Rob Silverman Ascher

In an introduction to Lord Alfred Douglasʼs English translation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, his friend Robbie Ross shared Wilde’s apparent belief that the play was “a mirror in which everyone could see himself.

Oak Park Festival Theatre's new production of "Hamlet," directed by artistic director Peter G. Andersen, is an engrossing and emotionally legible rendition. This "Hamlet" is true to Shakespeare's text with subtle modernizing touches, presented under what Hamlet calls "this most magical canopy" in Oak Park's Austin Gardens. As Hamlet, Drew Bos stalks onstage in the play's second scene in a leather duster, launching into the first of many speeches that feel like unguarded conversations with us.

The question of whether or not theatrical comedies can survive has been an unfortunate part of film discourse for the last decade. But, between the Canadian juggernaut Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025), John Early’s Maddie’s Secret (2026), and now Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, directed and cowritten by David Wain, I say we can wrap that conversation up. A breathtakingly silly romp, Gail Daughtry is, put simply, a very funny film that deserves a hot crowd.