‘South Side Stories Revisited’ at City Theatre (Thurs., 1/25/2024)

Tami Dixon has updated her landmark work ‘South Side Stories.’ See it onstage at City Theatre. (Photo: Kristi Jan Hoover)

Sequels are rare in live theater—Waiting for Godot wasn’t followed by Still Waiting—but they do occur: Shakespeare kept a good thing going through his Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V. Now you can see the sequel to a good Pittsburgh thing. City Theatre presents the new one-woman show by Tami Dixon, South Side Stories Revisited. Dixon’s original South Side Stories scored a hit in 2012 with its rousing, oral-history-based portrayal of a unique city neighborhood. The South Side has always been a cultural melting pot, ever since the days when it was a major industrial district, a home to blue-collar immigrants, and one of the few places in the U.S. to have a polka named after it. As the region’s steel industry wound down, the South Side became a budding haven for artists and artistic venues. Gentrification added heady mixtures of white-collar affluence and angst. Throughout the changes, many longtime South Siders stayed put. For the first edition of Stories, theater artist Dixon interviewed an assortment of these—a retired steelworker, a cat lady, various local characters, and more—and re-enacted their tales in a series of hilarious but touching onstage vignettes. 

To create Revisited, Dixon talked with a new selection of folks, gathering fresh views on the ever-evolving dramas of South Side life. South Side Stories Revisited plays until February 18 in City Theatre’s Lillie Theatre. Tickets are selling fast. 8 p.m. today, 1300 Bingham St., South Side. (M.V.) 

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