Page 48 - Christopher Wheeldon News Today

Fill your weekend with holiday concerts, stage shows, Nutcrackers, artisan markets, brunch with Santa, light shows and much more.

The director and choreographer on the winter wonders he can't live without.

Pure, grand-scale magic. That is the only way to describe the Joffrey Ballet’s glorious production of “The Nutcracker,” which breaks the mold of the traditional version by being set against the grandeur of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair.

“The Nutcracker” is so much more than a series of steps. It’s about the dancing, sure. It’s also children dressed in their holiday finest seeing ballet for the first time.

When Twyla Tharp revived two dances from the 1980s at New York City Center this fall, I dutifully attended, thinking to refresh my memory of her high-

The annual production of the Chicago favorite opens Saturday at the Lyric Opera House and runs through late December.

CAN AN ARTIST HIT THE JUGULAR while they’re reaching for the wallet at the same time? Only if the wallet and the jugular are the same thing. In the cultural devolution of “audience” to “eyeballs,” perhaps no genre has so loudly insisted on its robust resistance to power as comedy—and perhaps no genre’s complicity has, since 2017, been made more transparent. (Let the rise of Joe Rogan be citation enough here.) To borrow a one-liner from Morgan Bassichis’s brilliant solo performanc...

From Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith at the Rosemont Theatre to "The Nutcracker" to "Too Hot to Handel" to violinist Itzhak Perlman to Jingle Ball featuring Jack Harlow, Pitbull and Khalid, theres a lot to see and hear in the suburbs and city this week.

In “Nine Sinatra Songs,” recently revived at City Center, Tharp captured elusive strains in the country’s DNA.

Broadway has struggled since reopening during the pandemic, but new shows keep opening and attracting audiences looking for fun and stimulation.