Articles by Leanne Star

Confession: As a student of comparative literature at the University of Chicago, I couldn’t dive deep enough into a text to reach the bottom, nor was that my goal. My aim was to examine the […]

    When Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s Into the Woods debuted in San Diego in 1986, a women’s theater club gathered their things after the first half of the musical, ready to head home […]

It’s a challenge to summarize Saul Bellow’s epic, picaresque 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March. With dozens of memorable characters and scenes that unfurl herky-jerky over decades and scattered locations, the book is held […]

The central feature of Regina Garcia’s puzzle box set design for Next to Normal at is a wooden staircase, the epitome of sleek suburban luxe and an apt metaphor for the workings of the human […]

A Number opens in medias res — “into the middle of things” — an ancient approach that jibes with today, when TV shows use nonlinear narratives for that extra edge. British playwright Caryl Churchill’s A […]

In Amor Towles’ 2016 novel A Gentleman in Moscow, a German visitor suggests that Russia’s only contribution to the world is vodka. A challenge ensues to name three more Russian strengths, and the title character takes up the […]

Even before the Trinity Irish Dance Company took to the stage of the Auditorium Theatre, the Auditorium’s jewel box of a lobby was popping with young dancers, students from Chicago’s half dozen or so Irish […]

        A dead squirrel makes an early exit from Will Eno’s affecting play The Realistic Joneses, now at Theater Wit in co-production with Shattered Globe Theatre. The squirrel corpse is swiftly transferred with a […]

I thought I knew Swan Lake. Tchaikovsky’s evocative score is on my brain’s playlist. As a young ballet student, I learned some of the steps from the iconic 1895 revival, choreographed by Maurius Petipa and […]