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Shakespeare rules the playbill as Stratford unveils plans for its 2014 summer festival
Report: While the Stratford Festival has shed its branding association with the Bard of Avon, any concerns that the festival might really be loosening its traditional ties with Shakespeare should be allayed by newly announced plans for the summer of 2014. The Bard abounds. The festival’s five Shakespeare productions will include two takes on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — a full-scale account and a “chamber” version for just four players directed by one of the world’s most innovative masters of stagecraft, Peter Sellars.
Confused identities and a flair for mendacity spark comic romp in ‘The Liar’ at Writers’
Review: Young, lusty, autobiographically creative Dorante embraces a simple code: The unimagined life is not worth living. From the tangled roots of that premise springs Pierre Corneille’s 1643 comedy “The Liar” – revamped and translated for today’s English-speaking audiences by David Ives, and now brought to the stage with a farcical flourish at Writers’ Theatre. ★★★★
Role Playing: Darrell W. Cox sees theater’s core in closed-off teacher of ‘Burning Boy’
Interview: The central character Larry, an English teacher, in David West Read’s “The Dream of the Burning Boy,” is a smart, inspiring mentor to the kids around him. But when they need him as consoling father-figure, after one of their classmates dies, Larry can’t engage their pain or embrace them emotionally. For Darrell W. Cox, who delivers a wrenching portrait of the teacher at Profiles Theatre, such a closed-off, deeply complicated soul is the touchstone of great drama.
Role Playing: Dion Johnstone turned outsider Antony to bloody purpose in ‘Julius Caesar’
Interview: The actor who portrays Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” draws one of the greatest speeches in the Bard’s canon: the dramatically pivotal funeral oration for the slain Caesar. But that opportunity, says Dion Johnstone, whose eloquent and driven Marc Antony fires the current production at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, comes freighted with compact and perilous challenges. “From the moment Marc Antony enters the Senate and sees Caesar’s bloody corpse, with Brutus and the other assassins all still there, he’s in serious danger,” the actor says. “And despite his overwhelming grief, he has to think fast.”
‘The City & The City’: Politics, murder occupy the same space in a surreal thriller at Lifeline
Review: ★★★
CSO in Asia: Without fanfare, musicians give gifts of art and joy; see themselves richer
Report: Halfway into the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Asia tour, trombonist Michael Mulcahy was reflecting on a little concert he and four colleagues played for some children back in Taipei. Without hesitating a sixteenth note, Mulcahy declared that encounter with the kids and their parents, no more than 150 people, “the most magnificent thing that has happened to me on this trip.”
‘Skylight’ at Court: In a battle of the sexes, slings and arrows and words, words, words
Review: ★★★★
Mythology’s ripple effect felt as Lookingglass splashes into season with ‘Metamorphoses’
Review: ★★★★★
Chicago Opera’s stage magic is a bit rough, but fine singing delivers a charming ‘Flute’
Review: The Chicago Opera Theater production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” leaves one with two distinct impressions. For the most part, its young cast sings with stylistic savvy, fetching beauty and engaging spirit – all shaped with unfailing sensibility by conductor Steuart Bedford.★★★
Vivid characters and some great singing carry the day for ‘A Little Night Music’ at Writers’
Sondheim’s paean to love. 4 stars!
ATC and About Face hang fresh ‘Rent’ sign on a production of street-level intimacy, energy
Musical classic, new again. 4 stars!
It’s the Bard’s birthday! Simon Callow reflects on the fanciful weave of ‘Being Shakespeare’
Interview: As “the soul of the age” turns 448 on April 23, the celebrated actor talks with Chicago On the Aisle about his one-man play “Being Shakespeare,” presented by Chicago Shakespeare Theater at the Broadway Theatre through April 29.
‘Fish Men’ at Goodman: When chess hustlers bait their hooks, slippery truth snaps at the line
Con game in the park. 3 stars.
Handel trips back to the future as Lyric Opera proclaims the outrageous genius of ‘Rinaldo’
Not your grandfather’s Handel. 4 stars!
‘Mr. Rickey’ imagines a prelude to history, before Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers
Full count at the Lookingglass. 3 stars.
Role Playing: Diane D’Aquila’s twice regal portrait as lover-monarch in ‘Elizabeth Rex’
Interview: Diane D’Aquila, who brings Queen Elizabeth I to regal and vulnerable life in Timothy Findley’s “Elizabeth Rex” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, says acting in this gripping, keenly honed production “is a like a dance out there, and it’s scary as hell.”
Role Playing: Dean Evans, in clown costume, enters the darkness of ‘Burning Bluebeard’
Interview: His clown suit, a bit tattered and soiled with soot, looks like it once might have been pure white. But the character Dean Evans plays in the Neo-Futurists’ production of “Burning Bluebeard” is decidedly dark, one might even say spectral.
Profiles’ ‘Behanding in Spokane’ bundles laughter and terror in the same dark bag
Sardonic, but clear-sighted. 3 stars
