Vicki Quade has written and produced a lot of theater in Chicago, including comedies, bluegrass musicals, improv, and magic. She is best known for co-creating the one-woman show, Late Nite Catechism, which opened in 1993 in Chicago and holds the record for the longest running religious comedy in the city’s history. She also created four other religious comedies: Put the Nuns in Charge! (a look at modern sins). Sunday School Cinema (a modern take on Hollywood), Saints & Sinners (about church fundraising schemes), and her holiday show, Mother Superior’s Ho-Ho-Holy Night.
She also has a new line of bingo comedies, including Bible Bingo, Christmas Bingo, Movie Bingo, Convent Bingo, and Saints & Sinners Bingo, and she's performed throughout the U.S. as her new character, Mrs. Mary Margaret O'Brien.
Some of her other plays include Room for Advancement (1994), Mr. Nanny (1997), and Here Come the Famous Brothers (2001).
As a producer, she has produced her own shows, as well as the mentalist Christopher Carter (2002-05), the musical Forever Plaid (2003), the improv comedy Cast on a Hot Tin Roof (2004), and the political spoken word piece Verbatim Verboten (2004, 2009). In 2005, she produced the U.S. premiere of Drapes by Australian playwright Stephen House, at Victory Gardens Theatre, Chicago. A version of Verbatim Verboten, produced in conjunction with her production company, opened off-off-Broadway in 2009 at WorkShop Theater Company.
She also helped create the talk radio parody You’re On the Air, with WGN radio host Jerry Agar, and the three comics he calls Jerry Kidders: Dobie Maxwell, Ken Sevara, and Tim Slagle. And also in 2009, she wrote a short, 10-minute comedy called I Hate Christmas and God Does, Too! which was selected as part of A Reasonable Facsimile Theater Company (ARFTCO)’s annual Christmas show.
As a performer, she appears occasionally in ARFTCO’s TV Re-Run series. She also took part in Portraits: Stories of Hope and Survival as part of the Chicago Foundation for Women’s 2007 anti-violence campaign: What Will It Take?. Also in Chicago, she also appeared in the All the Women You Want comedy festival at Los Manos Gallery, delivered political rants in Verbatim Verboten at the Royal George Theatre, and appeared in a benefit performances of The Vagina Monologues at both the Apollo Theater, and at the Center on Halsted. In 2008 she played a guest restaurant critic violently killed on stage in Corn Productions’ Blood Sausage.
She did a guest appearance as Sister in Scarrie, the Musical, at the Theatre Building in Chicago, and in 2007 and 2009 she chased WGN’s Dean Richards on stage as part of the Dance for Life fundraiser at the Harris Theatre in Chicago’s Millennium Park. In 2009, she also performed snippets of her nun shows on stage at the Skokie Theater.
From Mother’s Day 2007 through the end of 2008, as a collaboration between her show Sunday School Cinema and WLS-AM 890, she wrote movie reviews every weekend for the Jerry Agar show, featuring Elaine Carlson as Sister. The segment, called “Our Moral Guide to the Movies,” featured Vicki on the air as Mother Superior, the movie reviewing nun. Starting in 2008, she began doing movie reviews on air for the Chicago Archdiocese, and also wrote movie reviews for one of the archdiocese newsletters.
When Jerry Agar moved his show to WGN-AM 720, she began appearing as a guest on the Jerry’s Kidders segment, which is an improvised spoof of today’s news. In 2013, she began doing movie reviews on WIND-AM on Ken Sevara's show, Fly By Night,
You can also find her on You Tube as part of the “Movie Queens” comedy ensemble, created by Richard Knight, Jr. Starting in 2013, she began doing movie reviews on WIND-AM 560, on Ken Sevara's radio show, Fly By Night. She plays a movie-reviewing nun called Sister Cinematica.
Vicki grew up in the southwest suburbs of Chicago and started her career in journalism, working for daily newspapers, national magazines, and writing for just about every publication in Chicago. She also spent 10 years as a correspondent for Newsweek.
In 1999, she contributed to the Chicago Sun-Times millennium book, 20th Century Chicago: 100 Years, 100 Voices. She also wrote the biography, I Remember Bob Collins, about the WGN-Radio legend who was killed in a plane crash in February 2000.
Vicki has three children, Michael, David, and Catherine, who keep her sane.