Articles by Lawrence B. Johnson
Grant Park Chorus director Christopher Bell, newly lauded, cues troops for ‘War Requiem’
Preview: On a vigorous summer schedule for the Grant Park Chorus and its lately honored director, performances of Benjamin Britten’s monumental “War Requiem” June 28-29 pose the kind of challenges that choristers live for. “A piece of music has to weather the storms of time, and the ‘War Requiem’ has shown its staying power,” says Grant Park Chorus director Christopher Bell, who earlier this month received a lifetime achievement award at Chorus America’s annual convention in Seattle.
‘The Three Musketeers’ at Lifeline: Acrobatics meet melodrama in a one-for-all free-for-all
Review: If Alexandre Dumas’ historical novel “The Three Musketeers” is a romantic adventure of epic proportions, Lifeline Theatre’s adaptation for the stage is a busy amusement, a shrunken likeness that has its appealing features but falls well short of capturing either the bravura spirit or the inherent drama of the original. ★★
Riccardo Muti turns spotlight on CSO Chorus with lustrous account of Verdi ‘Sacred Pieces’
Review: Riccardo Muti, winding up his third season as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this weekend, led the orchestra and Chicago Symphony Chorus on a spiritual voyage Thursday night, from luminous Mozart and rapturous Vivaldi to a transcendental peak in Verdi’s glorious “Four Sacred Pieces.” Performances continue through Sunday. ★★★★★
American Players Theatre offers Shakespeare, Friel, Stoppard in a festival mix in the woods
Preview: What’s in a name? American Players Theatre, which has been filling summers with drama since 1980 in the woods of Spring Green, Wis., doesn’t trade on the Shakespeare brand. But in every aspect of making theater, from staging to vocal delivery to its choice of plays, this ambitious enterprise hews to the Bard as its reference point. In the 2013 mix of eight plays, which opens June 15, APT includes a typical infusion of Shakespeare, a stylistic sweep from “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” and “Hamlet” to “Antony and Cleopatra.”
Role Playing: Ora Jones had to find her way into Katherine’s frayed world in ‘Henry VIII’
Interview: Ora Jones, so assured and imposing as Queen Katherine in “Henry VIII” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, was just as confident she had blown her audition for the part. And that wasn’t such a bad thing, she thought – because Katherine’s great speech in her trial scene, the very audition piece that Jones would come to deliver with authentic majesty, had left the actor essentially mystified.
Eight hot Chicago plays you should have seen come round again in Theater on the Lake fest
Preview: Theater director Halena Kays is exaggerating only slightly when she refers to the million plays you’d have to see if you hoped to catch every show in a Chicago season. That’s the beauty of Theater on the Lake, the summer reprise of eight top productions that opens June 12 with original casts reassembled. It’s a bonus round for theater-goers who simply ran out of nights.
Behind forbidden love in ‘West Side Story,’ clashing views of what’s right in America
Preview: The crux of conflict in the musical “West Side Story” may be the time-honored insanity of warring factions – the Sharks and the Jets in this case – but the play is also a portrait of cultural assimilation and clashing perspectives on what an immigrant group has to gain and what it risks losing. This American classic comes to the Oriental Theatre on June 11 in a version modeled on the latest Broadway production, even to the use of Spanish dialogue.
Muti and Chicago Symphony embrace spirit, time-stretching cosmos of ‘Divine’ Scriabin
Review: There’s a hypnotic enchantment about Alexander Scriabin’s sprawling, sensual “Divine Poem,” and its magic worked at full pitch in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s luxurious performance with music director Riccardo Muti Friday afternoon at Orchestra Hall. ★★★★
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. ★★★★
Stellar cast of Chicago jazz musicians tunes up for free summer concerts on museum terrace
Preview: When Chicago bassist Junius Paul opened the Museum of Contemporary Art’s outdoor jazz series Tuesdays on the Terrace last June, he met a new definition of hot jazz.“It was 100 degrees. It was sooo hot,” he recalls with a laugh. “But we still packed in a good crowd. It’s always good. People come from everywhere.” This year’s summer-long lineup of 17 concerts featuring Chicago jazz musicians, all free to Illinois residents, kicks off June 4 with trumpeter Corey Wilkes and friends. And while the jazz will cook, the air temperature should be nowhere near triple digits.
Role Playing: Kareem Bandealy tapped roots, hit books to form warlord in ‘Blood and Gifts’
Interview: Our guy – the American – in J.T. Rogers’ play “Blood and Gifts,” about the United States’ clandestine effort to blunt the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, is a CIA agent. We see the unfolding events through his eyes. But the character who elicits our sympathy and commands our imagination is an Afghan warlord called Abdullah Khan. He is made credible flesh and elusive spirit at TimeLine Theatre in a riveting performance by Kareem Bandealy, who says his portrait reflects both his own cultural heritage and the desperation that drives this unpredictable warrior.
‘The Misanthrope’ at Court: Rants that rhyme keep laughs coming in crisp, modern Molière
Review: When Molière’s satiric play “The Misanthrope” first came to the stage in 1666, at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris, its mockery of society as duplicitous, self-aggrandizing and narcissistic must have had audiences teary-eyed with laughter. Just so is Court Theatre’s deliciously decadent new production LOL stuff. Indeed, director Charles Newell’s imaginative, sharply executed enterprise is simply not to be missed. ★★★★
‘In the Company of Men’ at Profiles: The boys will have their vengeance; then love walks in
Review: ★★★★
Australian drama troupe transcends handicaps with serio-comedy full of backstage laughter
Review: If the title “Ganesh Versus the Third Reich” provokes more than the usual curiosity about fresh dramatic fare, the play itself — presented by the ensemble that created it, Australia’s Back to Back Theatre – leaves one hardly less perplexed upon emerging from the experience. “Ganesh” displays a singular aspect of beauty, even sweetness, until it takes a bitter turn and dissipates as if into a vacuum, into nothingness. ★★★
Latvian Andris Nelsons follows James Levine as Boston Symphony Orchestra music director
Report: Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons was named Thursday as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Nelsons will become officially installed as the BSO’s 15th music director effective with the 2014-15 season, but meanwhile will act as music director-designate for the 2013-14 season.
Role Playing: Eva Barr explored two personas of Alzheimer’s victim to find center of ‘Alice’
Interview: To watch Eva Barr play out the progressive, early-onset dementia of the woman at the center of “Still Alice” at Lookingglass Theatre is to forget you’re looking at the subtle, skillful work of an actor. Yet hardly less remarkable is the way Barr arrived at the role: She began, in first readings with playwright-director Christine Mary Dunford, by taking a different part, an alternate Alice – a separate character Dunford identifies simply as Herself.
‘Vera Stark’ aims a satiric lens at Hollywood stereotype of black film characters in 1930s
Review: ★★
‘Blood and Gifts’ at TimeLine: Blood-soaked Afghanistan as pawn in U.S.-Russian faceoff
Review: ★★★★★
CSO Rivers Festival explores the enchantment of waterways, their impact on human history
Preview: Literally and metaphorically, rivers seem to flow in every direction across our lives; indeed, across life. It’s not hard to see how the Chicago Symphony Orchestra might have hit on the concept of its Rivers Festival, a multifaceted month-long exploration and tribute that opens musically May 9 at Orchestra Hall.
Oh, what a beautiful show: Lyric ‘Oklahoma!’ sweeps the plain with bounty of song, dance
Review: ★★★★★
Opportunist meets shrewd socialite, and his match, in Porchlight’s vivacious ‘Pal Joey’
Review: ★★★★
‘The Happiest Song Plays Last’ at Goodman: Counterpoint of old guilt and quest for grace
Review: ★★★★★
It’s a pianistic happening as Evgeny Kissin treats adoring listeners to a musical bounty
Review: After the third encore in pianist Evgeny Kissin’s recital Sunday afternoon at Orchestra Hall, the hundreds of listeners still on hand switched into an insistent, stentorian applause. The Russian virtuoso came through with one last bonus, a thundering roll through Chopin’s Prelude in D minor, Op. 28, No. 24; and with that, another phenomenal exhibition was over. ★★★★★
Day in Rhineland: Muti, Chicago Symphony translate Schumann Third into vivid travelogue
Review: Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 3 in E-flat isn’t known as the “Rhenish” for nothing. I felt very much like Schumann’s Rhine-journeying companion Thursday night, listening to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s radiant performance of the Third Symphony conducted by music director Riccardo Muti. ★★★★
‘Still Alice’ at Lookingglass: When dementia seizes a woman’s life, a family is measured
Review: In her play “Still Alice,” author and director Christine Mary Dunford employs a graphic metaphor to illustrate the disintegrating world of Alice, a victim of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Throughout the play, now in its world premiere run at Lookingglass Theatre, Alice’s kitchen appliances disappear one by one, until nothing remains – until the locus, the defining “here,” of this woman’s life is no longer there. ★★★★
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.
Love, loss and broken souls framed in tangos: COT etches dolor of ‘María de Buenos Aires’
Review: Bittersweet remembrance with a tango pulse hangs over the surreal mindscape of “María de Buenos Aires,” the operatic love story created – perhaps the right word is insinuated – by composer Astor Piazzolla and poet Horacio Ferrer, and staged with bold, evocative imagination at Chicago Opera Theater. ★★★★
As dancing dame on high seas, Rachel York heads up motley tour crew of ‘Anything Goes’
Preview: Rachel York, slyly sinful Reno Sweeney in the Roundabout Theatre production of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” headed for Chicago, sees herself in the proud line of those indomitable dames of 1930s Hollywood.
