Last month, the Guardian's longtime theatre critic Michael Billington spent a week here, seeing eight shows at several Chicago theatres (as documented in Hedy Weiss's Sun-Times column). His report upon returning to London names us "the current theatre capital of America." "While New York, with its suffocating commercialism, seems increasingly hidebound, it is to Chicago that the true theatregoer now avidly looks," he wrote, noting the city's 156 primarily non-profit theatre companies spread through every neighborhood. "It's a city that embraces the classics as well as contemporary work, that regards theatre as a source of delight rather than an instrument of profit and that has a midwestern openness to new experience."