Theatre in Chicago

Theater in Chicago describes not only theater performed in Chicago, Illinois but also to the movement in Chicago that saw a number of small, meagerly funded companies grow to institutions of national and international significance. Chicago had long been a popular destination for tours sent out from New York managements, as well as an origins of many shows sent to appear worldwide. According to Variety editor Gordon Cox, beside New York City, Chicago has one of the most lively theater scenes in the United States.

The young settlement of Chicago in 1834 saw its first commercial production by the fire eater and ventriloquist, Mr. Brown. In 1837, the first resident theater company, the short-lived Chicago Theater opened in the Sauganash Hotel. One of the players was then a boy named Joseph Jefferson, who grew to become a very successful comedic actor. Chicago's main theater prize, the Joseph Jefferson award is named after this pioneer. New theaters, including Rice's Theater, owned by an empresario and future mayor, and McVicker's Theater began booking nationally prominent acts beginning in the late 1840s. After the devastation of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Scottish-American producer, David Henderson, gave Chicago a national theater reputation at his Opera House and other theaters. Lively foreign language theaters patronised by new immigrants also sprang up.

Hull House, the social settlement house of Chicago, had from the 1890s a theatre program under Laura Dainty Pelham which performed the Chicago premiers of numerous of the new plays of Galsworthy, Ibsen, and George Bernard Shaw. In 1912 Maurice Browne founded the Little Theater in Chicago, crediting Pelham's Hull House influence. This, along with the founding of the Toy Theatre in Boston the same year, is credited with starting the American Little Theatre Movement. The troupes that are commonly regarded as having started the postwar stage renaissance were The Second City, Steppenwolf Theatre Company and The Goodman Theatre.

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