Anne Taubeneck

"Once a play opens, I never touch a drop," says Marie Meyer, sounding like she's had a few. She weaves, stumbles and collapses into a chair, legs stuck out like...

Cheap is such an ugly word, we prefer to say value-priced. In this grand, gritty world of entertainment, everybody wants value. It's easy enough to pony up for the most...

At the end of act one of "bee-luther-hatchee," now at Northlight Theatre in Skokie, audience members are left reeling when Shane Williams, as Manhattan editor Shelita Burns, gets the shock...

At Chicago's ritziest hotels, this year's pricey New Year's Eve packages come with a question as well as a bottle of bubbly: Will the Y2K bug bite at midnight? Tom...

When Chicago psychiatrist Jonathon Goldman dines at Spruce, 238 E. Ontario, he orders three courses with three different glasses of wine, forking over $10 to $15 for each. "I'm the...

If you haven't made reservations yet for Dec. 31, 1999, it's not the end of the world. Sure, Disney World is already booked for the end-of-the-millennium celebration, but the Bellagio...

Hitler-munching maggots, gargantuan ants and breakdancing cockroaches share a certain downstate distinction. All have been featured (in, respectively, "Flesh Feast," "Them!" and the newly cultish "Joe's Apartment") at a past...

At the Shubert in late October, a few minutes before the second act of "Barrymore" was to begin, Judi Sher of Chicago was waiting to enter the theater's cramped, six-stall...

Q. At one point in a precarious balancing act called "Statue," Marie-Laure Mesnage is upside down with only her shoulders touching the top of the back of her partner, Yves...