Review: Officially, conductor Riccardo Muti holds the distinction of music director emeritus for life with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But after the 83-year-old maestro’s two-week season debut concerts at Orchestra Hall, it seems more apt to acknowledge him as the band’s artistic patriarch. When Muti’s on the podium, the CSO rises to its proper level. It glistens.
Read the full story »‘Russian Transport’ swoops into Steppenwolf, delivering dark cargo of corruption and terror
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.” ★★★★
‘Gypsy’ at Chicago Shakespeare: This Rose puts fresh blush on Sondheim’s star-gazer
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. ★★★★★
Role Playing: Mary Beth Fisher embraces both hope, despair of social worker in ‘Luna Gale’
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.
‘The How and the Why’ at TimeLine: Evolution thicker than blood as biologists clash
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. ★★★
When The Hypocrites bound ‘Into the Woods,’ something special blooms from almost nothing
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.” ★★★★★
Slick as a shave, only a lot funnier, Lyric Opera delivers brilliant ‘Barber of Seville’
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. ★★★★★
World premieres in Grant Park’s 2014 plans; conductors renew ties for festival’s 80th year
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.
Joshua Bell, violinist and adventurer, hits the city for recital trek from Tartini’s ‘Devil’ to Stravinsky
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.
Pianist Daniil Trifonov, 2 gold medals in hand, delivers an Olympian recital at Orchestra Hall
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.
‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ at Porchlight: The joint’s (almost) jumpin’ as singers ease into swing
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. ★★★
Muti, CSO and singers echo private Schubert with belated first glimpse of Mass in A-flat
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. ★★★★★
From an exotic lark for cellos to MusicNOW, CSO ventures bring heat to frosty cityscape
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.
‘Gidion’s Knot’ at Profiles: Answers hit hard when mother seeks cause of child’s suicide
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. ★★★
Muti, CSO extend his directorship to 2019-20; next season accents French, Russian music
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.”
Chicago Theatre Week: Curtain rises on Act 2 with now-eager audience on edge of its seats
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.
‘Luna Gale’ at Goodman: Groping for answers when parents are children and milk is meth
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. ★★★★★
Condemned to a brutal world, British prisoners act out their humanity in ‘Our Country’s Good’
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. ★★★
Lyric Opera’s diamond anniversary will spotlight Fleming and Serjan amid stellar cast of singers
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.”
Carl Nielsen’s merry ‘Maskarade’ a rare, tasty treat as Vox 3 Collective stages Danish romp
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. ★★★
‘Seven Guitars’ at Court: Director Ron Parson and smart cast tap beauty, pain of Wilson play
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. ★★★★★
Joining revival of Soviet composer Weinberg, Lyric plans Holocaust opera ‘The Passenger’
Report: Mieczysław Weinberg, perhaps the best Soviet composer you never heard of, was the “other story” at a Lyric Opera of Chicago press conference Jan. 17 when a new Wagner “Ring” Cycle was announced. But Weinberg’s recently revived opera, “The Passenger,” inspired by a Holocaust novel, is making the international rounds and will arrive at the Chicago Lyric in early 2015, as excitement grows for this prolific composer and esteemed friend of Shostakovich.
Role Playing: Brad Armacost switched brothers to do blind, boozy character in ‘The Seafarer’
Interview: Brad Armacost’s earthy, funny and deceptively nuanced portrait of the blind, drunken brother of a lost soul in Conor McPherson’s “The Seafarer” was shaped in part, he says, by a blessing and a curse. How Irish that both circumstances should spring from the same source. Armacost’s performance as the devoutly plastered Richard Harkin, in Seanachai Theatre’s brilliant go at “The Seafarer,” is his second pass at the play in recent Chicago seasons.
Showing 2020 vision, Lyric Opera reveals plan for new production of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ Cycle
Report: With headliners Christine Goerke and Eric Owens — two breakthrough American Wagner singers that everyone is seeking – Lyric Opera of Chicago announced Friday that it will embark on a new David Pountney production of the “Ring” Cycle starring Owens as the great god Wotan and Goerke as Brünnhilde, his beloved Valkyrie daughter. The cycle’s four operas are to be unveiled one by one in consecutive seasons beginning in 2016-17, and then in total-immersion festival form, over the course of three weeks in April 2020.
Pianist Eschenbach, baritone Goerne plunge into churning stream of Schubert’s ‘Müllerin’
Preview: Baritone Matthias Goerne and pianist Christoph Eschenbach have collaborated many times on Schubert’s famous song-cycles – including the tragic “Schöne Müllerin,” which they will perform Jan. 19 at Orchestra Hall. It is an ever-evolving dramatic adventure, says Eschenbach, literally a flowing river which these two actors, baritone and pianist, can never experience twice in the same way.
‘Solstice’ at A Red Orchid: In everyman’s land, house divided crashes down on life, innocence
Review: It is a tragedy as timeless as it is trackless, Zinnie Harris’ “Sostice,” now in its U.S. premiere run at A Red Orchid Theatre. Tellingly, the play is set nowhere in particular, though more or less in the present. But the divided people, the shattered family, the loss of innocence, the appalling cost of violent conflict – these things register with immediacy, with photographic clarity. ★★★
Chicago Symphony on Tour: It’s a red-carpet welcome and rave reviews in Spain’s Canarias
Report: The sail-like hall on the shore of Tenerife, one of Spain’s Canary Islands off the African coast, was home for two concerts by the touring Chicago Symphony Orchestra this week. The famous archipelago is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its winter music festival, where music director Riccardo Muti and the CSO were headliners. Now, they’re off to Germany.
Lyric Opera’s ‘Butterfly,’ with spellbinding new cast, beautifully frames a soprano’s fine art
Review: Soprano Racette may not look like a fragile 15-year-old Japanese bride, but then few dramatic sopranos who specialize in Italian opera do. Yet Racette is one of those singing actresses who can make you believe just about anything, so sincere is her art and so particular her skills. ★★★★
Chicago Symphony on Tour: Flight snafu resolved, musicians open series in Canary Islands
Report: Music director Riccardo Muti and the CSO are set to give four performances in the Canary Islands Jan. 10-14. Spain’s idyllic archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa offers architecturally striking concert halls. But the touring musicians were no less subject to travel woes in Chicago’s frigid winter than the rest of us, missing their Madrid connection.
Co-stars of ‘Ghost The Musical’ agree: Magic dwells in unchained illusions, mystic melody
Preview: Onstage romance doesn’t come more charged or emotionally draining than the supernatural stuff of “Ghost The Musical,” says Katie Postotnik, co-star of the nationally touring production that opens Jan. 8 at the Oriental Theatre.
With Sir John Falstaff as an overstuffed delight, CST romps in ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’
Review: You never know what pared-down, free-wheeling adaptation of Shakespeare you’re going to get at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. But even for CST, its 1940s setting of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” complete with a musical track of period pop tunes, takes fast-and-loose into a new dimension. It’s also a complete delight. ★★★★
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