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Heating up the stage

The weathers just another challenge for outdoor theater vets

Untitled Document Every year at least one Muni Opera show suffers from the intense summer heat. This year’s victim was Oklahoma!, which ended the Muni season this past week...

Wednesday, July 18, 2007 08:47 am

Temptation Island

Age-old love story opens at Theatre in the Park

By Phil Funkenbusch

Untitled Document I have a hunch that one of the highlights of the area’s summer theater will be the rarely seen musical Once on This Island, which opens Friday, July 20, at New...

Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006 04:11 pm

Killer theater

Springfield welcomes a comedy about presidential assassins

By Phil Funkenbusch

Every morning for nearly two years now, I’ve passed a lifelike figure of John Wilkes Booth on my way to work at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum. This week, Booth comes to life onstage in...

Thursday, July 6, 2006 07:26 pm

For mature audiences only

Danger: Adult Content premiers at the Hoogland: Chicago at the Muni

By Phil Funkenbusch

Onstage this week is a two-performance bill of short plays titled Danger: Adult Content, featuring a group of local actors performing 10 short pieces by contemporary American playwright...

Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006 08:00 am

A kiss is still a kiss

Theatreworks stages the comedic and unsettling drama Stop Kiss

By Marissa Monson

Don’t call Diana Son’s 1998 play Stop Kiss a political piece. It’s a love story. The first time Missy Thibodeaux-Thompson, assistant professor of theater at Illinoi...

Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005 05:28 pm

The plays the thing

"Degrees of Lucky," a one-act play written by the late Judy Dyer, premieres Monday at UIS

By Yosh Golden

“My radiation oncologist cruelly resisted my pleas. I begged him to irradiate the unaffected breast so it would be big and perky and glow in the dark like the one they ...

Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005 11:24 am

Who's the Man?

Springfield Theatre Centre stages 1939 comedy hit

By Phil Funkenbusch

The Man Who Came to Dinner, the popular comedy by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, opens a five-performance run tonight (Thursday, Sept. 22) at the Hoogland Center for the Arts. Back in 1939...

Thursday, Sept. 8, 2005 09:37 am

Harvest time

Fall yields a bumper crop of theater

By Phil Funkenbusch

The local fall theater season promises everything from Greek drama to 1930s madcap comedy to recent Broadway musicals. Cal Pritner, longtime faculty member of the Illinois State University...

Thursday, Aug. 11, 2005 08:15 pm

Two weeks to stardom

By Mikel Weisser

On a Wednesday afternoon in early July, five teachers huddle in a cluttered second-floor office in the Hoogland Center for the Arts to plan the third and final session of summer theater camp...

Thursday, July 28, 2005 01:54 pm

Taking it to the edge

Teen theater troupe present challenging play this weekend

By Phil Funkenbusch

And now for something completely different: Springfield Theatre Centre’s Active and Creative Teen Theatre troupe is giving us a play to think about this weekend: Boilin...