Chris Jones

4 days ago | chicagotribune.com | Chris Jones

The most fun I ever had at Black Ensemble Theater was in 2006 at the old Hull House on Beacon Street, and it involved the legendary vocalist Dionne Warwick. By then, theater founder Jackie Taylor’s BET had settled into its longtime mode of paying tribute to great recording artists by including their songs within a biographical story and then hiring often knockout young talent to perform the music.

1 week ago | chicagotribune.com | Chris Jones

Cowboy hats and Nashville-style dresses proliferated Thursday night in Oakbrook Terrace. Not the first time I’ve noticed that fans of country music are more common in Chicago’s western suburbs than many people think. All had assembled at the Drury Lane Theatre for “Always … Patsy Cline,” a remarkably resilient revue by Ted Swindley that now has enjoyed a longer life than did the actual Patsy Cline herself.

1 week ago | chicagotribune.com | Chris Jones

My personal history reviewing “An Iliad,” the contemporary vernacular take on the Homeric epic penned by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, has become my reminder of the ubiquitousness of war and human suffering.

1 week ago | chicagotribune.com | Chris Jones

In a graduation speech I heard this May, the physician-writer Abraham Verghese talked about his experience as a small-town doctor during the AIDS era and how he found, to his amazement, that rural emergency rooms had filled up with AIDS patients even as everyone assumed the crisis was restricted to large cities. But many of these mostly young gay men had chosen, Verghese said, to come home from New York or Chicago to the likes of rural Tennessee to die.

1 week ago | chicagotribune.com | Chris Jones

An apt subtitle for Atra Asdou’s “Iraq, But Funny” might be: “How the British Caused Every Problem in the Middle East (With a Late Assist from the U.S.A.).”It always cracks me up how, in progressive artistic circles, Brits are exempted from the pervasive disdain for stereotyping. Asdou leans into all of it with confident impunity: the accent, the physical appearance, even the quality of one’s teeth. Substitute any other nation and she’d be canceled forthwith.