Meet the Critics

Dueling Critics is a podcast and blog covering Chicago theater, hosted by two working critics who often disagree — and sometimes don’t — about what’s worth seeing on stage.

Two critics sharing a microphone is a simple premise, but it opens the door to a richer conversation about art. Dueling Critics pairs two seasoned Chicago reviewers who bring their own preferences, blind spots, and pet peeves to every show they discuss. Rather than smoothing over disagreements, the show treats them as the point, letting listeners hear how two thoughtful people can watch the same production and walk away with different impressions. The format makes criticism feel less like a verdict and more like an ongoing discussion among friends who care deeply about the stage and the people who make it work, night after night, in a city with one of the country’s busiest theater scenes.

Chicago theater is famously vast and varied, ranging from tiny storefront companies to large resident institutions, and the city’s stages host everything from brand-new plays to revivals of musicals and experimental work. For audiences trying to choose what to see, that abundance can feel like both a gift and a puzzle. A podcast that focuses on critical perspective helps listeners sort signal from noise, especially when the two hosts push each other to explain why a show worked, why it did not, and what assumptions they brought into the theater. The result is a guide that respects the audience’s intelligence and treats going to the theater as an experience worth thinking about afterward.

Disagreement is not the same as hostility, and the heart of the show lies in how the hosts argue. When one critic loves a production that the other finds flat, the back-and-forth becomes a way of examining taste itself: what each person values in acting, direction, design, or storytelling. That conversation turns casual theatergoers into more attentive ones, encouraging them to notice choices they might otherwise miss and to trust their own reactions even when the reviews diverge. Even when the hosts agree, they often arrive there by different routes, and tracing those paths gives listeners a vocabulary for thinking and talking about performance on their own.

Beyond the recordings themselves, the blog extends the conversation into writing, giving the hosts a quieter space to develop ideas that a fast-moving conversation can only sketch. Posts revisit shows with more room for context, look back at seasons past, and occasionally turn to broader questions about criticism, gender, equity, and the working life of actors, directors, and playwrights. Together, the podcast and the writing form a long-running record of Chicago theater as it happens, told through the particular lens of two critics who keep showing up, week after week, to watch, to argue, and to share what they see with anyone who cares about the stage.