Here’s the press release from Harris Theater:

MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV, LANG LANG, CHRISTOPH ESCHENBACH, STEPHEN SONDHEIM, EVELYN GLENNIE AND KATHLEEN BATTLE HEADLINE HARRIS THEATER FOR MUSIC AND DANCE 2009-2010 HARRIS THEATER PRESENTS SEASON

SIXTH SEASON AT THE HARRIS FEATURES CHICAGO PREMIERES, HARRIS THEATER DEBUTS AND EXTRAORDINARY ARTISTS

SUBSCRIPTION AND TICKET PRICES REDUCED

CHICAGO, May 6, 2009 – The Harris Theater for Music and Dance today announced its Harris Theater Presents 2009-2010 season.  The schedule of Harris Theater Presents events features nine programs, a remarkable thirteen Chicago premieres and includes an impressive and diverse selection of music, dance and conversation by internationally acclaimed artists and ensembles. Highlights of the Harris Theater Presents 2009-2010 season include a rare opportunity to see Mikhail Baryshnikov in a solo dance performance, an evening of insight with the “Master of the Musical,” Stephen Sondheim, the Harris debut of Lang Lang under the baton of his mentor Maestro Christoph Eschenbach, the Chicago premiere of Orquestra de São Paulo with virtuoso percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, Kathleen Battle’s unusual program of holiday spirituals, and much more. Read the rest of this entry »

"The Day of Knowledge" was first produced as part of Leap Fest 4/Photo: Ryan Ward Thompson

By Monica Westin

Leap Fest, one of the strongest new-play festivals in town for five years running, goes into its sixth incarnation this month. The festival is unique in subject matter, focusing on sociopolitical and overly political plays, which other companies might shy away from, and three Leap Fest plays have gone on to win Jeff Awards, so the odds of seeing one of next year’s Jeff Award-winners is uncannily high. I spoke with Drew Martin, the interim co-artistic director (along with David Alan Moore), about what to expect at Leap Fest 6.

Leap Fest is known as a powerhouse new-play festival, and the Jeff Award record certainly attests to its strength. How do you choose the plays, and what’s exciting to you about the process?

I attribute the Jeff odds to the selection process. The plays we choose are whittled down from hundreds, and we read them over and over and argued about them. We’ve done plays in the past from all over the country and internationally. This year, four of the five playwrights are from Chicago, which isn’t intentional because we don’t target any particular demographic and it does vary from year to year. Read the rest of this entry »

Viva La Muerta Hot and Heavy Burlesque will revive slasher-flick favorites in its latest production at the Viaduct Theater on May 9. The group’s founder DanYell felt that combining her love of horror films into her burlesque show would bring their performance to a whole new level. “I felt like heavy metal and horror just go so well together,” she says. “Asking my performers to work with a horror-movie theme has really pushed them to be super creative.” The show will feature acts inspired by everything from “Evil Dead” to “Rosemary’s Baby.” DanYell was even able to get “Friday the 13th” veteran and Chicago native Ari Lehman to host the event. Expect to see more horror-themed Hot and Burlesque shows in the future. “I didn’t realize how many folks love horror films as much as I do around here,” DanYell says. “I’ve gotten such a great response to this show and there are lots of people who are super excited for a new way to experience their favorite films.”

A festival of heavily expressionist one-acts that toe the line between intriguingly fragmented/incomplete (“An Alternate Set of Procedures,” “Unnamed Time Play”), quasi-melodramatic (“Randomed Soul,” “Stunt”) and so ambiguous as to border on incoherence (“Fuckjoy,” “Demons and Monsters”). Every play is highly charged emotionally, with at least one intense screaming scene in each; but because  most have characters arguing about unknown past events or confusing present relationships, it’s sometimes hard to feel engaged. The year-long Cut to the Quick festival has been heavy on monologue overall, and “after/math” is no exception; what makes this group more challenging for an audience is that, given the thematic emphasis on characters’ memory and distinctive evasiveness in the writing, the shows are often less immediately compelling than their fervent pitch seems to necessitate. Still, the overall experience is evocative, if a bit too hysterical; curation by the side project’s Adam Webster exhibits a strong sense of how short theatrical pieces can speak to one another, with echoes between the performances that make the overall experience cogent than the individual plays. (Monica Westin)

At the side project theatre, 1439 W. Jarvis, (773)973-2150. Through May 17.

Noah Stewart and Sandra Piques Eddy/Photo: Liz Lauren

Bizet’s “Carmen” is the one opera that everybody knows, even those who have never been in an opera house.  Thanks to countless parodies, cartoons, sitcoms, plays, movies, commercials and the like, its infectious melodies bring an instant nod of recognition from even the greenest of operatic novices.  How then, to justify Peter Brook’s “La Tragédie de Carmen,” a truncated version that dumps half the music and drama, cuts the chorus, most of the orchestra, most of the characters and rearranges and reorders what little is left?  In short, everything that makes “Carmen” the grandest of grand operas goes missing here.  Clocking in at a single intermissionless act less than eighty minutes long, the only thing not cut is the title, which has bizarrely been expanded, but which could more accurately be called “Carmen remix.”  The fact that the most uplifting musical moment came when the fourteen-piece chamber orchestra was silent and a canned version of the familiar fully orchestrated “Carmen” Overture that usually starts the opera came blasting from the Harris Theater sound system towards the climax was the most persuasive argument for the emptiness of this exercise.  Sure, this version allows companies of limited resources and audiences with limited attention spans the opportunity to experience a Cliffs Notes “Carmen,” but we have come to expect so much more challenging fare from Chicago Opera Theater that I found myself genuinely puzzled by why this was being done.  Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Are there Chicago audiences for gay theater that isn’t easy to swallow?  How about for one-man shows by gay performers  that straddle the line of monologue, performance art and concert?  The night I saw Kevin Thornton’s “Sex, Dreams and Self Control,” in town for only a fist-full of shows, the audience certainly was somewhere else.  In all fairness, the 11:30pm start time on a Thursday evening may have had something to do with it, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen one man working in this genre threaten to outnumber the audience.  In this case, it really is a shame.  Thornton is engaging and funny and cute as hell as he recounts his journey from aspiring youth minister to rebellious homosexual with only himself, a microphone and a guitar.  His web site compares him to a post-Smiths Morrissey, and in fact there are moments he opens his mouth to sing that you can hear it right away.  The impressive versatility of voice shines brightest when he picks up the tempo, even when he is singing about handjobs after Bible study.  There are a few more chances to catch Thornton this weekend at The BoHo Theatre at Heartland Studios.  Gay audiences, this is our opportunity to prove we will support theater that doesn’t involve naked men, bars or Broadway in Chicago. (William Scott)

At BoHo Theatre at Heartland Studios, 7016 N. Glenwood , (866)811-4111, through May 9.

RECOMMENDED

The Museum of Contemporary Art has a stiff one for the innovative use of sound these days and I’m loving it.  Fresh off last weekend’s engagement by imaginative pop duo The Books, this week the MCA will present the North American premiere of Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin’s “Strange News,” performed by the Grammy-nominated Chicago Chamber Musicians.  In 2006 Wallin, along with director Josse de Pauw, took a reporter and cameraman to Uganda and The Democratic Republic of Congo to meet with child soldiers.  The result is a kind of chamber opera telling one boy’s story through video footage, war audio and electro-acoustic landscapes.  Wallin describes the work as, “An artistic parallel to a TV or radio documentary: a small, but informative window onto a particular matter, where the empathy with those involved is more important than dry information.”  The piece is anything but dry.  Bone-chilling might be a better description if images of children with automatic weapons make you squirm. Sharing the bill with “Strange News” will be George Crumb’s 1970 anti-Vietnam War quartet “Black Angels for Electric String Quartet.” (William Scott)

May 8 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, (312)397-4010.

RECOMMENDED

Stories like Bo Burnham’s either warm your heart or make you puke: riding a tidal wave of popularity from his amusing YouTube music videos (bemoaning his overwhelming awkwardness at parties and the underlying feeling that his family thinks he’s gay), the 18-year old Massachusetts comedian/teenager already has two records and a Comedy Central special under his belt, as well as a deal to write an upcoming Judd Apatow “anti-High School Musical” movie. That’s well and good for him, but I just wish it didn’t make the rest of us feel like we’ve massively underachieved with our lives. Regardless, Burnham’s clearly a wickedly talented kid with a ton of potential, and his material works when he disregards any restrictions from political correctness. “I want you like a lawyer slash mathematician wants some kind of proof, I want you like JFK wanted a car with a roof,” he sings on “Love Is…” from his new self-titled record. “Love is like real life porn, minus all the things that make porn cool.” (Andy Seifert)

May 8 at Lakeshore Theater, 3175 N. Broadway, (773)472-3492, 7:30pm and 10pm. $22.50.

I remember watching Gallagher’s stand-up routine back in the early nineties and, as a little kid, I naturally thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen: giant trampoline couches, crazy inventions, frizzy clown hair and—best of all—the Sledge-o-Matic mallet, with the power to violently obliterate everything from watermelons to cartons of milk to computer keyboards. Since his glory days, Gallagher’s been in the midst of some bad press, first by suing his brother, Ron Gallagher, for copying nearly every aspect of his act (which sounds like a perfect story for Dateline NBC), second for a 2005 interview when he called David Letterman, Tom Hanks and Michael Keaton terrible comedians and belittled Comedy Central for only awarding him “the 100th best stand-up of all-time.” Seems like all the hooplah sucked the life out of him, because at the age of 62, Gallagher looks pretty gray and altogether tired, and the novelty of destroying everything on God’s green earth has run its course. Comedy doesn’t have to be intellectually stimulating by any means, but Gallagher’s been staging the same glorified food fight for almost thirty years, and at some point, the whole gag turned stale. (Andy Seifert)

May 8 at Zanies in St. Charles, 4051 E. Main, (630)584-6342, and May 9 at Zanies in Vernon Hills, 230 Hawthorn Village Commons, (847)549-6030.

Jared Fernley, Stephen Dunn, John Zimmerman, Wes Clark and Ian Knox/Photo: Allen Rein

It’s tough to tackle Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” The classic has often been successfully produced on stage and screen; it’s difficult to forget Henry Fonda staring into a bleak future. But Infamous Commonwealth Theatre gamely remounts the piece as their “nature” season finale—unfortunately, with mixed results.

The Joad family’s flight from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to California lacks the urgency of a family on the brink of extinction. Jennifer Mathews captures the steel of the indomitable Ma Joad, but the rest of the ensemble greets each new tragedy as if they’ve just been told they’ve run out of pie at the local road house. Genevieve Thompson’s direction undersells the Joads’ California crossing, as well as the desperate tenderness of the climax.

Alan Donahue’s dusty, gauze-wrapped set beautifully suggests drought conditions without reenacting them. However, dragging the Joad jalopy across the stage during scene changes diminishes the show’s energy, an energy it sorely needs. (Lisa Buscani)

Infamous Commonwealth Theatre at the Raven Theatre Complex, 6157 N. Clark Street, (312)458-9780. Through May 24.