23 Best Performing Arts Venues in Chicago, Illinois

The Neo-Futurists artist collective is most famous for their long-running, late-night hit The Infinite Wrench, where 30 original plays are performed in 60 minutes. Performances take place at their intimate, black-box space adjacent to Andersonville where audience members often participate in the show.

Steppenwolf's alumni roster speaks for itself: John Malkovich, Gary Sinise, Joan Allen, and Laurie Metcalf all honed their chops with this troupe. The company's trademark cutting-edge acting style and consistently successful productions have won national acclaim. An ultramodern 2021 expansion added a 400-seat theater in the round, an education center, and two bars to the company’s already-impressive assets.

Telling imaginative, almost magical stories is Redmoon Theater's specialty. The company's “spectacles” take a number of forms but can best be described as madcap theater with a twist—imagine a mix of live music, puppetry, pageantry, and visual art. Some are staged outdoors, others inside a converted Pilsen warehouse called Spectacle Hall.

The 1,200-seat Athenaeum Center, which sits adjacent to St. Alphonsus Church and dates back to 1911, stages classical music performances, live podcast tapings, panel discussions and artist conversations, dance festivals, comedians, and more. 

Designed by notable architects Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, the 4,300-seat, Romanesque Revival–style Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University opened in 1899 as an opera house and later became a National Historic Landmark. Known for its perfect acoustics and excellent sight lines, the ornate theater features marble mosaics, dramatic gilded ceiling arches, and intricate murals. (Also of note: This was one of the first public buildings to have electric lighting and air-conditioning.)

Founder and executive producer Jackie Taylor opened the Black Ensemble Theater a half-century ago, and since then has written and directed musicals and plays like The Marvin Gaye Story and The Other Cinderella. The theater has a penchant for long-running musicals based on popular African American icons. In 2011, they opened their own theater facility on Clark Street, which hosts performances most weekends.

Originally built as a horse stable for Marshall Field, Briar Street Theatre is the spot to catch the long-running hit Blue Man Group, which has been performing there since 1997. 

Formerly known as Drury Lane, the 550-seat theater in Water Tower Place was taken over in 2010 by the Broadway in Chicago group, which modernized the space and reopened it as the Broadway Playhouse. Its inaugural season included a new production of hometown scribe Studs Terkel's Working.

Designed by famed theater architects the Rapp Brothers, the Cadillac Palace opened to much fanfare in 1926. The ornate, gilded interior was inspired by the palaces of Versailles and Fontainebleau; restored to its original opulence in 1999, the 2,500-seat space now hosts a wide range of traveling productions.

The Chicago Shakespeare Theater devotes its considerable talents to keeping the Bard's flame alive, and also showcases new international dramas and musicals. It has three theaters of varying sizes in its Navy Pier complex, so there's almost always something on.

Since 1921, visitors to the Chicago Theatre, which began as a Balaban and Katz movie palace, have marveled at its stunning baroque interior. The 3,600-seat auditorium features crystal chandeliers, bronze light fixtures, and murals on the wall and ceiling. These days the marquee draws tend to be big-name music and comedy acts.

After debuting as the Majestic in 1906, this 1,800-seat theater became a major stop on the vaudeville circuit. Today, after a series of name changes (the current naming-rights holder is a Canadian bank), the plush, red-and-gold venue hosts Broadway in Chicago performances such as Jersey Boys, The Book of Mormon, and other traveling shows.

City Lit Theater Company produces notable staged readings and full productions of famous literary works—by the likes of T.S. Eliot, August Wilson, and Mark Twain—as well as original material with a literary bent.

Actors, artists, and musicians share the stage in Collaboraction's experimental free-for-alls. In recent seasons, the company has refocused its mission on social justice, with original performances taking on issues specific to Chicago communities.

This professional theater on the campus of the University of Chicago has a mission of producing "classic theater," but it's expanded the definition of that term well beyond Shakespeare and the Greeks. You'll find those here—done exceptionally well—but Court also produces stunning reinventions of musicals, works by August Wilson and Pearl Cleage that have helped it tap into Hyde Park's largely Black population, and the occasional new play dealing in classical themes.

Founded in 1925, the city's oldest and largest nonprofit theater presents an exceptional repertoire of plays each year featuring local and national performers. Works by August Wilson and David Mamet have premiered here, and the Goodman's annual holiday staging of A Christmas Carol is a Chicago tradition.

Originally dubbed the Oriental Theatre, this former movie palace has a grand, over-the-top Far Eastern decor (think Buddha statues and huge mosaics of an Indian prince and princess). First opened in 1926, it reopened in 1998 after a period of disrepair to accommodate big-name Broadway hits, and received a welcome name change in 2019.

Located on the northwest corner of Millennium Park, this 1,500-seat, mostly belowground theater is a sleek, contemporary space where you can catch music and dance performances by the likes of Laurie Anderson, Magnetic Fields, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.

Staged in the belly of the historic Chicago Water Works building, the Lookingglass Theatre Company's physically and artistically daring works incorporate theater, dance, music, and circus arts.

The Royal George is actually a complex of three theaters: a spacious main stage, a smaller studio theater, and a cabaret space. Popular plays and long-running musical comedies are the draw here.

This cozy three-theater complex presents Theater Wit's own productions (which run the gamut between highbrow comedies, one-person shows, dance troupes, dramas, and kid's theater) and also hosts performances by like-minded small companies without spaces of their own.

New and classical material is staged at various locations throughout the city by Bailiwick Chicago.

This storefront theater, operated by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, is an intimate, black-box venue for a diverse array of performances by local theater ensembles.