Articles by Nancy Malitz
‘First Wives Club’ delivers the songs and stars, but the new musical is still looking for its heart
Review: “The First Wives Club,” the movie, was a sweet revenge caper for three of the funniest forty-something women in the business. Now Faith Prince as Brenda the loudmouth, Christine Sherrill as the aging star Elise and Carmen Cusack as the ditherer Annie star in the Broadway-bound musical comedy “First Wives Club,” playing at the Oriental Theatre. The musical is a work in progress but it has several heady things going for it, including these leading ladies, who fall together in a D-line when their husbands try to dump them. ★★
Violinist Shaham turns to brisk Baroque Bach, recast in modern frame of super-slow videos
Review: After hearing Bach, there are melodies that linger in the memory, as if the brain is sorting bits to savor in pursuit of its own afterglow. But after listening to the Bach of Gil Shaham at Orchestra Hall in a world premiere collaboration with video artist David Michalek, there are images that linger, too.
Klezmer opera ‘The Property’ melds nostalgia, renewal in music awash with Old-World charm
Feature Review: “The Property,” a new vest-pocket opera that burst onto the Chicago scene Feb. 25, is the sweet-spirited musical brainchild of a 28-year-old Minsk-born Polish composer Wlad Marhulets, who makes a living these days tooling music for films in L.A. Marhuletz came to the Lyric Opera by way of klezmer madness — not a disease, rather an exhilarating state of mind. Through March 5.★★★
Lyric Opera staging of Weinberg’s ‘Passenger’ casts intimate light on life, death at Auschwitz
Review: The first impression of “The Passenger” by the Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg, whose Holocaust-inspired 1968 opera has been circulating the globe since its belated 2010 world premiere, is that of a major composer in his prime. Conducted with searing authority by Andrew Davis, the illuminating Lyric Opera of Chicago presentation of “The Passenger” seemed familiar right away. Weinberg was typically referred to as a lesser-known member of Shostakovich’s inner circle, but in fact he was on top of his world. ★★★★
Snatched from oblivion, post-Holocaust opera ‘The Passenger’ makes a rescue stop at Lyric
Report: “The Passenger,” a late-blooming 1968 opera by the Polish-born Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg, will have its Chicago Lyric Opera premiere as part of a whirlwind of introduction in Austria, Poland, England, the U.S. and Spain. Director David Pountney and author Zofia Posmysz talk about why.
Balm for a winter weekend, Mozart’s Requiem casts warming glow in hands of Muti and CSO
Review: It was a sad time for Chicago’s musical community, which had lost two respected musicians within days of each other. By astonishing coincidence the scheduled program, dedicated to their memory, included the Requiem by Mozart, whose own life slipped away from him as he wrote it. A bit of the Lacrymosa is the last passage in Mozart’s own hand.
From ‘Romeo’ to ‘Figaro,’ love rules as Lyric plans eight operas, ‘King and I’ for 2015-16
Report: You know that Valentine’s Day is just around the corner when the romantic couplings planned for the Lyric Opera’s 2015-16 season are the stuff of headlines. The game of love becomes a delicious frenzy when lots of money and a very attractive widow are at stake: Soprano Renée Fleming will be playing her “Merry Widow” title role to the hilt with baritone Thomas Hampson beginning Nov. 14 and into the holiday season. We provide details.
Muti’s mighty Chicago forces wind up Carnegie campaign with impressive reprise of Prokofiev
Review: There was a wild and welcome counter-intuitive energy to the final program that Muti brought to his trilogy of concerts with the Chicago Symphony and Chorus at New York’s 57th Street temple of music, in the wake of a travel-hampering blizzard on the eastern seaboard and another underway in Chicago.
As Chicago Symphony unveils 2015-16 season, Muti pushes live streaming, concerts in Cuba
Report: At a Symphony Center press conference, where details of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s 2015-16 season were released, music director Riccardo Muti expressed a three-fold desire to increase connections with Chicago’s many ethnic communities through neighborhood events, press forward with cutting-edge multimedia recordings and live-from-Chicago events that can reach a worldwide internet audience, and widen the CSO’s touring horizons beyond the U.S. and Europe to include newly open Cuba and “all the East, which is the future.”
21-year-old Atlanta Symphony bassoonist wins post as new principal with Chicago Symphony
Report: Keith Buncke was still a Curtis Institute of Music student in February 2014 when he won the principal bassoon job, at 20, with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Now 21, he has taken a second bounce, and it’s a big one – to become the new principal at the CSO.
American music is lodestar of 2015 Grant Park concert constellation; price is heavenly – free
Preview: It is one of the glories of Chicago’s summer and a thrilling populist tradition, the Grant Park Music Festival at Millennium Park, where the one-size-fits-all lawn price – free! – means that if you’ve got a blanket, your place under the stars is guaranteed. Artistic director Carlos Kalmar reflects on the 2015 season, just announced, which celebrates American greats alongside an appealing mix of symphonic classics. The stage of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion is framed by the signature billowing stainless steel forms of architect Frank Gehry.
Cue cameras: Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, come of age, is playing at a cinema near you
Feature review: The Metropolitan Opera is the most international of houses, but there is something quintessentially American about the Saturday afternoon HD cinema broadcasts that are now part of its marketing arsenal. After attending a performance of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” at the Met, I caught the same production, broadcast live to cinemas on Dec. 13, starring German baritone Michael Volle as Hans Sachs, the master shoemaker, cobbler of poems and mender of hearts.
New York Aisle: Met’s balanced ‘Klinghoffer’ revealed depth of Adams’ controversial opera
Analysis: To sit in the audience at the Metropolitan Opera, where a richly inflected production of John Adams’ 1991 opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” unfolded this fall, was to experience the opera itself coming into focus. “The Death of Klinghoffer” is already a different experience than it was at its Brussels premiere 23 years ago.
Vienna Aisle: Happily in tune with CSO, Muti nixes idea of position at Vienna State Opera
Report: When Riccardo Muti says that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is one of the greatest orchestras in the world – as he did before 300 adoring guests in an intimate recital space at the famed Musikverein – the Viennese simply take it in stride. Out of politeness and affection alone they would give him that. Muti has been a favorite in the Austrian musical capital for decades. Curiosity about Muti’s Chicago orchestra was high during the CSO’s weeklong visit capping a five-country European tour. So was speculation whether he might be interested in the biggest music directorship in Vienna, suddenly open. But Muti says Chicago’s enough for him.
New musical ‘Amazing Grace’ recounts the story of perfect storm that redeemed a slave trader
Preview:The acute historical irony is that the hymn “Amazing Grace” — which is the subject of the Broadway-bound musical that opens Oct. 19 at Chicago’s Bank of America Theatre — was written by an English sailor, John Newton, who had prayed in terror during a storm at sea while engaged in the evil of the triangle slave trade.
Lyric’s ‘Capriccio’ embraces ensemble flair, patrician milieu of Strauss’ high-minded lark
Review: To watch Lyric Opera’s “Capriccio” is to put one’s mind inside a blissful dream of wealth and privilege, where the toughest choices facing a glamorous Parisian countess — played by Renée Fleming — concerned which adoring, handsome and talented young man to endow with her philanthropy, and her bed. ★★★★
Chicago Opera Theater buffs up neglected jewel in high-tech staging of Bloch’s grand ‘Macbeth’
Review: When Swiss-born Ernest Bloch began to contemplate the creation of his first and only opera, “Macbeth,” he was an untested 25 and would turn 30 before his opus found footing at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. The opera then slipped into oblivion. What is surprising is how staggeringly good Bloch’s result is — for an opera that almost no one knows. ★★★
Chicago Symphony’s new chief is battle tested by long, productive career in orchestra world
Profile: Jeff Alexander may seem a low-profile long-shot for those who were handicapping the search for a new president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association. But as a closer look at the secret and highly selective search process reveals, Alexander, who heads up the Vancouver Symphony, scored high in two areas deemed paramount: the potential for a simpatico relationship with CSO music director Riccardo Muti, who required passion and knowledge of music first, and a proven track record as an orchestra’s No. 1 decision-maker.
Martha S. Gilmer, longtime Chicago Symphony executive, named CEO of San Diego orchestra
Report: It’s off to San Diego’s warmer clime this fall for Martha S. Gilmer, the veteran executive of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra who now serves as vice-president of artistic planning and audience development. Gilmer becomes CEO of the 104-year-old San Diego Symphony effective Sept. 24.
‘Brigadoon’ at Goodman: In musical’s bright mist, someone is lost and new meaning found
Review: In this briskly refreshing theater season, the Windy City has performed a hat trick on behalf of the American musical. Three mainstage companies have each expertly revived a Broadway classic through a shrewd rethinking that paired careful respect for the original with sympathy for today’s audience and its contemporary state of mind in changing times. Following Chicago Shakespeare’s heart-stopping “Gypsy” and Lyric Opera’s gorgeous “The Sound of Music” comes Lerner and Loewe’s 1947 “Brigadoon,” which ran for 581 performances on Broadway and is now in resplendent bloom at the Goodman. ★★★★
Bullets fly amid poignant comedy as Kokandy scores bull’s eye with Sondheim’s ‘Assassins’
Review: Imagine a homicidal hearts club of a very particular kind, where killers of U.S. presidents (and would-be killers) gather to clash and kibitz and relive the “why” in a time-bending collage, and you have “Assassins.” Chicago’s latest pocket production of the John Weidman-Stephen Sondheim 1990 classic comes at the close of a remarkable season for precision-cut Sondheim stagings, and this is one of them. ★★★★
To wisdom of memorable songs, Sting’s musical ‘The Last Ship’ adds mystery of grace
Review: It’s not often that a composer introduces his first Broadway-bound musical at the age of 64, but then Sting is the sort of artist who never stops spreading his wings. The great rock singer-songwriter has picked up collaborators from his work in film and television and he has even suffered the prolonged torture of a Disney animated movie that morphed so completely his songs were largely cut. Who better to tackle the cut-throat business of the Broadway musical?★★★★
Alex in wonderland: Minding Streisand’s mall proves trip into loopy luxury in ‘Buyer & Cellar’
Review: At last it’s summer, the season for ice-cream cones and books with fun as their chief nutritional value. It’s also prime for a Broadway in Chicago show on this fancifully ridiculous premise — that Barbra Streisand, who has designed a “shopping mall” in the basement of her own home, drives a hard bargain to purchase a doll, which she already owns, from the fella she has hired to tend the shops. And he says No. ★★★
‘M. Butterfly’ at Court Theatre: Amorous fantasy blurs truth and tests the limits of plausibility
Review: Rene Gallimard is a shy functionary in Beijing’s French diplomatic corps who falls head over heels for a Peking Opera artist performing “Madama Butterfly.” He soon begins a 20-year love affair with the man he believes to be a woman, and falls into a classic honeypot lure for spy recruitment. ★★
After double exposure in Met Opera HD roles, Susanna Phillips ready for 2 more in Chicago
Interview: Soprano Susanna Phillips, hot from back-to-back Metropolitan Opera HD simulcasts that reached a couple of hundred thousand international viewers each, is heading into a week-long and half-unplanned stint in Chicago, where many classical music enthusiasts doubtless think of her as the auspiciously talented soprano from the Ryan Opera Center, Lyric Opera’s professional artist development program. But that was 2005-07. How great it must now feel to be in the shoes of this pure-voiced, luxurious-sounding singer at the top of her game.
‘Sound of Music’ at Lyric: When opera meets B’way, the hills come alive – and hearts, too
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. ★★★★
Esa-Pekka Salonen, in double duty as conductor and composer, sparks energy surge with CSO
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.
In ‘Starcatcher’ romp, goofy pirate lends a hand and Peter (Pan) learns no man is an isth-s-mus
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. ★★★★
Riccardo Muti sets personal seal on Schubert with CSO’s agile turn through 2 symphonies
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.
Fleming, Kaufmann offer Lyric Opera faithful festive tribute to love and the art of singing
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.
