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Patti LuPone initially came to prominence originating the completely sung role of Eva Peron on Broadway in “Evita,” for which she won a Tony Award. Her career took a tumble however, when after originating the role of Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard” on London’s West End, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber abruptly replaced her with Glenn Close for the Broadway run, deeming LuPone’s acting too superficial.

LuPone’s career has since had an unusual renaissance courtesy of the Ravinia Festival, where she has been singing roles of Stephen Sondheim—a composer that she came to late in her career—in various shows there for the past decade. Two of these went on to have Broadway runs: “Sweeney Todd” and later “Gypsy,” which won LuPone her second Tony as Mama Rose, and was briefly reprised in a stellar rendition of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” at Ravinia’s recent Sondheim gala. Read the rest of this entry »

Cameron Brune and Jeny Wasilewski

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When you tackle Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods,” there is always the identity crisis of achieving proper tone.  The show is a series of fractured fairly tales that more often than not, can become too sophisticated for children and too juvenile for adults. Some productions tend to play up the fantastic aspect rather literally, while others so push the underlying allegories of the piece that the characters become so tongue-in-cheek as to become hammy caricatures. Kudos to Porchlight Music Theatre and to director L. Walter Stearns for realizing that there is enough depth here to allow any of these views to be effectively accommodated in the same production. Read the rest of this entry »

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If Winnetka native Christine Ebersole is not a household name, part of the reason may be that her range is so diverse and the genres she has conquered so unrelated that only someone paying close attention would notice it is all the same person.

Back in the late 1970s, the New Trier graduate went to New York City where her dramatic prowess was showcased as a regular on the soap opera “Ryan’s Hope”—and much later “One Life to Live”—before landing at “Saturday Night Live” where she co-anchored the “Weekend Update” desk and also revealed that she is a wicked comic and mimic.

As a character actress, Ebersole has been a constant in movies and television—my own favorite was her portrayal of the soprano who beats up Mozart in “Amadeus” when she learns he is engaged to someone else—but it is as a Broadway performer that Ebersole has most come into her own. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from Porchlight:

Porchlight Music Theatre
Announces its 2010–2011 Season Featuring
Sunday in the Park with George, Meet John Doe, The King and I
and Miracle on 34th Street Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from the Goodman:

MARY ZIMMERMAN REIMAGINES BERNSTEIN’S CANDIDE IN A MAJOR FALL MUSICAL EVENT;
ROBERT FALLS RE-EXAMINES CHEKHOV’S THE SEAGULL; PLUS NEW WORKS BY SARAH RUHL,
REGINA TAYLOR AND THOMAS BRADSHAW HEADLINE GOODMAN THEATRE’S 2010/2011 SEASON

***THE GOODMAN CELEBRATES A DECADE OF ACHIEVEMENTS AS ANCHOR OF THE NORTH LOOP

THEATRE DISTRICT, STARTING WITH A SEPT. 27 EVENT AT THE ART INSTITUTE’S MODERN WING*** Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Gudahl and Kate Fry/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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Composer Joshua Schmidt scored a surprise hit with Next Theatre’s “The Adding Machine,” so much so that the show went on to have an off-Broadway New York run.  Meanwhile, Schmidt has continued creating sound designs and scoring music on demand for various venues and shows around town, as he has for years.  “A Minsiter’s Wife” is Schmidt’s second full-scale musical-theater piece, based on George Bernard Shaw’s “Candida.”  The idea to adapt Shaw’s triangular romance to music belongs to Writers’ Theatre artistic director Michael Halberstam, who commissioned the work and was originally planning to write the adaptation as well as direct it, but wisely realized that was too daunting a task, and so Austin Pendleton was brought in along with Jan Tranen to write the lyrics.

The end result, in its world-premiere production at Writers’ Theatre, has much going for it, to be sure.  Read the rest of this entry »

Larry Adams and Catherine Lord/Photo: Rich Forema

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Just as “Sweeney Todd” is the work closest to opera in the Sondheim canon, “A Little Night Music” is the closest Sondheim work to operetta, with its consistent use of waltz-like rhythms (virtually everything is in triple meter) and some of his most melodic material, including his most popular song, “Send in the Clowns.” Additionally, it is Sondheim’s most elaborate use of the kind of counterpoint that Leonard Bernstein had experimented with in the climax of “West Side Story,” for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics, and also includes an orchestration that is at times evocative of Ravel’s “La Valse” and Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier;” musically, it ranks among Sondheim’s most ambitious and adventurous works.  As such, it is the ideal vehicle for Light Opera Works to tackle as its first fully-staged Sondheim production in more than twenty-five years, not counting last fall’s Sondheim revue “Side by Side by Sondheim” at the company’s smaller venue. Yes, show voices can sing this stuff, often quite nicely, but oh, isn’t it rich to be able to hear such oft-done pieces heard in context and done up with trained voices that can really due full justice to their nuances and accompanied by the lilts and extravagance of a full orchestra with an ensemble cast in colorful costumes that often literally dances its way in and out of scenes.  Read the rest of this entry »

On November 22, 1963, George Hearn was set to perform “Camelot” in Columbus, Ohio.  Hearn was playing Sir Dinadan on the first national tour of the beloved Broadway musical but was also understudy to both King Arthur and Merlin the Magician when the news came that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas.  “The country froze,” Hearn recalls, “but the decision was made that in this special case, namely that ‘Camelot’ had been Kennedy’s favorite play, we would go on.  There were no laughs that night, that’s for sure, and there was a solemnity to the occasion, and yes, open weeping, especially during the finale.”

The finale of “Camelot” is where a broken King Arthur, about to go to war with his closest friend Sir Lancelot, has a moment of hope where he discovers that a young boy has stowed away to join up with the knights of the Round Table.  How could the boy possibly know anything about the Round Table, Arthur ponders, to which the boy responds, “from the stories people tell.”  The revelation that what Arthur has accomplished will be remembered has him knight the boy and intone the memorable benediction that climaxes, “Don’t let it be forgot / That once there was a spot / For one, brief shining moment / That was known as Camelot.”

When Ravinia CEO Welz Kauffman asked Hearn to finally, at long last, play King Arthur Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

David Rhee, Keith Uchima, Erik Kaiko and Peter Sipla

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When Stephen Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” first appeared on Broadway back in 1976, few knew quite what to make of it.  World War II was as close to the show opening as we are now to the American Bicentennial Celebration that the piece was in part written to commemorate.  The story of the Westernization of isolationist Japan told from the Japanese perspective as imagined by white guys, the show began with Japanese-born film star Mako as “the Reciter” taking a samurai position and screaming at the audience and acting as narrator and commentator on kabuki-style staging with an all Asian-American cast singing Western-style show tunes.  The brainchild of producer Hal Prince, the show began as a straight drama but along the way, Prince thought that music could help the viability of the work, and Sondheim became involved.  Well, at least Broadway portrayals of Asians in musicals had come a long way since “Flower Drum Song.” Read the rest of this entry »