Finale would hardly be a sufficient word for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s last regular concert of the season, a transcendent performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony conducted by 82-year-old Bernard Haitink. It was more like a consummation. Or perhaps summation. This exquisite, valedictory Mahler seemed to total up everything I have admired for decades about Haitink as musician, artist and thinker. A few days after that June 5 concert I came across an interview Haitink did with The Guardian in 2009 when he was conducting ...

► Read the entire post

  Review: “Wozzeck,” opera by Alban Berg, Metropolitan Opera, New York; “Woyzeck,” play by Georg Büchner, collaboration by About Face and Hypocrites theater companies at the Chopin Theatre, Chicago The first opera I came to know really well, as a college student, was nothing so conventionally tuneful or romantic as Verdi’s “La Traviata” or Puccini’s “La Boheme.” What nailed my attention, and nudged me down the path toward criticism, was ...

► Read the entire post

  With the maestro’s illness-plagued start now receding into a footnote, Riccardo Muti’s music directorship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is swiftly blossoming into something special. The level of music-making I’ve witnessed in recent weeks, at Orchestra Hall in Chicago and at Carnegie Hall in New York, points to a singular meeting of minds, a rapport between conductor and orchestra that is fundamentally creative, at once artistic and intellectual. At age 69, Muti has nothing to prove musically but ...

► Read the entire post

Review: “The Front Page,” by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur TimeLine Theatre, Chicago In its unvarnished original 1928 form, “The Front Page” isn’t just dark comedy. It’s disturbing to watch, this portrait of the newspaper game as the fiefdom of crass, unprincipled reporters and editors, good old boys as cynical and perverse as the corrupt politicians they covered. Viewed through that clear cultural lens, TimeLine Theatre’s tumultuous, ...

► Read the entire post

Review: “Heartbreak House,” by G.B. Shaw Writers’ Theatre, Chicago German planes rumble in the night sky over Sussex, England, and as their bombs detonate ever closer to the residence of Capt. Shotover, one of his several guests takes decisive action. He runs from room to room turning on all the lights to make a brighter, clearer target for the airborne raiders. Is this fellow mad? Does he wish to die? The answer to the first question is, probably not; and to the ...

► Read the entire post

Review: “The Madness of George III,” by Alan Bennett Chicago Shakespeare Theatre The magic of Alan Bennett’s engrossing and substantial play “The Madness of George III” depends on a king who can rule the stage in every state of mind. This production boasts a monarch, played by Harry Groener, who commands the heart utterly, whether in coiffed authority or careening about in soiled undergarments, his dignity in tatters and his reign in peril. And yet ...

► Read the entire post

Review: “Orlando,” adapted from Virginia Woolf by Sarah Ruhl Court Theatre, Chicago What a thorny and enigmatic subject is the life-long process that leads toward human understanding and indeed self-knowledge. In her fanciful and yet serious fictional-biography “Orlando,” Virginia Woolf suggested that meandering pathway of discovery, of comprehending the world wholly, through the eyes of a woman as well as a man, might require a good deal more than  a ...

► Read the entire post

Review: “Hercules,” by G.F. Handel Lyric Opera of Chicago If the essence of a classic artwork is timelessness, the Lyric Opera makes the case for Handel’s “Hercules” by ripping it from costumed antiquity and giving it modern context and fresh urgency. The opera’s luxurious but stylistically challenging music, reflecting the agony of souls bruised by the devastation of war, is imbued with brilliance and depth by a cast of singers who indeed ...

► Read the entire post

Review: “Sex With Strangers,” by Laura Eason Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago “Sex With Strangers” has a good deal to do with sex, or at least talk about sex, but a good deal more to do with other enthusiasms like money, fame, manipulation and control. Sally Murphy and Stephen Louis Grush give smart, edgy, laugh-out-loud performances in playwright Laura Eason’s two-hander about a pair of writers whose wildly different paths just happen to lead to the same ...

► Read the entire post

Review: “Eclipsed,” by Danai Gurira Northlight Theatre, Chicago Four Liberian women in Danai Gurira’s “Eclipsed” are in survival mode. They are effectively prisoners, property, concubines of a warlord in the midst of a revolution. They live each day on the precipice. Taken from their homes, most of their loved ones killed, they obey and wait for they know not what. Their lives are in eclipse. Gurira, who pronounces her name G’rira, is the ...

► Read the entire post

Review: ‘The New Electric Ballroom,’ by Enda Walsh A Red Orchid Theatre, Chicago Enda Walsh’s “The New Electric Ballroom,” now on brilliant display at A Red Orchid Theatre, may induce a sense of déjà-vu in anyone who saw the remarkable production of Walsh’s “The Walworth Farce” given in Chicago last year by Ireland’s Druid Theatre. In both plays, one feels palpably caught up in the psychological tape loops that ...

► Read the entire post

Review: “Three Tall Women,” by Edward Albee Court Theatre, Chicago She is Everywoman. Well, perhaps not just any woman. She’s quite wealthy. But here’s the leveler. She’s 91 years old, maybe 92. She gets mixed up about that, and a lot of other things. And she’s dying. She doesn’t have a name, this willowy old lady in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women.” She doesn’t need a name. Albee calls her simply A, but she is ...

► Read the entire post

Review: “As You Like It,” by William Shakespeare Chicago Shakespeare Theatre To the inexorable swing of a towering clock’s pendulum, pretty youths love, a deposed duke awaits a better fate and a courtly fool beguiles the time in pursuit of a lusty shepherdess. All while we observers forget the hour in the enchantment of Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s “As You Like It.” Tick-tock. Though designer Kevin Depinet’s grand, ever-present ...

► Read the entire post

Review: "The Trinity River Plays," by Regina Taylor Goodman Theatre, Chicago When you’re lost to the world, lost in your own heart, sometimes the place to find yourself is where you started. Back where truth, like family and the river, is eternal. But it’s an ugly truth that abides with Iris, the aspiring young writer who flowers into a successful author in Regina Taylor’s three-part, long-arching “Trinity River Plays.” Iris, whom we first ...

► Read the entire post

Review: Puccini’s "La Fanciulla del West" Lyric Opera of Chicago Puccini’s take on the Gold Rush days of the American frontier, “La Fanciulla del West,” hangs around the fringes of the composer’s canon – and indeed the general repertoire – as something of an oddity, infrequently staged and, in its unfamiliarity, modestly prized. The title’s usual rendering in English as “The Girl of the Golden West,” faintly ...

► Read the entire post

Review: “Home” by Samm-Art Williams Court Theatre, Chicago Home may be simply a place in the heart, but getting there can be an arduous journey. Cephus  Miles, a black man full of love and goodness, discovers just how long, convoluted and difficult that trip can be in playwright Samm-Art Williams’ “Home,” now on affectionate and soul-warming display at the Court Theatre. Williams, 64, born Samuel Arthur Williams in Burgaw, N.C., began his own ...

► Read the entire post

Review: “To Master the Art” Timeline Theatre, Chicago You can almost smell the savory food being prepared in “To Master the Art,” William Brown and Doug Frew’s new play about the blossoming of that incomparable maîtresse de la cuisine, Julia Child. Hey, wait a minute – you really can smell those shallots simmering in butter, just as Julia does in a revelatory moment at a little restaurant shortly after her arrival in France in 1948. That ...

► Read the entire post

Review: Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” at the Lyric Opera of Chicago Verdi’s 1859 opera “Un Ballo in Maschera” may be saddled with one of the weakest story lines the composer ever had to deal with, but it is a veritable garden of musical delights. And the Lyric Opera, in a staging of singular intimacy and conviction, gathers Verdi’s blossoms into bouquets of vocal splendor. It’s bizarre to think that “Un Ballo in ...

► Read the entire post

Review: Orchestre de Paris, Paavo Jarvi conducting; Elisabeth Leonskaya, piano, at the Salle Pleyel, Paris Each time I’ve heard the Orchestre de Paris on its home turf in recent years, I’ve wondered why this fine ensemble typically does not come up in conversations about the world’s great orchestras. In any case, whether because it doesn’t visit the United States very often or its recordings are unfamiliar to us, American critics seem to undervalue the Orchestre de Paris. I find it ...

► Read the entire post

Review: Orchestre de Paris, Andris Nelsons conducting; pianist Michaela Ursuleasa. Salle des Concerts, Cité de la Musique, Paris Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons’ intriguing program with the Orchestre de Paris on Oct. 29 featured two works with philosophical overtones by Richard Strauss, the late “Metamorphosen” for 23 strings and the opulently orchestrated “Also sprach Zarathustra,” written nearly 50 earlier. ...

► Read the entire post

Review: Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago Occasionally, the manifestation of a great theater company can rival the brilliance of the play at hand. Case in point: the Goodman Theatre’s thoroughly rewarding production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” Viewed from any perspective – director Robert Falls’ uncluttered concept, designer Todd Rosenthal’s barely adorned deep-thrust  stage, the uniformly fluent and specific ...

► Read the entire post

Review: Edward Albee’s “At Home at the Zoo” at Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre, Chicago Peter and Ann are cruising along in a marital comfort zone. Which means he’s bored and she’s angry – at him. She’s seething, actually, with a feral rage. Ann even fantasizes about regressing into animalistic ferocity. And so Peter retreats further into the ennui of his work as a book editor. Until suddenly, astonishingly, it is he who finds himself with blood on his claws. ...

► Read the entire post

Review: David Mamet’s "Oleanna" and "Speed-the-Plow" at American Theatre Company, Chicago You have to love playwright David Mamet’s brand of cynicism. It is unbending, relentless and concise. To which one must add, virtuosic. One helping of Mamet’s dark view of the human spirit invariably requires some time to process, which perhaps explains why the American Theater Company is doing his two short plays “Oleanna” and “Speed-the-Plow” not as a ...

► Read the entire post

Review: Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet" at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre The rewards of Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s “Romeo and Juliet” are substantial, and they take the viewer to rare levels of energy, insight and humanity in what is arguably the most devastating of Shakespeare’s plays. Yet almost as imposing are the problems in this production, which steadily loses focus through the second half, with Ariel Shafir’s bravura Mercurio removed from the picture ...

► Read the entire post

Review: Bizet’s “Carmen”  at the Lyric Opera of Chicago Bizet’s ever-popular “Carmen” must be the closest thing to a sure-fire winner in the operatic canon. With its alluring anti-heroine and a score replete with great tunes so familiar that most of the audience could sing along, it’s a virtual slam-dunk. Except when it isn’t, quite. Such a rule-proving exception is a revival of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “Carmen” that first came to ...

► Read the entire post

Review: Chicago Symphony Orchestra Pierre Boulez, conductor, at Orchestra Hall. It was hard to know what to admire most about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s eloquent and evocative turn through Mahler’s Seventh Symphony on Oct. 14 at Orchestra Hall: the sheer intellectual virtuosity of the composer, the front-to-back brilliance of the orchestra or the illuminating mastery of conductor Pierre Boulez. However you measure it, this Mahler – a hastily determined replacement for the Cherubini ...

► Read the entire post

Review: Lisa D’Amour’s “Detroit” at Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago When a new play leaves its author’s hands, it ceases to be a specific private conception and becomes the mutable object of interpretation. Its ever-evolving meaning derives from the experience and insight of the next director­­, cast and audience. I was reminded of this simple truth by the disjunction between my viewing of Lisa D’Amour’s play “Detroit,” in its world premiere run at ...

► Read the entire post

Review: Paul Mullin’s “Louis Slotin Sonata”  at A Red Orchid Theatre, Chicago Almost as enduring as the work of nuclear physicist Louis Slotin, who helped to create the first atomic bomb and later pushed that envelope, are the horrific circumstances of his death from radiation poisoning. Slotin, a Canadian whose brilliance won him a place in the Manhattan Project, died in May 1946, at age 35, the result of his own error in a Los Alamos laboratory test that ...

► Read the entire post

While the Chicago Symphony Orchestra waits for some clear sign that all is going to be well with its ailing new music director, Riccardo Muti, CSO patrons – and critics – are having an unexpected adventure with stand-in conductors and unforeseen repertoire. The first such replacement encounter, Oct. 7-9, brought the impressive CSO subscription debut of Israeli conductor Asher Fisch, who kept the program Muti had planned, including an excursion through Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 in E-flat (“Eroica”) that ...

► Read the entire post

Eye of newt and brilliant singing, wing of bat and stunning sets. Stir in fetching witches, add some oddly flavored staging and you have the steamy cauldron that is Verdi’s “Macbeth” at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. In baritone Thomas Hampson as Macbeth and soprano Nadja Michael as his grasping, murderous wife, the Lyric’s season opener boasts two dramatic voices that could well make Verdi’s concise opera fly on a bare stage. But far from barren, designer James Noone’s sweeping, steely sets embrace ...

► Read the entire post

Music director may be the conventional name for an orchestra’s chief conductor, but artistic director more accurately defines the best of them. As much as anything, it is Riccardo Muti’s creative and purposeful programming that’s bringing such excitement and promise to his new directorship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The Sept. 30 concert at Orchestra Hall, which matched symphonies by Haydn and Mozart, provided a telling case in point. By choosing less familiar works, both early and late, from each composer, Muti ...

► Read the entire post

The Goodman Theatre’s staging of Leonard Bernstein’s ever-problematic musical “Candide,” in a new adaptation by Mary Zimmerman, brings to mind Touchstone’s conflicted assessment of his new life in the country compared with his erstwhile surroundings at court. In respect that Zimmerman’s rethinking of “Candide” lends new coherence to an ill-formed play, it pleaseth me well; in respect that it still suffers from longueurs and an impression of one joke repeated ad nauseum, ’tis tedious. ...

► Read the entire post

The confluence of conductor Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra looks like the making of a heavenly stream. In Muti's official debut Sept. 23 as the CSO’s 10th music director, conductor and orchestra delivered a performance of Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique” of consummate finesse while fashioning the work’s tormented rhetoric into exquisite poetry. The “Symphonie” is fantastique in the sense of phantasmagorical, a welling of disturbed images in the mind of a ...

► Read the entire post

It was a banner night for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the spectacular public welcoming of conductor Riccardo Muti as its 10th music director. But more than that, at a time when American orchestras are reeling from the effects of an economic slump, it was a profoundly encouraging sign of the health and prospects of classical music. The free concert Sunday evening at Chicago’s handsome Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park drew not just a big crowd, it drew a sea of humanity – upward of 25,000 people, according to ...

► Read the entire post

Time was when "classical" music flowed ever fresh from the inspiration of the moment. It was called improvisation, and it was considered fundamental to the art of composer-performers like Mozart and Beethoven. That was before the classical tradition became standardized, formalized, cast in stone. I was recently reminded of that long-ago creative world, as I was covering the prodigious Detroit International Jazz Festival. Performances by great musicians like trumpeter Terence Blanchard, saxophonist Branford Marsalis, bassist ...

► Read the entire post

            Pianist Cecile Licad, whose romantic temperament is well documented and whose interest in chamber music is far reaching, takes both proclivities to a new place in her latest venture. She’s about to embark on a five-city tour with jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and an all-star band – to play live accompaniment for a new silent movie, "Louis," on the early life of jazz icon Louis Armstrong. ...

► Read the entire post