Review: Even in a Chicago Symphony season that has produced an array of memorable concerts, the March 14 program with conductor Jakub Hrůša is likely to stand out for a long time to come. The virtuosic pairing of Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra’ with Bartók’s suite from “The Miraculous Mandarin” was at once a reminder of the CSO’s comprehensive brilliance and a testament to Hrůša’s extraordinary prowess.
Read the full story »Preview: It was no great leap for Chicago native Allison Semmes to take on the role of Diana Ross for the national tour of “Motown the Musical,” which launches May 8 at the Oriental Theatre. Semmes grew up listening to the Supremes and other Motown sounds on her mom and dad’s vinyl LPs: “My parents say when I was about 3 years old, I was harmonizing with the vacuum cleaner.”
Review:x There’s nothing like practice to turn an opera company into a viable musical theater producer, as the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s third venture into Broadway’s golden oldies clearly shows. “The Sound of Music” is the Lyric’s best effort in the classic musical genre to date, after “Showboat” in 2012 and “Oklahoma!” in 2013. ★★★★
Review: Scene upon witty scene, there is much to admire about Sara Gmitter’s elegant and facile new play “In the Garden: A Darwinian Love Story,” which in its world premiere at Lookingglass Theatre offers a kind of evolutionary portrait of the marriage of Charles and Emma Darwin. Floridly festooned in designer Collette Pollard’s literal interlacing of the natural and civilized worlds, “In the Garden” exudes a radiant, if benign charm. ★★
Review: Great theater does not require introduction or advocacy. It announces and proclaims itself. It is, in other words, what it is. Behold the heart-breaking, thrilling greatness of Teatro Vista’s raw-boned take on Arthur Miller’s classic 1950s tragedy “A View From the Bridge,” the story of Eddie Carbone, a dock worker in Brooklyn’s Italian-American community scaping together a living even as he veers toward catastrophe. ★★★★★
Review: Anna is 15 years old, seriously overweight and disconnected from just everything: her mom and dad, her school mates, her life. But disconnection runs in the family. Anna’s parents don’t seem to notice her. Then into their midst, in Nick Payne’s absorbing and painful play “If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet,” pops the girl’s utterly lost soul of an uncle bearing a glimmer of hope. It is a promise as fragile as it is paradoxical, and exquisitely framed by four superb actors in Steep Theatre’s fine production directed by Jonathan Berry. ★★★★
Review: What an engaging, stimulating change of pace, this weekend’s all-American concert fare offered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and conductor Leonard Slatkin at Orchestra Hall. Extending from classics by Barber and Gershwin through William Schuman’s bold, robust Sixth Symphony to youthful Mason Bates’ cleverly crafted Violin Concerto, the program heard April 17 offered a resounding reminder of this country’s enduring contribution to orchestral music in the modern era.
Review: The setup of Amy Herzog’s play “The Great God Pan” is intriguing: A man in his early thirties reconnects with a childhood chum who makes deeply disturbing claims about their formative years. Problem is, where we ultimately expect catharsis the playwright leaves us merely teased. And despite director Kimberly Senior’s sensitive and tempting effort, the current production at Next Theatre cannot magically spin this fragment into whole cloth. ★
Review: In the literal and best sense, Marisa Wegrzyn’s poignant comedy “Mud Blue Sky” at A Red Orchid Theatre is a four-star winner – one for each of the quartet of players in this close-knit and entertaining enterprise. ★★★★
Review: The Finnish-born, California-invigorated composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, at 55, could not be more robustly complementary in nature to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s elegant 72-year-old Italian-born music director Riccardo Muti, who has taught Chicago so much about the composers in close orbit to Old Vienna. In March, Muti made familiar Schubert seem new again. In April, Salonen made new music sound familiar.
Review: If you liked Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” you’ll love the original: August Strindberg’s “The Dance of Death,” wherein a toxic, blood-sport marriage between a venomous old soldier and his hissing wife make the sniping between Albee’s George and Martha feel once more present in the room. Writers Theatre provides the well-polished dance floor for Strindberg’s caustic waltz. ★★★★★
Preview: Chicago-born clarinet virtuoso Anthony McGill returns to his native soil this weekend for a rare concert double: With the Pacifica Quartet, resident ensemble at the University of Chicago, he will play Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A major and Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet in B minor on April 13 at the Logan Center on the UC campus.
Review: Despite the exuberant ridiculousness of “Peter and the Starcatcher” — a show that channels Groucho Marx and Gilbert & Sullivan and Monty Python as it traces the backstory of the boy who became Peter Pan — you will turn misty at the end. To be an adult at Broadway in Chicago’s Peter Pan “prequel” is to be pricked with the realization that, for just about everybody in the world except Peter, and maybe Equity actors, one’s youth relentlessly fades. ★★★★
Review: This is a perfect moment to reflect on Sibelius’ early mastery, in light of the great achievements by the twentysomething Schubert we’ve been hearing from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and music director Riccardo Muti. And it is the fully flowered young Sibelius, before the First Symphony, caught up in the allure of Finnish myth and in absolute command of his symphonic craft, whom the CSO and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen celebrate in a season-peak program heard April 3 and to be repeated April 8.
Review: Imagine that consummate romantic legend of heroic Tristan and beautiful Isolde, thrust together into illicit love by circumstance and a potion, as a tragi-comedy. No? Can’t conceive of that? Then you have yet to see the visiting Kneehigh theater company’s outlandish “Tristan & Yseult,” which now bounces about the boards at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. ★★★
Review: One always comes away from a play performance, whether the staged work is new or familiar, with a single dominant impression. It may be a complex impression, but there’s always that ruling aspect, the starting point from which the conversation evolves. In the case of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s “Good Boys and True” at Raven Theater, it is a sense of relentless circularity. ★★
Preview: John Sanders, who portrays the psychopathic Black Stache in the Peter Pan back-story play “Peter and the Starcatcher,” can’t stop talking about the physical demands of the touring show, which comes to the Bank of America Theatre on April 2 under the aegis of Broadway in Chicago.
Review: At the end of an exhilarating Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert, the third installment of music director Riccardo Muti’s season-long traversal of Schubert’s symphonies, the maestro walked to the lip of the stage with a slightly self-deprecating smile and disarmed his audience with a droll remark about the “Italianate influence” in Schubert’s Second Symphony, which the orchestra had just played. Ripples of laughter ensued, but Muti was serious about the echoes of Salieri and Rossini in the Viennese composer’s music.
Interview: In creating his musical “Into the Woods,” composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim perhaps viewed the witch’s show-stopping number about her vegetable garden as a direct descendant of the patter songs long associated with Gilbert and Sullivan. But to Hillary Marren, who plays the old crone in The Hypocrites’ imaginative staging, the veggie song is exactly what it sounds like in her disarming, rapid-fire delivery — a very smart rap.
Review: It’s a good trick, reducing an epic – and I might add really famous – novel like Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” to two hours’ worth of narrative and dialogue, and yet preserving the psychological and dramatic dimensions that make the story compelling. Credit Lifeline Theatre with doing just that. ★★★
Review: As surely as the truth will out, so will literary genius, even if the latter eventuality involves a great deal of personal angst and interpersonal, well, relations and unleashes gales of laughter. I’m talking about Haven Theatre’s sharp-edged take on Theresa Rebeck’s comedy “Seminar,” a riotous exploration of language shared by a group of aspiring writers and their mentor as they delve between the lines and dive between the sheets. ★★★★★
Review: Riccardo Muti’s season-long traversal of the complete Schubert symphonies with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has a few stops remaining, but it’s hard to imagine the musical arc rising much higher than the “Great” C major Symphony heard March 20 at Orchestra Hall.
Review: Vanda careens into the playwright-director’s audition room as if she’s been tossed there by the storm that’s booming and flashing outside. Hair tousled, mini-skirted and discombobulated, she wrestles with her wet umbrella and a large bag she’s brought, spewing F-words as the amazed author looks on. But Vanda has only begun to amaze this guy, Thomas, in David Ives’ startling play “Venus in Fur.” It’s an incendiary night out at Goodman Theatre. ★★★★
Review: Charting a memorable arc from the flustered panic of love’s first rush to the sorrowful tenderness of lovers whom death has parted, soprano Renée Fleming and tenor Jonas Kaufmann gave Chicago’s Lyric Opera loyalists quite the evening of music to treasure on March 19.
Review: “Elliot: A Soldier’s Fugue,” the first play in Quiara Alegría Hudes’ trilogy about the moral and psychological distress of a Marine back from duty in Iraq, almost captured the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The trilogy’s second installment, “Water by the Spoonful,” won the Pulitzer, and the merits that pushed it over the top are evident in every nuance, impulse, collision and aspiration of the current production at Court Theatre. ★★★★★
Review: Leif Ove Andsnes’ physically exuberant all-Beethoven program at Orchestra Hall — an ingenious traversal from Op. 22 to Op. 101, from Beethoven at age 30 to Beethoven at 46 — followed one week after the Japanese-British pianist Mitsuko Uchida’s fiercely poetic reading of the “Diabelli” Variations. It was the second time this season that the series has offered such back-to-back interpretive contrasts of a single composer.
Review: Meet boxer Joe Bonaparte: smart kid, tough, determined, wickedly fast hands. And one more thing, self-destructive. You could say Joe, the anti-hero of Clifford Odets’ classic 1937 play “Golden Boy,” launches his own career, hurtles himself into a high orbit. The beauty, if that’s the word, of Nate Santana’s portrayal of this increasingly ugly character, in Griffin Theatre’s punchy production, is that you can’t take your eyes off him even as he pummels his life into a bruised mess. ★★★★
Report: The legacy of Ray Still as an unforgettable musician is preserved not only in the dozens of recordings he made through four decades as principal oboe of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but also in the vivid memories of musicians whose lives he influenced, among them Eugene Izotov and Michael Henoch, the CSO’s current principal oboe and assistant principal.
Review: There’s an infamous jest that if you ask six reviewers about the same event, you’ll get seven different opinions. As there is more than a grain of truth in that, conductor Mei-Ann Chen surely is entitled to put a notch in her baton after winning a consensus of enthusiasm from a dozen arts writers from across the U.S. and Canada following her guest appearance March 9 with the Sarasota Orchestra.
Review: Mozart died in 1791 just months after writing “La Clemenza di Tito,” about the first-century Roman emperor Titus and his struggle to rule with generosity of spirit. Performances are still a rarity, and the most successful aspect of the production at the Lyric Opera of Chicago is the unmistakable fineness of the music itself. ★★★
Review: We cannot watch or read the likes of Brian Friel’s “Translations” or Martin McDonagh’s “The Cripple of Inishmaan” without sensing the sublimated presence of John Millington Synge’s 1907 comedy “The Playboy of the Western World.” It is a cornerstone of modern Irish theater, and it’s all there in Raven Theatre’s idiomatic staging — the brisk dialect and wry humor, the tumbling physicality and muted hues, the seed and genesis of everything we love about Irish drama in the present tense. ★★★★