A collection of critical reviews and opinions on local and national theater productions. Coverage spans world premieres, revivals, musicals, and one-person shows, with radio reviews airing on WDCB.
About This Section
Kelly Kleiman and Jonathan Abarbanel debate and dissect productions across Chicago's stages, including Steppenwolf, Goodman, Lookingglass, Timeline, Steep, and many more.
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A podcast built around two critics with sharply different sensibilities invites listeners to eavesdrop on a conversation that often happens behind the scenes. Rather than collapsing disagreement into a single verdict, the show treats the clash of opinions as the point. One week the hosts may be drawn to spectacle and emotional sweep, another week they may prize restraint and craft, and the back-and-forth becomes its own form of review. The format gives audiences a rare window into how criticism is shaped, questioned, and revised in real time by two people who refuse to pretend they see the same play.
The reviews collection reflects a wide cross-section of Chicago theater, from flagship institutional stages to smaller storefront companies and experimental productions. Musicals share space with dark dramas, new works sit alongside revivals, and puppetry, opera, and solo performance all find a place in the rotation. By covering such a varied landscape, the critics model a kind of attentive local journalism that resists the temptation to chase only the loudest premieres. Instead, every production receives the same basic question: what is this work trying to do, and how well does it do it within its own terms.
What gives the reviews their texture is the disagreement. One critic may find a revival buoyant and the other finds it hollow, and neither is treated as obviously right. The podcast leans into that friction, pressing both reviewers to articulate not just what they felt but why, and to weigh the choices of directors, playwrights, designers, and performers rather than reducing a show to a single star rating. The resulting conversations model a generous, argument-driven form of criticism, where strong opinions coexist with genuine curiosity about the other perspective.
Beyond any single production, the show is implicitly arguing that criticism is a craft worth practicing in public. In an era when many cultural conversations collapse into soundbites, the slow build of two thoughtful hosts working through a show together offers something rare: criticism as dialogue rather than decree. Newcomers to Chicago theater can use the reviews as a guide to companies and styles they may not yet know, while seasoned audiences get a sounding board for their own reactions. The implicit invitation is to keep thinking about what you saw long after the curtain falls.
