Review: One well might argue that Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” is a less than perfect play. But the neatly framed picture of hypocrisy at its core is so clear, indeed so ringingly universal in its human embrace, that it resonates in any culture. Witness the Russian-language production (with English supertitles) that officially popped the cork Jan. 27 on Shakespeare 400 Chicago, a yearlong aggregation of events dramatic and otherwise spearheaded by Chicago Shakespeare Theater. ★★★★
Read the full story »Preview: John Sanders, who portrays the psychopathic Black Stache in the Peter Pan back-story play “Peter and the Starcatcher,” can’t stop talking about the physical demands of the touring show, which comes to the Bank of America Theatre on April 2 under the aegis of Broadway in Chicago.
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.
Interview: In creating his musical “Into the Woods,” composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim perhaps viewed the witch’s show-stopping number about her vegetable garden as a direct descendant of the patter songs long associated with Gilbert and Sullivan. But to Hillary Marren, who plays the old crone in The Hypocrites’ imaginative staging, the veggie song is exactly what it sounds like in her disarming, rapid-fire delivery — a very smart rap.
Review: It’s a good trick, reducing an epic – and I might add really famous – novel like Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” to two hours’ worth of narrative and dialogue, and yet preserving the psychological and dramatic dimensions that make the story compelling. Credit Lifeline Theatre with doing just that. ★★★
Review: As surely as the truth will out, so will literary genius, even if the latter eventuality involves a great deal of personal angst and interpersonal, well, relations and unleashes gales of laughter. I’m talking about Haven Theatre’s sharp-edged take on Theresa Rebeck’s comedy “Seminar,” a riotous exploration of language shared by a group of aspiring writers and their mentor as they delve between the lines and dive between the sheets. ★★★★★
Review: Riccardo Muti’s season-long traversal of the complete Schubert symphonies with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has a few stops remaining, but it’s hard to imagine the musical arc rising much higher than the “Great” C major Symphony heard March 20 at Orchestra Hall.
Review: Vanda careens into the playwright-director’s audition room as if she’s been tossed there by the storm that’s booming and flashing outside. Hair tousled, mini-skirted and discombobulated, she wrestles with her wet umbrella and a large bag she’s brought, spewing F-words as the amazed author looks on. But Vanda has only begun to amaze this guy, Thomas, in David Ives’ startling play “Venus in Fur.” It’s an incendiary night out at Goodman Theatre. ★★★★
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.
Review: “Elliot: A Soldier’s Fugue,” the first play in Quiara Alegría Hudes’ trilogy about the moral and psychological distress of a Marine back from duty in Iraq, almost captured the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The trilogy’s second installment, “Water by the Spoonful,” won the Pulitzer, and the merits that pushed it over the top are evident in every nuance, impulse, collision and aspiration of the current production at Court Theatre. ★★★★★
Review: Leif Ove Andsnes’ physically exuberant all-Beethoven program at Orchestra Hall — an ingenious traversal from Op. 22 to Op. 101, from Beethoven at age 30 to Beethoven at 46 — followed one week after the Japanese-British pianist Mitsuko Uchida’s fiercely poetic reading of the “Diabelli” Variations. It was the second time this season that the series has offered such back-to-back interpretive contrasts of a single composer.
Review: Meet boxer Joe Bonaparte: smart kid, tough, determined, wickedly fast hands. And one more thing, self-destructive. You could say Joe, the anti-hero of Clifford Odets’ classic 1937 play “Golden Boy,” launches his own career, hurtles himself into a high orbit. The beauty, if that’s the word, of Nate Santana’s portrayal of this increasingly ugly character, in Griffin Theatre’s punchy production, is that you can’t take your eyes off him even as he pummels his life into a bruised mess. ★★★★
Report: The legacy of Ray Still as an unforgettable musician is preserved not only in the dozens of recordings he made through four decades as principal oboe of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but also in the vivid memories of musicians whose lives he influenced, among them Eugene Izotov and Michael Henoch, the CSO’s current principal oboe and assistant principal.
Review: There’s an infamous jest that if you ask six reviewers about the same event, you’ll get seven different opinions. As there is more than a grain of truth in that, conductor Mei-Ann Chen surely is entitled to put a notch in her baton after winning a consensus of enthusiasm from a dozen arts writers from across the U.S. and Canada following her guest appearance March 9 with the Sarasota Orchestra.
Review: Mozart died in 1791 just months after writing “La Clemenza di Tito,” about the first-century Roman emperor Titus and his struggle to rule with generosity of spirit. Performances are still a rarity, and the most successful aspect of the production at the Lyric Opera of Chicago is the unmistakable fineness of the music itself. ★★★
Review: We cannot watch or read the likes of Brian Friel’s “Translations” or Martin McDonagh’s “The Cripple of Inishmaan” without sensing the sublimated presence of John Millington Synge’s 1907 comedy “The Playboy of the Western World.” It is a cornerstone of modern Irish theater, and it’s all there in Raven Theatre’s idiomatic staging — the brisk dialect and wry humor, the tumbling physicality and muted hues, the seed and genesis of everything we love about Irish drama in the present tense. ★★★★
Preview: Jamaican-born dancer Teneisha Bonner is a seasoned theater veteran, but she admits she had no idea of the world-widening experience awaiting her in the multi-ethnic dance spectacle that is “Heartbeat of Home.” The new extravaganza, from the same team that created “Riverdance,” makes its U.S. debut in Chicago on Tuesday night at the Oriental Theatre for a run through March 16.
Report: Ravinia Festival music director James Conlon leads Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Don Giovanni,” soprano Patricia Racette stars in Strauss’ grisly “Salome” and Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki makes her festival debut in the 2014 summer series announced Thursday.
Review: As Tracey Scott Wilson’s urban tragi-comedy “Buzzer” spins through a series of introductory monologues, its mordant wit and coalescing picture of a ménage à trois suggests an updated bundling of the two young men and a woman in Noel Coward’s “Design for Living.” Though the laughs keep coming in “Buzzer,” the comedy soon hones the edges of a bitter tale — of love and hope infected by torment and fear. Goodman Theatre serves it up as potent brew. ★★★★
Review: The musical legacy of Antonín Dvořák has always held favor with the public and esteem among musicians. Until recently, however, few this side of Prague would have mentioned Dvorak’s opera “Rusalka” with his most important works, much less listed it with the greatest achievements in the operatic canon. But the Lyric Opera’s first-ever production of “Rusalka,” a musical fairy tale of consummate beauty and profound humanity, dictates acknowledgement of this opera in the first rank of music-dramas. ★★★★★
Review: The Chicago Opera Theater and the Chicago Jazz Orchestra production of Duke Ellington’s late-in-life and largely unfinished Harlem street opera “Queenie Pie” became the casualty of an electrical fire that has temporarily shut down the Harris. The delay adds a footnote to the saga of frustrated restoration attempts that have dogged “Queenie Pie” and left its unfulfilled potential as much in limbo as ever. ★★
Review: Even in absentia, Pierre Boulez brings an incalculable contribution to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as its conductor emeritus, artistic guru and good friend. What better example than two rarefied programs exploring Stravinsky’s musical world that Boulez fashioned and planned to conduct this weekend and next at Orchestra Hall. ★★★★★
Review: Happiness. Is it an authentic state of contentment, fulfillment, grace – or merely delusion, self-deception and denial? Playwright Robert Caisely pummels the question in “Happy,” an ironically titled session of group misery directed by Elly Green with stunning acerbity at Redtwist Theatre. ★★★
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.” ★★★★
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. ★★★★★
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.
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. ★★★
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.” ★★★★★
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. ★★★★★
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.
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.