Review: Under the baton of James Conlon, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus presented “Elijah” in performances April 11-13, of which I heard the last. Like the oratorio on its surface, which is to say in its entirety, what I heard was altogether above reproach. The only question was why it was undertaken at all.
Read the full story »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. ★★★★
Preview: Jamaican-born dancer Teneisha Bonner is a seasoned theater veteran, but she admits she had no idea of the world-widening experience awaiting her in the multi-ethnic dance spectacle that is “Heartbeat of Home.” The new extravaganza, from the same team that created “Riverdance,” makes its U.S. debut in Chicago on Tuesday night at the Oriental Theatre for a run through March 16.
Report: Ravinia Festival music director James Conlon leads Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Don Giovanni,” soprano Patricia Racette stars in Strauss’ grisly “Salome” and Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki makes her festival debut in the 2014 summer series announced Thursday.
Review: As Tracey Scott Wilson’s urban tragi-comedy “Buzzer” spins through a series of introductory monologues, its mordant wit and coalescing picture of a ménage à trois suggests an updated bundling of the two young men and a woman in Noel Coward’s “Design for Living.” Though the laughs keep coming in “Buzzer,” the comedy soon hones the edges of a bitter tale — of love and hope infected by torment and fear. Goodman Theatre serves it up as potent brew. ★★★★
Review: The musical legacy of Antonín Dvořák has always held favor with the public and esteem among musicians. Until recently, however, few this side of Prague would have mentioned Dvorak’s opera “Rusalka” with his most important works, much less listed it with the greatest achievements in the operatic canon. But the Lyric Opera’s first-ever production of “Rusalka,” a musical fairy tale of consummate beauty and profound humanity, dictates acknowledgement of this opera in the first rank of music-dramas. ★★★★★
Review: The Chicago Opera Theater and the Chicago Jazz Orchestra production of Duke Ellington’s late-in-life and largely unfinished Harlem street opera “Queenie Pie” became the casualty of an electrical fire that has temporarily shut down the Harris. The delay adds a footnote to the saga of frustrated restoration attempts that have dogged “Queenie Pie” and left its unfulfilled potential as much in limbo as ever. ★★
Review: Even in absentia, Pierre Boulez brings an incalculable contribution to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as its conductor emeritus, artistic guru and good friend. What better example than two rarefied programs exploring Stravinsky’s musical world that Boulez fashioned and planned to conduct this weekend and next at Orchestra Hall. ★★★★★
Review: Happiness. Is it an authentic state of contentment, fulfillment, grace – or merely delusion, self-deception and denial? Playwright Robert Caisely pummels the question in “Happy,” an ironically titled session of group misery directed by Elly Green with stunning acerbity at Redtwist Theatre. ★★★
Review: The young playwright Erika Sheffer’s stark and chilling tragedy-as-morality play “Russian Transport,” just opened in a hard-edged production at Steppenwolf Theatre, offers an unvarnished look at the immigrant experience recalling Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.” ★★★★
Review: Chicago Shakespeare Theater has given us a “Gypsy” for our own time, one that embraces the difference that 55 years have made since the brassy blockbuster first strutted onto the stage. As directed by Gary Griffin, it’s a gritty roadshow musical with a surprisingly contemporary and tender heart. ★★★★★
Interview: Mary Beth Fisher, who portrays the empathic, long-experienced and raggedly weathered social worker Caroline in Rebecca Gilman’s new play “Luna Gale” at Goodman Theatre, says every performance has been an interactive encounter with the audience.
Review: Rachel Hardeman is 28 years old and very bright, in fact a budding evolutionary biologist. She’s also a prickly pear who wears her attitude like a badge – or perhaps a protective cape. In Sarah Treem’s fascinating play “The How and the Why,” now on clinical display at TimeLine Theatre, Rachel collides with a blood relative who may owe her a good deal – some explaining for starters – and the thorns fly. ★★★
Review: From paper and string and other found objects — in the hands of a wonderfully talented cast and a whiz of a director — The Hypocrites theater company has cobbled together a magical production of Stephen Sondheim’s fairytale mash-up musical “Into the Woods.” ★★★★★
Review: There is still no opera funnier or feistier than Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” at 198 years and counting. When it works, its comedy seems as effortless as a flick of the wrist. Top to bottom, the Lyric Opera of Chicago has accomplished this trick in a sophisticated new production that owes a great deal to the precise funny bones of conductor Michele Mariotti, director Rob Ashford and designer Scott Pask – all in their company debuts. ★★★★★
Report: World premieres by composers William Bolcom and Christopher Theofanidis and the return of former principal conductors Leonard Slatkin and Hugh Wolff will highlight the Grant Park Music Festival’s 80th anniversary season at Jay Pritzker Pavilion.
Review: The entire musical world knows about Joshua Bell, the violin prodigy grown up to become blazing virtuoso. And by now many also know him in a more recent guise as a conductor, indeed as music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. But the man in those robes also sees himself in quite another way – as a musical adventurer. “I tend to agree to pretty much everything I’m asked to do,” says the amused violinist, who comes to Orchestra Hall on Feb. 12 for a recital with pianist Sam Haywood.
Review: It was an Event, the recital by 22-year-old Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov on Sunday afternoon at Orchestra Hall. While the ascent of this phenomenal musician has been meteoric since he won both the Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein competitions in 2011, the artist himself is no meteor. Trifonov is more like a midsummer’s morning sun. He’s going to be with us, his zenith yet to be observed, for a long time.
Review: On opening night, Porchlight Music Theatre’s go at the Fats Waller revue “Ain’t Misbehavin’” gave the impression of two different shows, one ready and one not quite. The good news is that the sharper, more relaxed and spontaneous effort came in the second half, when perhaps nerves had calmed and the company of five singing, hoofing show folks started to look like they were simply having fun. ★★★
Review: It is hard to know which to admire more about Schubert’s Mass No. 5 in A-flat, its consummate lyricism and elegance of construction or its honest spirituality, so open-hearted and direct. In both form and content, this luminous Mass shone in a performance Thursday night by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Riccardo Muti at Orchestra Hall. ★★★★★
Review: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and its au courant offshoot MusicNOW introduced four contemporary works to Chicago in the space of a single week, including the world premiere of a double cello concerto featuring Yo-Yo Ma and cellist-composer Giovanni Sollima. It’s been cold in Chicago, but it feels like spring with a Riccardo Muti residency in full bloom.
Review: While it isn’t exactly a monodrama, Johnna Adams’ play “Gidion’s Knot,” about a mother looking for answers after her fifth-grade son kills himself, is a provocatively detailed – and less than flattering — portrait of the mom, with the only other character, the boy’s teacher, serving essentially as interlocutor. And Amy J. Carle’s performance at Profiles Theatre as the self-absorbed, reluctantly self-questioning mother is wrought with painful precision. ★★★
Report: Riccardo Muti has agreed to a five-year extension of his contract as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra through the 2019-20 season, the orchestra announced Monday. Word of the new pact, concluded only Monday morning, came unexpectedly at a press conference to announce the CSO’s season plans for 2014-15, the final year on Muti’s current agreement. The 72-year-old Italian maestro expressed delight at the extension, noting with a wry grin that at its conclusion he will not yet be 80. “The older I get, the more homesick I feel,” he said, “but these musicians and the city of Chicago have made me feel like this is my second home.”
Preview: When the League of Chicago Theatres decided to stage its first Chicago Theatre Week last year, offering discounted tickets to some 100 productions and other perks in a sort of regional stimulus package, no one knew how it would go – whether the public would bite. What happened was more like a gobble: All 6,000 tickets in the discount pool were snapped up. Now Chicago Theatre Week is back, with the 2014 version of dramas for $15 and $30, and this time the presenters exude optimism.
Review: Caroline is a social worker whose job it is to rescue neglected and abused children and find decent homes for them. She goes about her task seriously – one of her former charges gently rebukes her for being “always on topic.” In Rebecca Gilman’s radiant and disturbing new play “Luna Gale,” now in an electric world premiere run at Goodman Theatre, Caroline comes to her melancholy topic with a full heart as well as her own imperfect history. ★★★★★
Review: On the surface, a play about 18th-century British scofflaws creating a play while imprisoned in the distant wilds of Australia might seem, well, remote – and too likely to harangue on the morally transformative powers of theater. Suspend your disbelief. “Our Country’s Good,” by British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker, explores such a premise in crackling drama that’s raw, funny, sober, persuasive and brought off with disarming humanity by the fine ensemble of Shattered Globe Theatre. ★★★
Report: Russian dramatic soprano Tatiana Serjan, who riveted audiences as Riccardo Muti’s Lady Macbeth with the Chicago Symphony in 2013, will return to the Windy City next January at the Lyric Opera of Chicago to sing another knife-wielder, Floria Tosca, the tempestuous diva who tries to outwit a tyrant and foil her lover’s assassination. The Lyric’s 60th anniversary season, announced Jan. 27, also will feature soprano and Lyric creative consultant Renée Fleming in a signature role as Countess Madeleine in Richard Strauss’ final opera, “Capriccio.”
Review: A delightful surprise awaits opera buffs in an ambitious, full-length staging of Carl Nielsen’s comic opera “Maskarade,” produced by Vox 3 Collective – in the original Danish, no less – at the Vittum Theater on Chicago’s northwest side. ★★★
Review: A meeting of minds, of sensibilities, between director Ron OJ Parson and playwright August Wilson illuminates a lyrical, joyful and heartbreaking production of Wilson’s “Seven Guitars” at Court Theatre, delivered by an ensemble that’s as sly as it is polished. ★★★★★