a classified government memo; selected passages are blacked out, and scrawled margin notes warn critics that certain information is on a strictly "need to know" basis. That kind of mockery fits the purpose of the...

Profiles Theatre, a rough, gutsy and long-established storefront on the North Side, is one of the few off-Loop theaters to have perfected the art of the long run. Though most similar troupes hate to divert from a full season of dramatic offerings,...

Philip Glass and Mary Zimmerman recently combined their disparate forces in Goodman Theatre's "Galileo Galilei." Another potentially electric fusion, "Movin' Out," opens to the press Friday. This new Broadway-bound musical fuses the talents of pop...

Philip Glass and Mary Zimmerman recently combined their disparate forces in Goodman Theatre's "Galileo Galilei." Another potentially electric fusion, "Movin' Out," opens to the press Friday. This new Broadway-bound musical fuses the talents of pop...

Ah, how fleeting is the innocence of youth! When Matt Stinton and Michael Moran appeared in the memorable 1998 Famous Door Theatre Company production of "Beautiful Thing," this pair of skilled and guileless young actors effortlessly and exquisitely...

"Hushabye Mountain," in Jonathan Harvey's curious play, is heaven, a place of twinkling stars and dead gay icons. Here, in a cloud of fog, Danny arrives, waiting on the threshold to see if he can gain admittance to the promised land. We see him there...

Did Lord Byron kill a lesser poet? Could fractal geometry and the second law of thermodynamics have been discovered by an English schoolgirl in 1809? Why do we most love the ones who won't have us? What is a carnal embrace? Questions as disparate as these...

http://entertainment.metromix.chicagotribune.com This fall we're getting right down to the theatrical goods. Ask Chicago theater lovers why they don't get out to a show more often and they'll usually tell you that it's tough to make the right...

Friday November 1, 1996      "Beautiful Thing," which is two-thirds of a good film, is a tender coming-of-age love story set in London's Thamesmead Estates, which has bold, dramatic architecture that bespeaks of social progress but has the same lack of...