RECOMMENDED

One of the practical realities of the enormous expense of producing opera is that all productions—both the good and the bad—will pop up again. This can be a pleasure if a production was interesting and creative the first time around, but a real chore if not. The current Lyric Opera production of Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” was first seen here nearly twenty years ago and has been revived every half a dozen years or so since, which means that if you enjoyed John Conklin’s free-floating red furniture across sky blue backgrounds with clouds the first time around, you’ll enjoy it again and again and again. If, however, you were left wondering what any of this had to do with “Barber of Seville” in the first place, your confusion is likely to multiply with each viewing. This revival was intended for Juan Diego Flórez, who wowed us in Rossini’s “Cinderella” two seasons ago and is the Rossini tenor of the moment, but who swallowed a fishbone in sunny Barcelona and somehow thought recovering there was preferable to doing so in a gray and cold Chicago in February. Go figure. Oh yes, and since the baritone set to play Bartolo was covering for another no-show who was set to sing the lead in “Falstaff,” there ended up being as many musical chairs in the casting as there are chairs left on the ceiling. With expectations that low, this is a “Barber” that despite coming up a few hairs short, is still a fun experience. Holding things together through all of these changes, Italian conductor Donato Renzetti keeps the orchestra flexible enough for all of the singing yet brisk and light at all times. And despite some vocal mismatches, everyone could be heard and blended as well as possible. Iowa tenor John Osborn may not have Flórez’ glorious timbre and flexible technique, but he does a solid job, especially in the masquerade scenes and grew more confident as the evening went on. Midwest mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato may not have the dark color that some of us prefer for Rosina but her vocal agility and her acting ability more than compensate. Those of us who have experienced Chicago baritone Philip Kraus’ trademark portrayal of Bartolo over the years at Chicago Opera Theater and his many comic performances at Light Opera Works—a company he founded and shepherded for a decade and a half before his own board unceremoniously dumped him—are delighted to see him singing and acting better than ever in a role that has truly become his own at his hometown opera company. (Dennis Polkow)

At the Civic Opera House, 20 N. Wacker, (312)332-2244. This production is now closed.

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—Nina Metz
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“If you think you’ve seen ‘Oklahoma!’, you really haven’t,” proudly declares Light Opera Works’ general manager and co-founder Bridget McDonough. “Unless, that is, you’ve seen it with the full Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations. When we hear these Rogers and Hammerstein pieces that we think we know, uncut and with their original orchestrations, they are a revelation.”

Robert Russell Bennett was the master orchestrator and “go-to” guy for all of the great composers of Broadway’s golden age whose work is so rarely heard that it has been virtually forgotten today. “The work that he did really adds to the storytelling and really takes the drama to new heights of intimacy and emotion that you just don’t get if you’re seeing the show in summer stock, a high school, a community theater or some other way where the piece has been cut and you’re not having the full experience,” McDonough assesses. “Nowadays, even Broadway revivals do not give you the full orchestrations—it’s not financially possible anymore. So it’s really up to the non-for-profit music theaters like Light Opera Works to keep these American treasures alive as they were meant to be seen. These were complete works that were the product of several art forms combined together and if you take out any of those elements, you’re not seeing them as the true and complete masterpieces that they are.”

What particularly bothers McDonough is the move to deconstruct the American musical. “That can have validity as long as there is some respect for the form,” he says, “but some of these decontructions that we’ve seen in Chicago are done by people who do not understand, appreciate nor even like musical theater. There is a difference between a play and a musical. There’s ‘The Matchmaker’ and there’s ‘Hello, Dolly!’ There’s ‘Pygmalion’ and there’s ‘My Fair Lady.’ And in this case, there’s ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’ and there’s ‘Oklahoma!’ Do the play if you don’t like musicals. As one of my colleagues used to say, ‘They turn their nose up at our repertoire, until they have to sell tickets.’ This is a very complicated form. There certainly is a place for scaled-down productions, but you see the Real McCoy at Light Opera Works: a big show, with a full chorus, the full twenty-minute ballet sequence with all of the dance breaks, the full overture, the repeats, all of the fights, the cut songs that more fully explain the characters and the drama. If you really want to know this show, you have to come to us.” (Dennis Polkow)

 “Oklahoma!” runs through December 31 at Northwestern University’s Cahn Auditorium, 600 Emerson, Evanston, (847)869-6300.

RECOMMENDED

Borrowing its title from Kurt Weill’s own autobiography, this revue show of Weill’s best-known and best-loved songs begins with his German cabaret days and features a generous amount of “The Threepenny Opera” in its Marc Blitzstein translation sung by well-meaning singers who are able to transmit pleasing pitch but little of the dark spirit and edge needed for these numbers. The foursome has better luck with “The Alabama Song” from “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” better known in America as a hit for The Doors, but here heard in its haunting, cabaret ensemble form. The revue is a bit more stingy in dealing with Weill’s Broadway shows, only offering a hit or two from each of them, although veteran show performer Brian Herriott’s renditions of “The September Song” from “Knickerbocker Holiday” and “Speak Low” from “One Touch of Venus” are significant Act II highlights. The minimal narration and chronological rather than thematic approach of the show seem superfluous, and given Weill’s enormous significance in both pre-Nazi Germany and World War II America (he wrote on his citizenship application “American, formerly German” under nationality and stopped speaking German), there are more insights that could have been shared than sketchy biographical details. Still, hearing so much Weill across an evening makes this a worthwhile experience, even though such an approach makes you wish that Light Opera Works would just stage a full banquet of one of the full Weill works rather than tantalize us with well-prepared appetizers. (Dennis Polkow)

At McGaw YMCA, 1420 Maple Ave, Evanston, (847)869-6300. This production is now closed. 

RECOMMENDED

Although it was enormously popular in its day and many of its songs have remained standards ever since (“I’ll See You Again,” “Tara-Ra-Boom-De-Ay”), Noel Coward’s “Bitter Sweet” is so unlike anything else that he ever wrote that most of its rare revivals have been left to opera houses.  It is a true operetta, written after Coward had encountered “Die Fledermaus” and very much trying to evoke a similar world from a British point of view.  But what is most surprising is that despite a handful of funny moments—most notably the campy “We All Wear a Green Carnation,” which is often cited as the first hidden use of the term “gay” as a synonym for homosexual (this was 1929, mind you)—“Bitter Sweet” is an unabashedly sentimental love story told via flashbacks that wears its musical heart on its sleeve.  The resources of Light Opera Works are ideal for such a work and, in fact, this is the company’s second revival, having done it before in 1991. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It’s time to “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” in grand style with all of the trimmings thanks to Light Opera Works’ spectacular production of this Cole Porter backstage musical that includes his best score and most erudite lyrics. And though the work itself is now sixty years old, coming after a long silence and even some flops at the end of Porter’s long career and only taken on because of tax problems, he pulled out all of the stops for it and was able to succinctly sum up in a single work all that his art had developed into over decades as the top tunesmith of both Broadway and Hollywood. Most productions tend to either concentrate on the work’s gut-busting comedy, as the most recent Broadway revival did to great success, or the sumptuous score, as do the many productions mounted regularly by opera companies, but it is a rare production that can pull off both: this Light Opera Works production, however, has it all. Kudos to the luxurious casting of superb soprano Stacey Tappen as actress Lilli Vanessi, who not only can break your heart when she sings “So in Love” in clarion tones, but as Katherine in Porter’s mock musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” can bring off riotous resentment, comedy and sight gags in “I Hate Men.” Those who can really sing this role can rarely pull off its physical comedy, and those who can usually end up compromising its musical demands, but Tappen brings off both to great avail. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The miracle of Gilbert & Sullivan’s best-loved piece “The Mikado” is that, despite its politically incorrect portrayal of nineteenth-century Japan for the amusement of Victorian-era British snobbery, the piece endures. For all of its social naïveté, its charms remain largely because, as Floyd the Barber would tell Opie and whoever would listen on the old “Andy Griffith” show, “It’s beautiful.” Floyd would then go on to talk about how nephew once performed in it, that the place had a standing-room-only crowd and then would launch into an impromptu version of “The Wandering Minstrel,” which come to think of it, used to be sung by Van Johnson when he would play the arch-criminal the Minstrel on the “Batman” television serial. Here is a rare chance to see a fully staged professional production of the iconic operetta done by a company who loves this stuff and will do it up right with all of the trimmings. The show will feature 2006 Grand Prize Winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Awards Paul Corona in the title role and 2006 Jeff Award Winner Jeff Kuhl as Ko-Ko. (Dennis Polkow)

Light Opera Works’ production of the “The Mikado” runs at Northwestern University’s Cahn Auditorium, 600 Emerson, Evanston, ( 847)869-6300, through December 31.

Cole Porter conjures up carefree images of champagne, cruise ships and penthouses, an elegant and wealthy escapist world that he loved so much that he wanted the rest of us to experience it vicariously through his shows and songs. What then to make a of a Porter revue show which attempts to use obscure Porter songs and bland narration to portray the world around him that Porter largely ignored by going decade by decade through his career? It didn’t work in 1965, and it especially doesn’t work when you have performers on stage who have virtually no stylistic sense of how to approach this music. This is the Cole Porter equivalent of Bill Murray doing his satirical singing nightclub act on the old “Saturday Night Live” with the difference being that this isn’t funny. A bewildering and major misstep from the usually reliable Light Opera Works. (Dennis Polkow)

Fri-Sat/8pm,Sun/3pm. Light Opera Works Second Stage, 1420 Maple, Evanston, (847)869-6300. $24-$39. Through Nov 12.

RECOMMENDED

Back in the early 1960s, when librettist Tom Jones and composer Harvey Schmidt were looking for their first Broadway property as a follow-up to their “little” show running off-Broadway called “The Fantasticks” that would go on to run for an unprecedented forty-two years, the pair turned to N. Richard Nash’s “The Rainmaker,” which had already inspired a Katherine Hepburn/Burt Lancaster film, but which Nash particularly thought was crying out to be set to music. The result was “110 in the Shade,” which producer David Merrick had exercised such tight control over that some of the inexperienced pair’s intentions became lost in the shuffle. Even so, the show ran for a year, toured for a year and had a memorable cast album, but has had little life since. In preparation for a 2007 New York revival, Jones has provided Light Opera Works’ artistic director and show director/choreographer Rudy Hogenmiller with a revised script and two new songs, a real coup for the company, which is giving the work the tender loving care that it so richly deserves. The lush, Western-flavored melodic score is vintage Aaron Copland meets Rodgers and Hammerstein and benefits immeasurably from a full orchestra and trained voices, a first-class chorus, lively choreography, Dust Bowl sets and even real rain for a finale. All of the stops are being pulled out at Light Opera Works in the service of a truly neglected gem that with a first-rate cast such as LOT has assembled, is a first-class musical theater experience. (Dennis Polkow) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The most well-known and beloved of all of Rodgers & Hammerstein scores, “South Pacific” tackled the truly taboo subject matter of racial prejudice with such effectiveness that, despite being composed some sixty years ago, substitute the persecuted ethnic group of your choice for Polynesian and World War II anxieties for post-9/11 paranoia, and the work resonates as freshly as if it were taken right out of today’s headlines. Light Opera Works’ artistic director Rudy Hogenmiller’s direction plays up the romance and fun, making ensemble numbers such as “Bloody Mary” and “There is Nothin’ Like a Dame” sparkle, and while the two pairs of lovers are all superb actors, only Larry Adams is able to give the score the vocal weight that it needs in numbers such as “Some Enchanted Evening,” the other voices being light and sometimes shrill show voices with even Bloody Mary having to vibrato her way through “Bali High.” While it’s great to hear a 30-piece orchestra performing this lush score, the perfunctory conducting of Roger L. Bingaman evokes little of the mystery that the picturesque music calls for. (Dennis Polkow)

Northwestern University’s Cahn Auditorium, 600 Emerson, Evanston, (847)869-6300. $27-$75. Through June 11.