By Dennis Polkow

Okay, so it’s Christmas week and Newcity isn’t publishing again until January 6, so no print review of this show is able to appear before it closes on January 2. Nonetheless, there are some troubling issues raised by Light Opera Works’ production of “Hello, Dolly.”

As the world knows by now, Lyric Opera announced earlier in the month that soprano superstar Renée Fleming is becoming the company’s first-ever “creative consultant” and wants Lyric to start doing annual musicals, which will commence with “Oklahoma!” Lyric also has now performed operettas two years in a row, once a great rarity at that company which had thought for decades that operetta—let alone musical theater—was beneath the operatic mission and identity of the company.

Less known is that the Evanston-based Light Opera Works was founded thirty years ago to perform the very genre that Lyric ignored—namely, operettas—as its mainstay repertoire and core identity as the company name might suggest, and used to do exactly that, only performing musical theater pieces as a rarity. That formula has reversed itself at LOW to where operetta is now the exception—generally one out of four works per season—and musical theater the rule. The company has justified this by claiming that this is the ratio that its audiences preferred and that LOW was still contributing much to the local arts scene by showcasing musical theater works with trained singers and as they were meant to be heard with original full orchestrations and choruses, something rarely heard even on Broadway these days. Read the rest of this entry »

Krapp's Last Tape/Photo: Liz Lauren

Top 5 Shows
“The Brother/Sister Plays,” Steppenwolf
“August: Osage County,” Broadway In Chicago
“Hughie”/”Krapp’s Last Tape,” Goodman
“1001,” Collaboraction
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
—Brian Hieggelke

Top 5 Play Revivals
“A Streetcar Named Desire,” Writers’ Theatre
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Steppenwolf Young Adult
“Private Lives,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater
“After the Fall,” Eclipse Theatre
—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Performances
Brian Dennehy, “Hughie”/”Krapp’s Last Tape,” Goodman
Karen Janes Woditsch, “To Master the Art,” TimeLine
Tracy Letts, “American Buffalo,” Steppenwolf
Amy Morton, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
Mary Beth Fisher, “Seagull,” Goodman
—Brian Hieggelke

Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Those who only like their Gilbert & Sullivan served up with all of the trimmings—trained voices, full orchestrations, full chorus, et al—would be well-warned to stay away from Sean Graney’s musically minimalist version of “Pirates of Penzance.” Its famous melodies are merely approximated, by and large, by Graney’s small troupe of committed actors who dabble in singing, and Sullivan’s orchestrations are stripped down to the lowest-common-denominator guitar chords, largely strummed by the performers themselves hootenanny style, sometimes incorporating clarinet, banjo, mandolin, ukulele and accordion.

And yet the charm, energy, integrity and youth of the Hypocrites re-imagining of this familiar warhorse is so contagious and so dramatically convincing that their spirited irreverence suggests a contemporary approximation of how G & S might have been experienced in their own time. Read the rest of this entry »

Denis Lambert and John Scherer/Photo: Tanner Photography

When Irving Berlin wrote the song “White Christmas” for his 1942 film “Holiday Inn,” the story goes that he was expecting “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” the Valentine’s Day number, to be the big hit. Bing Crosby never saw the popularity of “White Christmas” coming either—he reportedly laid down the track that remains the best-selling single of all time in eighteen minutes—but it was Crosby’s gently crooning it to a country newly navigating its way through the horrors and sacrifices of World War II that ended up nostalgically reminding everybody of exactly what we were fighting for in the first place.

Ironically, though “Holiday Inn” was made during the war, the film itself exists in a warless vacuum aside from a patriotic montage of troops, weaponry and FDR shown during the Fourth of July sequence. Thus, its lavish, widescreen and Technicolor remake twelve years later made sure to refocus the attention and title on its breakout song, “White Christmas,” and that song’s own nostalgic relation to the war itself now that the country had successfully achieved victory, peace, stability and prosperity with weapons that had included songs to inspire both the front lines and the home front. Read the rest of this entry »

Amy Morton, Tracy Letts/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

Edward Albee’s iconic play from 1962, which won the Tony Award for Best Play and soon after became an acclaimed movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and her frequent husband Richard Burton, is a boxing match for acting heavyweights, where the fighters spar with words.

George and Martha, just home from a faculty party, are engaged in playful but barbed repartee that at first recalls the likes of Tracy and Hepburn and other savage wits of Hollywood lore. A new young professor Nick and his wife Honey have been invited over for cocktails after the party, though they are really just prey for George and Martha. The entire play unfolds, as the war between George and Martha escalates into something far too ugly for the silver screen, in the increasingly claustrophobic confines of their home—designed with appropriate New England academic shagginess by Todd Rosenthal—in the wee wee hours of morning.

After two decades of marriage, Martha and George are despicable creatures, or as George tells Nick, who is alarmed by the unfettered hostility, “we’re merely walking what’s left of our wits.”

Tracy Letts’ George is a worn-out shell of a man, beaten down by the one-two punch of professional disappointments suffered in the face of a father-in-law who rules the kingdom as president of the university where George toils in the history department, and a wife who seems to define her existence by letting George know what a failure he is compared to her father. “A simp,” she calls him. George half-heartedly amuses himself with social swordplay,  slicing up anyone in his range with an effortless nonchalance. Letts skillfully gives his George an air of perpetual disengagement that suggests that even this verbal gamesmanship bores him, that he’s using a mere fraction of his wit. Read the rest of this entry »

Ricardo Santos/Photo: Herbert Migdoll

RECOMMENDED

The Tchaikovsky holiday confection is so gooey sweet that many dance cognoscente view it much the way theater aficionados view productions of “A Christmas Carol.” Thankfully, the late Robert Joffrey did not share that view. As a choreographer, Joffrey came to “The Nutcracker” rather late, offering the premiere of his “American” slant on the ballet for what turned out to be the last Christmas of his life, in 1987.

Once the ballet company that bears Joffrey’s name made Chicago its home in 1995, it was inevitable that Joffrey’s particular conception of the work would make its way into the already crowded local “Nutcracker” marketplace. At that point in time, the Ruth Page “Nutcracker” had held sway here since 1965, but ceased in 1997, six years after Page’s death.

In the decade and a half that Joffrey’s “Nutcracker” has been presented in Chicago, however, it has emerged as the definitive version. For most of those years, Joffrey’s partner and company co-founder Gerald Arpino lovingly looked after Joffrey’s vision until his death in 2008, and the details and choreography of both Joffrey and Arpino are carefully preserved in the current production. Read the rest of this entry »

Toby Spence, Andriana Chuchman, Neal Davies/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

Whenever an opera director makes the decision to “update” the specific time and place of a work—a common occurrence in the opera house—the key question aside from whether or not the libretto or music will support such a shift is: why? How does the work benefit from switching the original and intended time and place to another? Is an allegory being made that can be justified by the transposition?

In the case of Lyric Opera’s new production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “The Mikado,” the imaginary, fairy-tale Japan has been cast aside by director Gary Griffin in favor of the Japan of the 1920s. In other words, a “once upon a time” scenario of a Japan that never really existed has been replaced with a very specific Japan where something quite real and not very funny was going on that would ultimately have grave consequences for the world.

The only “Mikado” of the 1920s would be none other than Emperor Hirohito himself, and when the Mikado—played by James Morris—makes his entrance by 1930s motor car in Act II, he is wearing the same military uniform that Hirohito made so infamous during the Second World War. Not since Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” have we had a singing World War II-era dictator on stage, but the distracting problem in the case of “The Mikado” again is: why? Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Mayumi Lake and Lauren Deutsch

Watching a thunderous, highly choreographed taiko performance, you might be inclined to think you are witnessing an ancient Japanese rite, an homage to emperors and Shinto goddesses passed down from masters through wide-eyed generations, like karate or sushi making. In truth, taiko performance—at least the way Americans most often see it played, as an ensemble—is a post-World War II art form, developed by a jazz musician who helped disseminate it around the globe during his lifetime. Ensemble taiko is less an expression of ancient ritual than a thriving, evolving percussive art birthed at the outset of the Japanese diaspora.

The MCA Stage is an appropriate home then for a taiko spectacular smattered with improvisatory jazz, Japanese lute, Korean vocal performance and traditional kimono dance. Chicago-based JASC Tsukasa Taiko (funded by the Japanese American Service Committee of Chicago) gathers artists, including youth ensembles, from San Francisco, New York and Tokyo to put on the largest show of this kind each year at the MCA—an adrenaline-charged departure from the customary sugar-laced holiday fare. It’s refreshing to see kids in kimonos hammering tribal rhythms from massive drums with the grace of martial artists; you’re more inclined to respectfully bow to them after the show than coo at their adorableness. Read the rest of this entry »

Renée Fleming/Photo: Dan Rest

By Dennis Polkow

When Lyric Opera recently sent out engraved invitations for a “special announcement” that also included “distinguished guest” Renée Fleming, opera websites were abuzz with wild rumors that the opera megastar would be taking over the company as successor to Lyric’s general director William Mason, who is retiring after the 2011-12 season.

Such speculation seemed bizarre at the very least: why would Fleming, currently the most popular operatic soprano on the planet and at the height of a spectacular career, give all of that up to take an administrative position at an opera company?

As media, donors and the cultural elite of Chicago began gathering late Thursday afternoon on the stage of the Civic Opera House, it was clear that something big was indeed up. The two dailies were given advance word, but the rest of us learned only an hour before the official announcement via email that Fleming had accepted a position as Lyric Opera’s first-ever “creative consultant” for a five-year period “effective immediately,” which also included guarantees of Fleming performing here across that time in a concert appearance, a gala, an opera and a “staged concert opera.” Fleming had also been elected to Lyric’s Board of Directors as a vice president, as had Lyric Opera’s decade-long music director Sir Andrew Davis.

All of this was stunning news on so many levels, particularly given Lyric Opera’s long and conservative identity. Anyone who knows the company history knows that change happens slowly and reluctantly. Of the three general directors that Lyric Opera has had in fifty-plus years, the first was its founder, the second her assistant and the third a company insider who had been involved for most of Lyric’s history. The company has had only two music directors. Only a coup could have brought about such radical change so quickly and decisively, and indeed, as Lyric Board president and CEO Richard P. Kiphart began addressing the gathering, a clearer picture began to emerge. Read the rest of this entry »

Kelsey Brennan, Paul Hurley and Greg Matthew Anderson/Photo: Johnny Knight

RECOMMENDED

Oscar Wilde, who himself was condemned for leading a double life as a married man and a homosexual, criticized his detractors in a time when one’s public image was of the utmost consequence. In “Earnest,”  a hilarious yet scathing indictment of the hypocrisy of Victorian society, Jack and Algernon, two London gentlemen fond of assuming alternate identities to hide their indiscretions are caught in a sticky web of lies when they both show up at Jack’s country manor pretending to be Jack’s brother Earnest.

The play is ably handled by director Shawn Douglass and his cast, all of whom attack Wilde’s brilliant dialogue with aplomb. Greg Matthew Anderson’s Algernon is a loveable cad. Paul Hurley’s Jack is a sympathetic fop. Linda Gillum, as Gwendolen, and Kelsey Brennan, as Cecily, are both delightful as the two ladies in love with “Earnest.”  David Darlow’s traditional drag turn as the authoritarian Lady Bracknell is sensational. This revival is a little more lighthearted than caustic, but Wilde’s witticisms alone are worth the price of admission.  (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln, (773)404-7336, through January 9.