Richard Christiansen

How did it happen? The question popped up again last weekend when I took part in a discussion on new plays and new audiences in Miami Beach; and it came...

Michael Gambon has not achieved the international celebrity status of such late London acting knights as Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Alec Guinness. The films in which he has appeared...

Theater The enterprising performing arts series of the Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting the world premiere of "Jennie Richee," a multimedia music-theater piece based on the works of Chicago...

Smack in the middle of the current debate on the mission of and place for the Terra Museum of American Art stands the museum itself. In recent weeks, the Terra,...

Jazz One of the more festive occasions on the Chicago jazz calendar returns this week, when Jazz Fair 2001 swings into the Chicago Cultural Center. Though for many years a...

The musical "Rent" has found such a receptive audience in Chicago -- it has been staged here several times since its November 1997 local premiere -- that it will be...

In the summer of 1995, the English actor-director Michael Pennington agreed to stage a new production of "Twelfth Night" for Shakespeare Repertory of Chicago (now Chicago Shakespeare Theater). Pennington was...

Crisp and elegant as ever, George Bernard Shaw's "Don Juan in Hell" has been revived for a welcome series of performances in the downtown Storefront Theater. The production is the...

Theater "The Guardsman," by the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar, is a romantic comedy that has been a popular stage vehicle since 1910, and now, in a transition that seems perfectly...

The holidays are over; the new year is up and running. The future beckons. But toward what? In my own experience, three recent memorable encounters with art have pointed the...