Commentary: How rich, how embracing and inviting, are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s newly bruited plans for the 2025-26 season? I went through the detailed chronology of subscription programs to highlight a dozen. Then, after making some hard choices, I counted my picks. There were 20. Music director-designate Klaus Mäkelä will lead four programs and take the orchestra on an eastern tour. I’ve been reporting on orchestra seasons for half a century. I don’t recall a horizon more enticing than the CSO’s lineup for the season ahead.
Read the full story »22nd in a series of season previews: Two world premieres lead off an American Theater Company season dedicated to the memory of PJ Paparelli, the ensemble’s visionary artistic director who died last May after an automobile accident in Scotland. Thomas Bradshaw’s new play “Fulfillment,” about a successful African-American lawyer whose world gets flipped on its head, opens the season. It will be followed by the premiere of “Bruise Easy,” Dan LeFranc’s play about an adult brother and sister whose meeting at their childhood home offers a chance to iron out old issues.
Feature: Three formative plays on the boards in Goodman Theatre’s New Stages Festival offer an intriguing glimpse into the process of turning a work of promise into a well-honed piece of stagecraft ready for prime time. Now in its 12th year, the 2015 edition of New Stages concludes Nov. 13-15 with final performances of those plays and a cluster of readings.
21st in a series of season previews: A Red Orchid Theatre opens its 23rd season with Brett Neveu’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” one of two world premieres during 2015-16. It burrows into layers of conflict within a family gathered for Thanksgiving dinner. “It’s brutal and hilarious,” says artistic director Kirsten Fitzgerald, “and it’s the kind of play this company identifies with. We absolutely explore the poetry of life on the edge.”
Review: Tomasz Konieczny is Wozzeck, the low-ranking soldier who sinks into madness as he is subjected to scientific experiments, betrayed in love and persistently harrassed. As envisioned by director David McVicar and conductor Andrew Davis, the 1925 opera is as deeply unsettling visually as it is musically rich. Berg’s account of Wozzeck’s grotesque travails has a way of suddenly panning wide, as if to embrace us all in our human dissonance and complexity.★★★★
Preview: He could be talking about Puccini’s “La boheme” or Verdi’s “La traviata” or Bizet’s “Carmen,” but when Anthony Freud, general director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, says, “I would encourage anyone who has never experienced opera to give it a try,” he’s referring to none of the above. Freud means Alban Berg’s harrowing Expressionist music-drama “Wozzeck.”
20th in a series of season previews: Writers Theatre artistic director Michael Halberstam sees ideal choices in the two major productions planned for the spring 2016 opening of the company’s brand new home in Glencoe – Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” and the Stephen Sondheim musical “Company.”
Interview: In the thimble-size playing space of Redtwist Theatre, Brian Parry is reminded every night of the plain truth in playwright Edward Albee’s admonition to any actor who takes on the role of George, the battle-worn husband and semi-satisfied college professor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” – that it will be the workout of a lifetime.
Review: You could feel the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s crack troop of musicians and their super-flexible maestro Andrew Davis snap to alertness when the Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin ignored what he had just heard in the opening of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and simply went his own way in a performance Oct. 15 at Orchestra Hall.
19th in a series of season previews: Irish Theatre of Chicago took on its present name last season some 20 years after beginning life under the banner of Seanachai Theatre. Commencing its third decade with Geraldine Aron’s one-woman show “My Brilliant Divorce,” the rechristened Irish Theatre now spreads its wings by adding a third play to its season.
Review: With its blindingly bright colors and brilliant musical hijinks, the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s current production of Rossini’s “Cinderella” plays out like a surreal dream that might possess one in the wee hours of the night. It makes perfect sense while it’s happening, zany and hypnotic at the same time. Rossini’s music is wrapped in a fanciful production that goes well beyond the boring rules of logic. ★★★★★
18th in a series of season previews: Shattered Globe Theatre opens its 25th anniversary season with a memorial tribute to Chicago playwright Scott McPherson, who died at age 33 in 1992, just two years after the premiere of “Marvin’s Room” at the Goodman Theatre. Sandy Shinner, Shattered Globe’s producing artistic director, calls this historic revival “a celebration of Scott’s life.” The season opens Oct. 4.
Review: What was good was very good in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s concert with music director Riccardo Muti on Oct. 1 at Orchestra Hall. Then came the program’s bizarre second half, which recalled the previous week’s fare and left one wondering just how weird – and musically marginal – the CSO’s 125th anniversary season will turn out to be.
17th in a series of season previews: Founding artistic director Peter Moore says Steep Theatre’s 15th season captures the essence of what this scrappy company is all about – “ground-level views of life.” That low-angle survey begins with the world premiere of Hamish Linklater’s “The Cheats,” about two neighboring couples who suddenly find themselves uncomfortably close.
16th in a series of season previews: Broadway in Chicago’s bountiful fall series of touring shows, crammed into four performance venues – Bank of America Theatre, Oriental Theatre, Cadillac Palace Theatre and Broadway Playhouse – opens with one of the hottest new musical comedies to come out of New York, “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,” and winds up at the holidays with the pre-Broadway world premiere of “Gotta Dance,” a testament to youth as an expression not of age but of spirit.
Review: If Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” is inherently and effectively a bittersweet comedy that edges into farce, the new production directed by Barbara Gaines that opens the Lyric Opera of Chicago season reframes it as farce that edges into cartoon. This “Figaro,” conducted by the Hungarian Henrik Nánási in his American debut, fares best where a uniformly strong cast of singers is allowed to stand and deliver Mozart’s witty, touching, brilliant and wise arias and ensemble numbers. ★★★★
Update: The new deal is good through Sept. 16, 2018.
Review: August Wilson’s decade-by-decade portrait gallery of the African-American experience across the 20th century begins just two generations after slavery, indeed with characters who were born into shackles. To grasp the cultural resonance and progression of the last nine plays in the sequence, it’s essential to know the first one, “Gem of the Ocean,” which now unfolds in a perceptive and finely textured production directed by Ron OJ Parson at Court Theatre. ★★★★
15th in a series of season previews: The play first up for Victory Gardens Theater this season, Roy Williams’ “Sucker Punch,” might be seen as a summary statement of what fifth-year artistic director Chay Yew has tried to bring to this company. It’s a story steeped in gritty realism about two young black boxers in rundown London struggling to find meaning in life.
Interview: The first venture for the Lyric Opera of Chicago this season is also the first Mozart ever taken on by Barbara Gaines, artistic director at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. And in the poignancy – and the comedy – of “The Marriage of Figaro,” Gaines finds the Bard’s own sensibility, his empathy and his compassion.
Review: In double magic that beguiles ear and eye with levity and levitation, Chicago Shakespeare Theater has invoked a rare vision of the Bard’s lyrical play of vengeance transcended by forgiveness, “The Tempest.” Co-directed with no slight imagination and great sleight of hand by Adam Posner and the magician Teller (he of Penn and Teller fame), CST’s season opener is pure enchantment – as credibly human and affecting as it is vibrant, fanciful and fresh. ★★★★★
14th in a series of season previews: Opening with a run of Midwest premieres, Raven Theatre expands from four plays to five this season to capitalize on the opportunity offered by its dual performing spaces. And first up is a Mark Stein’s searing “entertainment” with the long, ironically evocative title of “Direct from Death Row: The Scottsboro Boys (An Evening of Vaudeville and Sorrow).”
13th in a series of season previews: Two world premieres and three first-time Chicago stagings form a doubly celebratory season at Steppenwolf Theatre – marking the company’s 40th anniversary and honoring the legacy of its longtime artistic director, Martha Lavey, who stepped down at the end of last season. Steppenwolf opens with the world premiere of Frank Galati’s adaptation of “East of Eden,” John Steinbeck’s sweeping, tumultuous epic novel about family dynamics and fortunes set mainly in California early in the 20th century.
Review: Seeing a play at tiny Redtwist Theatre, where a full house of 30 or 40 viewers often encircles the unfolding drama, can be an experience of in-your-face intensity. But the company’s electric burn through Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” takes intensity to a harrowing new place. ★★★★★
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Seventh in a series of season previews: Michael Weber, the artistic director at Porchlight Music Theatre, makes no bones about his company being a brash urban Chicago enterprise. That, he says, is why Porchlight’s 2015-16 season opener, a revamped version of the 1997 musical “Side Show,” is going to be special. Then, as if to underscore this true grit, it’s on to another earthy evening with an encore of the company’s Jefferson Award-winning Fats Waller revue “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”
Interview: Tracy Michelle Arnold, who portrays a feisty and resourceful Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” at American Players Theatre, doesn’t buy the common perception of this embattled woman as “a crazy person.” Arnold sees Blanche as a scarred fighter who never gives up her struggle to survive, even at the end.