The fine-brush baton of Bernard Haitink

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 the Chicago Symphony on tour in London. One comment in particular rang a bell with me. "My worry,” the conductor said, “is that (these days) Mahler is performed louder and louder to make a success." What had impressed me especially about Haitink’s Ninth Symphony with the CSO was the conductor’s trademark restraint. For the most part, certainly in the work’s deeply introspective opening movement and the Abschied-like finale, I was mesmerized by an aura of chamber music writ large.

But that has always been my experience with Haitink, going back to my first encounters with his recordings, in the 1960s, when he was principal conductor of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra. Whether the music before him was Mahler or Schumann, Brahms or Bruckner, he always seemed to work with a subtle palette and a fine brush. In the late 1970s, when Haitink brought the Concertgebouw to the U.S. for twin cycles of the Beethoven symphonies and piano concertos (with Vladimir Ashkenazy) at Carnegie Hall in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., I caught half the project in each locale. For a young critic, that concentration of concerts was like a master class in the art of conducting.

Even better, during the Kennedy Center stint, Haitink agreed to speak with me for a few minutes by phone. We ended up talking for quite a while, until he had to break off to get to rehearsal. But he invited me to sit in as the orchestra honed its Beethoven and to come back stage during the break so we could continue our chat. I’m sure we covered many topics, but the issue at the top of my mind was the same that seems to fascinate Haitink’s admirers today: How, in those intense but never overblown Beethoven performances, did he elicit so much drama without any hint of excess? It was the very quality that transfigured his recent Mahler Ninth with the CSO.

I remember Haitink’s answer verbatim: “You begin with a true pianissimo.” Since that day I have judged conductors by their ability, or willingness, to structure interpretation from a quiet base line.

In that evanescent closing movement of the Mahler Ninth -- the music of a soul melding into the cosmos, not unlike Strauss’ earlier “Death and Transfiguration” -- the Chicago Symphony strings seemed to play at the mere threshold of sound: true pianissimo. When you’re drawn into that sort of sonic domain, even a small dynamic inflection can make a dramatic impact. That’s Haitink, molecular engineer and musical poet.

For an illuminating glimpse of Haitink as teacher, drop in (virtually) on this YouTube master class session:

It’s also worth hearing what the maestro has to say about taking on Stravinsky’s ever-revolutionary ballet “The Rite of Spring” in a video produced by the London Symphony Orchestra:

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Buechner, Berg and the deconstruction of a soul

 

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 the grim, dissonant portrait of a beleaguered human being at the end of his rope, a simple man, a soldier, driven to distraction and murder by his self-righteous, moralizing and hypocritical superiors: Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck.”

By happy coincidence, I recently caught the Metropolitan Opera’s stunning production of “Wozzeck” followed closely in Chicago by a stark, chillingly vivid account of Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck” – on which Berg based his opera – by the combined About Face and Hypocrites theater companies. It was after attending the first Vienna production of Büchner’s unfinished “Woyzeck,” in 1914, that Berg threw himself into retelling the story through the power of his own expressionist musical language.

When Büchner died in 1837, at age 23, he left behind an unfinished manuscript about a soldier called Franz Woyzeck whose life is bounded by poverty and routine. To augment his meager army pay, he shaves his captain, who berates Woyzeck for his lack of morals. The poor fellow also follows a strict dietary regiment imposed by a perverse doctor who thinks he can establish a correlation between malnutrition and insanity. With his common law wife Marie, Woyzeck has a child. But Marie is unfaithful and the captain taunts Woyzeck about it. His life is, in short, awful.

Producing Büchner’s play has always meant organizing and fleshing out the many brief scenes he left with no particular designation of order. Thus Berg fashioned his opera – altering the play’s title to
“Wozzeck” -- into 15 scenes divided into three continuously flowing acts of five scenes each. His storyline closely resembles “Woyzeck,” as staged by the joint Chicago companies: Woyzeck steadily crumbles under the strain of mental abuse, poor diet and Marie’s unfaithfulness until he loses control and murders the woman with a knife. In the play, Woyzeck then slashes his own throat; in Berg’s opera, he drowns in a frantic attempt to toss the knife far out into a lake, lest the weapon be discovered.

Berg also added one last devastating touch: Near the bank where Marie’s body has been found, the child of that ill-starred couple rides his hobby horse and calls out “Hop-hop, hop-hop” – to a silent orchestra – oblivious, as the children around him shout, “Your mother is dead.”

Essentially, “Wozzeck,” which premiered in 1925, carries forward the Wagnerian ideal of music-drama, the complete integration of words and music. Indeed, it seems inaccurate to speak of Berg’s orchestration; the orchestra is mirror, accompaniment and commentator. The vocal and orchestral lines are interwoven with consummate technical finesse and dramatic purpose; it is the convulsions of a soul in the extremity of circumstance. At the performance I heard in April, conductor James Levine and the phenomenal Met orchestra forged those lines into an intimate tragedy of monumental weight. Baritone Alan Held as Wozzeck and soprano Waltraud Meier as Marie headed a brilliant cast, and Mark Lamos’ spare, high-walled set gave the madness a visual dimension.

What originally inspired Berg must have been an experience much like the About Face-Hypocrites “Woyzeck” now playing at the Chopin Theatre. On designer Tom Burch’s nearly barren set, director Sean Graney – who also adapted the play – has created a bleak world where hope is just a four-letter word. So hard-pressed are Woyzeck (the manic Geoff Button) and Marie (the radiant Lindsey Gavel) that their child is more than a burden; it is a stone.

As the supercilious captain (Sean Patrick Fawcett) and the maniacal doctor (Ryan Bollettino) badger and manipulate Woyzeck, he reels into paranoid anxiety. His mechanical, relentless assault on Marie is love and need warped into mindless perversity. It is painful to watch a helpless man ground down by a calculating, exploitative society. That’s exactly where Büchner was taking aim. Score a bull’s eye for this clear-sighted production.     

“Woyzeck” runs through May 22. www.thewoyzeckproject.com

  

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Prelude to a legend: Riccardo Muti in Chicago

 

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 everything to give, and he appears visibly eager to share his broad mastery with a burnished ensemble whose sense of rank reflects historical associations with the likes of Sir Georg Solti and Fritz Reiner. All the early evidence suggests the Muti-CSO era will stand besides those others in the orchestra’s storied annals.

The wider musical world will soon experience this remarkable union first-hand when Muti leads the orchestra on their first tour of Europe together late this summer. In something of a test flight, Muti conducted the CSO in three different programs at Carnegie Hall in mid-April that drew ecstatic responses from sold-out houses. When Muti walked onto the Carnegie stage opening night, to lead a concert version of Verdi’s “Otello,” the audience erupted in a hero’s welcome. Here was the conductor the New York Philharmonic only too publicly sought but did not land. More significant, and even more demonstrative, was the ovation that followed the performance. In support of a solid cast of solo voices and its own fine chorus, Muti’s orchestra reproduced that colorful and minutely expressive Verdian canvas in exquisite detail and unbounded passion.

The narrative freedom that Muti gives the CSO was evident again when the orchestra returned to its own house in May to play Strauss’ “Death and Transfiguration” and a suite compiled from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet.” The heady contrast between rapture and finesse in the Strauss was answered by brilliance and tenderness in the Prokofiev. Both works gloried in the completeness of the CSO sound: the finely contoured strings, the elegance of the wind choir, the controlled power of the brass department.

While Muti’s guiding hand is always there, and he can be quite animated, he never appears self-indulgent, never over-conducts. How naturally the CSO responds was clear from the start, notably in a program of Haydn and Mozart under the new music director played in October 2010, before Muti’s health problems arose. In those stylish, poised performances, the merest flick of that baton drew pin-point shafts of musical light. There is much light to come in Chicago.

    

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When the animals ran the journalistic zoo

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, blistering production is almost too good.

When I broke into newspapering nearly 50 years ago, still in my teens, I worked for gnarled old editors who’d witnessed firsthand the kind of newsroom and the colorful characters Hecht and MacArthur preserved in “The Front Page.” My mentors remembered the days when the bottle kept in the desk drawer wasn’t Evian, it was Jack Daniels. And it was a men’s club; no women allowed. By the time I came along, all that had changed. Civility, inclusiveness and accountability had become the norm.

Fellow reporters Hecht and MacArthur inhabited the rough and tumble world called Chicago journalism in the early years of the last century. The story they reworked into “The Front Page” is based on historical incidents and figures. It’s bleak, often appalling stuff we behold in this mirror of the times. But you also can’t help getting swept up in it, and TimeLine squeezes the play for all its acid wit.

There’s an election coming up and Chicago’s mayor and sheriff have hit upon a sweet way to secure the 200,000 “colored” votes: They’re about to execute a white man for the shooting death of a black police officer. Problem is, the governor keeps staying the execution. But now the deed is just hours away, and we look in on a press room full of idle reporters playing cards, cracking jokes and waiting for the rope to snap.

These paragons of the fourth estate are a rowdy bunch, lacking only knives to be cut-throat competitors, and yet they’re poker buddies in this tedious interlude before the drop. Phones ring as anxious editors clamor for updates, and occasionally one of the guys calls in a minor feature item that might flesh out the execution story. But the fellas are waiting for something else, too – the arrival of the acknowledged star among them, Hildy Johnson, a brash go-getter who’s finally been roped in by a girl and is about to quit the game for a quieter life. Little does Hildy know.

Once past the extended hubbub that sets the scene, “The Front Page” runs on the charisma and energy of Hildy Johnson, and PJ Powers animates the role with a boundless panache that’s tempered only by the poor lad’s fear of losing his girl as events begin to engulf him. In a cage full of animals, Powers’ Hildy allows us one critter for whom we can actually feel some sympathy.

But we can also love despising Rob Riley as the Mayor, a conscience-free opportunist who never met a scruple he couldn’t get around. To the hapless sheriff, a lawman so dumb that he hands a loaded gun to the condemned man, Bill McGough brings an almost glowing aura of ineptitude. As Hildy’s editor, who sweeps onto the scene when the Big Story turns really big, Terry Hamilton is a wonderful hard-bitten veteran who knows the meaning of news at any price.

The women of “The Front Page” – Mechelle Moe as the hooker with a heart, Bridgette Pechman Clarno as Hildy’s put-upon financée, Angela Bullard as her imperious mother -- are cardboard characters who serve mainly to show what rogues the men are.

Director Nick Bowling keeps the action hot and the anxiety high, and designer Collette Pollard’s weathered press room is the real thing, a frightful prospect of beaten wood desks and piled papers. Now that part I actually remember.

Through June 12. www.timelinetheatre.com. (773) 281-8463.

       

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Shavian bombshells, falling from the night sky

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 second, hard to say. As much as anything he just wants to heighten the excitement.

Most of the characters assembled here, starting with the retired sea captain turned inventor, are a bit wacky. They are at least an unconventional lot, free-spirited, anti-authoritarian observers on the foibles of conventionality. They constitute the unharmonious, bitingly funny choristers of Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” an ensemble brought to sparkling life in this beat-perfect production at Writers’ Theatre.

If polemical theater is a redundancy in the Shaw lexicon, “Heartbreak House” shares with the playwright’s “Saint Joan” a brilliance of language and sharpness of point that renders harangue irresistible. Shaw’s every mordant flourish hits the mark in this enterprise deftly directed by William Brown with a cast that has made the skins of these precisely drawn characters their own.

Dotty old Capt. Shotover’s house seems to foster odd behavior, or at least attract the amiably eccentric. Shotover, the distractedly imperturbable John Reeger, shares the place with his daughter Hersione and her husband Hector, a bohemian couple whose beauty endures though their mutual spark has expired.

They are joined on this fateful night by assorted visitors who are either invited or just pop in – Shotover’s long-absent daughter Ariadne (now risen in society to the rank of Lady), her lover (who also happens to be her husband’s brother), the beautiful young Ellie Dunn and her father and, not least, Shaw’s straw man -- Boss Mangan, a grasping capitalist who lusts after pretty Ellie.

With smiling cynicism, “Heartbreak House” explains why the world is going to hell in a hand basket. The problem, as Shaw sees it, is that we’re corrupt, perverse, duplicitous, calculating creatures by nature. And the very worst in us is expressed by the ambitions of capitalism, the profit-producing machinations of which we see distilled in a clever scheme devised by a burglar.

Shaw seems to like the bohemians here, an attraction one can only share in the lovely, witty person of Karen Janes Woditsch as Hersione and Martin Yurek as her alluringly handsome, devoutly melodramatic husband. But even more, the playwright adores Ellie, portrayed by Atra Asdou as an almost waif-like girl who seems all deference and vulnerability until a turn in circumstances reveals her soul of steel.

Ellie is the embodiment of who we really are, or rather what we must become if we are to survive in this dog-eat-dog existence. Nice guys don’t just finish last in Shaw’s world; they get eaten. And the devouring maw is capitalism, the insatiable “bloated entrepreneur,” as one house guest derisively labels Boss Mangan, given duly imposing form by John Lister.

In the end, Shaw leaves one character partially veiled. We know everyone’s story, every Achilles’ heel, but one: Hersione’s socially ascended sister Ariadne, framed memorably by Tiffany Scott in chiaroscuro tints of subsurface anger and anxiety, arrogance and unconfessed secrets. Defiant words notwithstanding, Scott tells us in visage and posture what her wealth and superior place have not conjured: contentment.

Designer Keith Pitts’ efficient but evocative set, complete with gazebo and leafy trees and stony pathway, caps an all-around splendid production that should be at the top of your Don’t Miss list.

Through June 26. www.writerstheatre.org (847) 242-6000.

   

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Kingship in a royally troubled mindscape

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 even in the midst of pathos and madness, we find ourselves subject to one hysterical historical comedy.

George III was king of England when the American colonies threw off British rule. Historically, he was the last in his government to sign off on the separation, and that receding annoyance still resonates in the background of Bennett’s play set about a decade later – closer to the French revolution of 1789. It was a perfectly lucid George III who struggled to retain the colonies and a clear-sighted king we first meet here, a straight-talking pragmatist, unpretentious but unmistakably regal.

It is not long, however, before we – like George’s courtiers, both friends and foes – see the first symptoms of a physical ailment, rashes on his legs and pain in his gut, that soon are accompanied by impaired speech and an inability to concentrate, then increasingly severe signs of dementia. George appears to be lost to his madness, and the vultures are circling – an idle son who can’t wait to seize the throne and a minority party poised to snatch control of Parliament.

From this historical episode in the human comedy, “The Madness of George III,” directed with wit and sympathy by Penny Metropulos and handsomely costumed by Susan E. Mickey, forges touching and compelling theater. It is a tragi-comedy in which there are fools aplenty and dubious behavior is by no means confined to the nominal victim.  

So personal, penetrating and nuanced is Groener’s portrayal of the distressed king that even the strong cast of characters around him seem reduced to mere attendant shadows. As we get to know him as both a public and private figure – cuddling with Mrs. King, as he fondly calls Queen Charlotte, lovingly played by Nora Jones – we’re swiftly won over by his human mingling of worldly wisdom and vulnerability. By the time George shows his first signs of disorder, we’re keenly attuned to Groener’s reactions of shock, disorientation and dismay. We see a man being robbed of his genuine nobility, untrimmed by nature’s changing course but also threatened by the machinations and incompetence of those around him.

Allowing that medicine in the 18^th century was not altogether what it is today, the three doctors first summoned to attend the king are clueless to the point of hilarity: the Three Stooges with medical degrees. As one declares upon being shown the king’s purple urine, medicine is about observation and has nothing to do with the color of the patient’s water. The Larry, Curly and Moe dispensing such insights here are the marvelously pompous Bradley Armacost, Patrick Clear and William Dick. They are joined by a fourth, Dr. Willis (the severely forthright James Newcomb), who brooks no fools and helps the king recover his health.

Notable among the stageful of characters, each looking after their own political interests, are Nathan Hosner’s stoic prime minister William Pitt, Richard Baird’s smarmy Prince of Wales, Alex Weisman’s idiotic Duke of York and David Lively’s malleable Lord Chancellor Edward Thurlow.

In an especially affecting vignette, the recovering king and Thurlow read a scene from “King Lear,” with Lively/Thurlow playing Cordelia to Groener/George’s Lear. It is inherently heartbreaking stuff and the parallel to George’s own dementia is quite unsettling. But far from maudlin, the scene proves energizing to the king, who knows “Lear” well and proudly takes his bow for a part sensitively read. Groener’s finely gauged flourish is just one more gem in a royal triumph.

Through June 12. www.chicagoshakes.com. (312) 595-5600.

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Crossing time and gender in Woolf's droll quest

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 lifetime. It occupies her hero for three and a half centuries.

There’s something downright hilarious about such a proposition, and hilarity is the buoying stream that carries Court Theatre’s treatment of Woolf’s “Orlando” as re-imagined by playwright Sarah Ruhl. Court’s infectious production is a theatrical arabesque, a commedia dell’ arte romp that manages never to lose sight of Woolf’s substantial theme even as it holds characters and circumstances up to riotous caricature.

Smacking of Henry Fielding’s 18^th century novel “Tom Jones” and its madcap vicissitudes of a foundling cast upon the world, Woolf’s 1928 “biography” takes Orlando from young manhood as a poet at the English court of Elizabeth I through wormholes of time to the courts of James I and Charles II, then forward through centuries of adventures in life and love until he lands in the present, meaning 1928. There, his race run, Orlando’s remarkable life comes to its end – at age 36!

Readers familiar with Woolf’s book will wonder when I’m going to get around to another detail: Somewhere about mid-arc on his trajectory through time, Orlando finds himself in Constantinople, where he falls asleep for several days, and wakes up a woman. Thus the comedy becomes recharged as Orlando suddenly finds the boundless prerogatives and rewards of a man’s world, in which one can command armies and dispatch foes, transformed into the corseted province of women where the options devolve to pouring tea while struggling to do anything at all in the bondage of petticoats.

Ruhl’s bristling adaptation preserves the finesse of Woolf’s satiric wit, but just as important it also embraces the fullness of the novel’s perspective on humanity with all its warts and biases as well as its free will and its complex need for love. Court’s production, directed by Jessica Thebus, delivers Woolf’s message with rapier point and disarming facility.

Only two characters are played by specific actors, with a chorus of four men morphing into all the other roles and sometimes even serving as props and special effects.

As Orlando, Amy J. Carle offers a sympathetic portrait of a man tossed about on the high seas of circumstance, the toy of a queen, the momentary amusement of fickle hearts, the object of predatory – dare I say wolfish – lust. When suddenly he becomes she, Carle has great fun making Orlando fit (literally) into his new robes and deal with this new set of expectations, allowances and limits.

I confess I don’t grasp why Ruhl chose to single out one character from Orlando’s swirling centuries of encounters for specificity. The four choristers – Thomas J. Cox, Adrian Danzig, Kevin Douglas and Lawrence Grimm – switch bits of costumes and props to impersonate all but the one with irrepressible energy, impeccable precision and zany fluidity.

But Ruhl makes an exception for a Russian princess called Sasha, played with indulgently broad humor by Erica Elam. Sasha is the infatuation of Orlando’s life (as a man), and perhaps Ruhl wished to remove the comic mitigation of a guy in drag.

Collette Pollard’s spare set consists chiefly of ornate canopy beds that also serve as boats, with a cluster of chandeliers to lend the changing scenes an aura of continuity. Linda Roethke’s costumes are remarkable for how much they express by minimal means in the ever-changing characters of the chorus.

Through April 10. www.CourtTheatre.org. Call (773) 753-4472.     

 

          

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War and human ruin in an opera for the ages

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 transcend the rigors of Baroque convention to create complex, vulnerable characters we care about. This “Hercules” is at once a great night of singing and a memorable experience in theater.

The source of Handel’s opera, first produced in 1745, was Sophocles’ spin on the myth of Hercules, the insuperable warrior who comes home from his latest conquests to a wife desperate with worry. But when he finally shows up, the hero arrives freighted with baggage – the beautiful daughter of the foreign leader he has dispatched and a load of psychological turmoil.

Thus “Hercules” unfolds not as a playing out of events (little actually happens over its three-hour course) but as a subtle progression of circumstance, and as much through self-examination as through dialogue.

In this new production, director Peter Sellars has penetrated to the opera’s human heart by relocating the story from some time in the distant past to the war-fractured world of today. The scene is America, with returning combat troops clad in modern gear and an elaborate barbecue grill pushed into view for a welcome-home party.

Set designer George Tsypin’s landscape of broken antique columns, beneath a sky that turns from starlit to something more hellish, serves as a plausible metaphor for mankind’s everlasting determination to reduce his world to rubble in the name of heroism.

Yet so fully are the conflict and tragedy of “Hercules” contained in Handel’s music that a vocal performance as thoroughly splendid as this one might be just as effective with minimal staging, the barest hints of place and time.

The wealth of Handel’s music, prodigiously challenging in its coloratura flourishes, is well distributed among four characters: Hercules’ wife Dejanira (mezzo-soprano Alice Coote), his son Hyllus (tenor Richard Croft), the herald Lichas (countertenor David Daniels) and the trophy princess Iole (soprano Lucy Crowe). The opera is about Hercules only in light of the damage his actions wreak upon the others, and thus the hero (bass Eric Owens) is the least on stage and the least involved musically.

Coote’s painfully enduring, pill-popping Dejanira brings to mind the bereft Countess in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” and indeed her heart-breaking reflection on the happier days of her marriage to Hercules is a blueprint for the Countess’ similarly wistful aria written some 40 years later. Typical of Coote’s expressive, agile singing is her guilt-ridden lament over Hercules’ death, “Where shall I fly.” The grievous answer is that she cannot escape from herself.

Sellars often has his characters singing in various recumbent poses, but as the captive Iole, Crowe deals with a greater challenge: She must deliver her first aria with a bag over her head. When finally given free voice, Crowe puts on one stunning vocal display after another. Her aria imploring Dejanira not to succumb to jealousy brought the performance to a prolonged stop.

Daniels’ sweetly eloquent singing as Hercules’ herald, the frequent bearer of bad news between the hero and his wife, peaked in a benumbed reaction to the image of his god-like master slain most hideously. Croft’s ringing performance as Hercules’ son, masculine and yet softened by the gentleness of youth, rounded out a vocal quartet that left nothing to be wished for. As Hercules, Owens’ imposing figure and moody restlessness, as a hard-edged soldier suddenly pressed into a domestic mold, added as much truth to this production as the singer’s formidable basso.  

Conductor Harry Bicket elicited crisp, stylish playing from the Lyric Opera Orchestra, and the chorus managed to sing with energy and precision even while executing choreographed hand and head gestures that suggested a continuum back through Handel to the early Greek stage. It is an implicit reminder that the tragedy of Hercules is endlessly repeated and ever new.

Through March 21. www.lyricopera.org. (312) 332-2244.   

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The sex is mostly talk, but the dialogue is great

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 isolated, snowbound bed-and-breakfast in Michigan.

Murphy plays Olivia, an aspiring Chicago novelist who’s had one book published and is still reeling from the critics’ acid reception. Now she’s holed up in this remote B&B to put the final touches on a second effort, though she may never risk actually allowing anyone to read it.

Out of the stormy night and into Olivia’s cozy retreat blows Grush’s Ethan, who’s first of all aghast to discover that the Internet is inaccessible, secondly the brash author of a crazily popular blog detailing a long string of sexual conquests and thirdly a great admirer of Olivia’s failed book. Which he has read twice. And he rarely reads anything twice.

Ethan is 24 going on 14, the master of a limited but direct lexicon in which every third word begins with f. Younger than Olivia, fluent in the social media barely on her radar, he exudes all the confidence she lacks. She also can’t match the gallery of tattoos that ornament his arms and body. Ethan is a supercharged, and it isn’t long before he plainly suggests that, hey, since he’s here and she’s here and it’s really cold out there, maybe…

The playwright’s banter between this odd couple is brisk, sharp and just enough off-kilter to keep the game light, even as Olivia grapples with Ethan’s graphic account of his rise to fame and considerable fortune as a tell-all Don Juan.

Olivia is no prude. She’s been around, too. And theoretically, sure, she could imagine sex with a total stranger. No strings, no relationship. But that’s just theoretical.

And so, to Olivia’s great surprise, the dance begins. It swirls into a heady, passionate waltz that ends with clothing and bodies all rearranged – and another proposition.

The table is now set for the real meat of “Sex With Strangers.” Ethan’s good opinion of Olivia’s craft is borne out in spades and he finds himself slipping into an unexpected role, one as awkward as it is unfamiliar.

Laura Eason, the author of more than 15 plays, is a skilled crafter of dialogue with a keen sense of emotional curve, conversational rhythm and the funny stuff that springs from impulsive reaction to a shocking idea. Her safely nestled Olivia, licking the wounds of rejection, is an immediately appealing character through whose eyes we witness this bizarre encounter.

If the chance meeting of Olivia and Ethan stretches plausibility, turning “Sex With Strangers” toward sitcom, the play still sparks enough anticipation and sustains enough wry humor to hold our interest. Whether it really goes anywhere is another question.

Eason’s dramatic structure, two acts built of neatly framed vignettes that constantly fade to black, begins to feel more facile than energizing. And while its opposites-attract charm carries “Sex With Strangers” a long way, one wishes for a bigger payoff, a final proposition as daring as Ethan might have put in his blog.           

Through May 15. www.steppenwolf.org. Call (312) 335-1650.                       

     

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Women living the hard way in the madness of war

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 Iowa-born daughter of parents from Zimbabwe, where she grew up before returning to the U.S. to earn a degree in psychology at Macalester College, then a master’s in acting at New York University. The playwright received a New Generations fellowship from the Theater Communications Group to visit Liberia and conduct research for “Eclipsed,” which premiered in 2009.

As Northlight’s crisp, agile and harrowing – yet very funny -- production attests, “Eclipsed” is the work a gifted young playwright whose African sensibility is matched by her lyrical grace as a writer. Chicago’s Goodman Theatre just announced that it will present the world premiere of Gurira’s new play, “The Convert,” next season.

The women of “Eclipsed” live literally in the shadow of men, or rather of the man who commands the rebel camp where they are incarcerated. We never see a man, only the fleeting shadow of a booted soldier who draws near from time to time to signal which woman the commandant has summoned for sex. That is not intimated: It is the reason why these women are still alive, and that reality governs their existences.

In their prison world, the women have even relinquished their names. They are the four wives of the CO, their short name for the commanding officer. So they refer to each other as No. 1, the eldest, who guesses her age to be mid-twenties and who has been the CO’s wife since girlhood; No. 2, who cut herself a more appealing deal by picking up an AK47 and joining the soldiers; No. 3, who’s ballooned with pregnancy and hating it, and No. 4, who at age 15 is the little group’s latest addition and the rapacious CO’s instant favorite.

There is also a fifth woman, an outsider who visits the camp from time to time as part of an international peace organization dedicated to ending the bloody civil war. She does have a name, Rita, and that symbolic fact, as much as the respect she is accorded by the CO, separates her from the other four women.

In director Hallie Gordon’s urgently credible staging, each of Gurira’s finely drawn characters mirrors a distinctive facet of human nature strained by the extremity of war.

The language they speak is an expressive pidgin English widely spoken in African countries. It is concise and direct. An object is not very small, but small-small; the weather not terribly hot, but hot-hot. The actors manage this argot with the fluency of people who grew up with it. Dialogue flies by, and it takes a few minutes into the play for the ear to catch up.

The performances are transcendent. As the senior wife, Alana Arenas portrays a woman wise in the ways of survival, a quiet authority figure whose word is rule in that bunkhouse. Tamberla Perry’s wife No. 2 is all fire and willfulness, the soldier with an attitude, her relative independence slung over her shoulder.

As the pregnantly burdened wife No. 3, Leslie Ann Sheppard provides the play’s gasping breaths of comedy. Paige Collins, as the newcomer who alone among them can read, bears the story’s tragic weight with just the right blend of innocence and ambiguity. Hers is a journey from idealism to a perspective clouded by circumstance. They all are conditioned to the exigencies of war. If the war ends, what happens to any of them?

Perhaps that is Gurira’s purpose for the fifth wheel Rita, played with open-hearted steadiness by Penelope Walker: this rational woman from the outside, a business woman, the link back to a world without war and sexual bondage.

Through Feb. 20. www.northlight.org. Call (847) 673-6300.

    

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An endless loop where hearts are trapped

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 drive and shape events. Like “The Walworth Farce,” “The New Electric Ballroom” shows us a group of deeply neurotic characters who keep replaying a traumatic episode which they have shared and from which there appears to be no escape.

But where “The Walworth Farce” (2006) deals with a father’s coercion of his two sons into reliving an unspeakable crime, “The New Electric Ballroom” (2005) finds three sisters painfully revisiting dashed expectations in love. And their little circle is expanded to include a local fisherman who, though seemingly trapped in his own loneliness, may bring hope to the troubled women.

One can hardly observe either play without thinking of the existential hell Jean-Paul Sartre created in “No Exit” or, closer to Walsh’s milieu, the imprisoning loops of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame” and “Krapp’s Last Tape.” Yet Walsh, a 43-year-old Dublin native now residing in London, puts a highly personal stamp on his designs for the claustrophobic mindscapes his characters occupy.

Enda Walsh is a virtuosic wordsmith, and in “The New Electric Ballroom” the sisters as well as their fisher friend speak copiously, and repetitively. They tell elaborate tales of experience and observation fraught with great detail. These reiterated stories – fables perhaps by the time we drop in -- are their refuge from life’s evolving reality, and no alterations are to be brooked.

“The New Electric” sisters are Clara and Breda, both in middle age and looking their years, and Ada, who still possesses the rosy complexion and clear eyes of lingering girlhood, though she is not young.

They live together in modest means in a small Irish town near the coast. Live together and replay together the painful stories of how, years ago, Clara and Breda had their hearts broken at the New Electric Ballroom. The younger Ada has embraced these bitter accounts as cautionary tales against the world outside, which she otherwise scarcely knows. Indeed, she insists that her older sisters re-enact those hideous nights -- complete with taped music and costumes and graphic recollections of their heightened sexual pitch as teenage girls -- over and over and over.

As Clara and Breda, Laurie Larson and Kate Buddeke offer vivid portraits of women perpetually suffering from wounds too deep to heal. Larson’s Clara is fretful, timid, easily bullied by both of her sisters. Buddeke’s dominant Breda, no less damaged, brings hot passion to her ever-circling story of expectation and disaster.  

But Walsh’s play really turns on the possibility that Ada might escape to normalcy after all. Kirsten Fitzgerald is luminous as the girlish woman who watches these family reruns with rapt fascination. Ada’s own New Electric promise comes in the form of Patsy, the fisherman who regularly shows up at the door with the day’s catch.

Guy Van Swearingen’s Patsy is a garrulous charmer, even if he tends to repeat his reports on who’s doing what in the village. Repeat them verbatim. But it seems the women have yet to invite him in as a real visitor.

Then one day Breda gets an idea. She sweeps Patsy into their kitchen. It is, in every sense, a transformational moment. Now it is the still-blushing Ada whose pulse quickens as Patsy turns into, whoa, quite a guy. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Has it?

Through March 6. www.aredorchidtheatre.org. Call (312) 943-8722.

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Pain, sorrow and other rewards of womanhood

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 complicated. That is, her life, her long life, has been complicated. There was happiness, a marriage, some love, infidelity, a lot of money and even more pain. She had a son, but that relationship rotted early.

“Three Tall Women,” so potently and grippingly played out at Court Theatre, is Albee’s paean to family values and the spiritual uplift that is domestic convention. Thus we learn the greatest reward of long life: the many times you can revisit compromise and replay heartbreak.

Character A in this one-woman play for three actors is companioned by the presences of B and C. In the first act, B is the old woman’s middle-aged care-giver, attentive, supportive and bored. C is a young representative of the law firm that manages A’s affairs. She proves to be a remarkably insensitive kid, petulant and spiteful.

But Act I serves mainly to acquaint us with A in the present, in her frailty and dementia. She believes people are trying to steal from her. Who knows, maybe she’s right. She’s also fond of repetitive reminiscences about her girlhood, how she loved to ride horses, how her mother was strict but fair. Or was that her father?

When she can’t remember clearly, she begins to sob. The care-giver has seen and heard it all before, many times. She can recite along, as if this were all a collection of oft-repeated children’s rhymes. The kid from the law firm doesn’t get it, finds this whole dementia-laced cant annoying. But then A takes a sudden turn for the worse and we’re catapulted on to the real deal: Act II, when we’re reintroduced to A, B and C as keenly interested observers of this sad figure recumbent on a bed, its face shrouded in an oxygen mask.

In Act II, the two companions of a now perfectly lucid, 90-something A (Lois Markle) are transformed into two former versions of her -- in the bitterness of middle age (Mary Beth Fisher) and at the optimistic, uncrushed age of 26 (Maura Kidwell).

Now the concision, eloquence and ringing truth of Albee’s writing, exemplified in Markle’s sad, random and funny ruminations on A’s younger days in Act I, blossoms in full flower.   

We also find ourselves staring at a logical crisis: If A (that wretched figure on the bed) is to B (the woman) as B is to C (the girl), what hope is there for either C or B?

That’s the fearful question posed again and again by the youthful embodiment of the old woman. And Kidwell, in an energized performance, embraces that anxiety with heart and mind, challenging the inevitability of what lies ahead or flat-out refusing to become either of the older women in her future. But what must be shall be in this existential loop, as Fisher’s mid-life character reminds her younger self most caustically.

Woman B, no longer young, not yet old but well-worn by the vagaries and necessities of life’s harsh way, is the play’s tragic figure. Fisher’s performance is galvanizing, as she recalls a miserable marriage and spits out the story of a defiant son who even in his debauched youth mocked her motherhood. Fisher’s seething rant on the inequity of her marriage and the awfulness of her son, the clear and specific counterpart to A’s demented rambling in Act I, marks the play’s emotional apex and turning point.

And so it remains for Markle, as the spiritual second self of that shell of a human being on the bed, to provide the long perspective on this less than happy-ever-after life. And to achieve her own closure. Without denying or mitigating what is past, Markle’s stately character, rising to her full height, offers the playwright’s grace.

To sleep, perchance to dream again.

Through Feb. 13. www.CourtTheatre.org. Call (773) 753-4472.

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Sweet and twenty: a timeless moment in the woods

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 time-marker may recede to the periphery of consciousness, it’s never wholly forgotten. The specter of time hovers constantly over Shakespeare’s characters and events in this philosophical comedy. The fearful usurping duke gives Rosalind, daughter of the banished duke and dearest friend to his own daughter, a sudden deadline to be gone or be killed. The love-smitten Rosalind in turn commands her adored Orlando not to delay their next meeting by the thousandth part of a minute.

And of course, the melancholy courtier Jaques reminds his fellow fugitives that our very lives are measured out as if by some cosmic clock: We rise to an apex of vigor and achievement only to face an inevitable decline into dotage, to become mere piping shadows, sans everything.

Such is the temporal conflict beneath the frothy comedy of “As You Like It,” and director Gary Griffin, the company’s associate artistic director, paces this production to catch each reflection of time’s bending sickle, the exhilaration of its sweep as well as its weight.

Yet this play simply can’t fly – cannot suspend time – without a Rosalind and an Orlando whose mutual infatuation we buy heart and soul. Griffin’s production takes wing with Kate Fry and Matt Schwader as lovers made all of passion and impatience. Zealous, funny and fluent in Shakespeare’s language, Fry and Schwader head this cast not only by virtue of their roles, but also by example.

Like Romeo and Juliet, these outcasts love when they first behold – in this case when Rosalind sees Orlando defeat a formidable wrestler only hours before their separate fates cast them both as exiles to Arden Forest. There, dressed as a man for her safety, Rosalind meets up with Orlando, who doesn’t recognize her. Indeed, the disguised Rosalind becomes Orlando’s counselor in the art of love, and what time he doesn’t pass in her tutelage he spends scrawling love poems to her fair name and hanging these ill-footed verses on the forest trees.

Here, too, the set designer embroiders the play with imagination. Depinet’s willowy branches, festooned with Orlando’s love notes, hang long and low over the scene like the strands of a leafy love nest.

Monitoring those crazy kids is Rosalind’s pal and ever-suffering collaborator Celia, in the irresistible form of Chaon Cross. From the moment we first glimpse her, we're in the thrall of Cross’ effervescent Celia. Her sure comic timing never misses a beat. In the forest, as Rosalind draws out the unsuspecting Orlando, Cross’ agonizing reactions bring down laughter in gales.

The brilliance of these three principals carries a show that suffers elsewhere. Phillip James Brannon, as the urbane fool Touchstone, squanders one of Shakespeare’s richest comic characters. Brannon rushes through lines that need resonating space. Less funny than frantic, he well might hitch himself to the measure of that swinging pendulum overhead.

And I really don’t understand Ross Lehman’s expansive, almost exuberant take on the pensive Jaques. In Lehman’s rather preening turn, the philosopher’s interior darkness gives place to a kind of mirthful illumination – more spotlight than insight.

Through March 6. www.chicagoshakes.com. Call (312) 595-5600.   

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Searching for self and sanity in a garden of doubt

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 meet at age 17, goes to college, travels the world and into her mid-30s enjoys a burgeoning career as novelist and editor. Meanwhile, her marriage has failed. And one day, she’s back home in suburban Dallas to visit her mother Rose, cousin Jasmine and adored aunt, Daisy.

That’s when the box into which Iris has stuffed her specter begins to break down. As the truth leaks out, the girl become woman collapses under its awfulness, howling against the storm. Yet Iris still has her family and the constant river, and so the painful healing process begins.

This is Taylor’s 10^th production at the Goodman Theatre, where she is a member of the Artistic Collective. She calls her lyrical, wryly funny and touching “Trinity River Plays” a triptych, and thus gives each act its own title: “Jarfly,” “Rain” and “Ghoststory.” Unlike, say, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s larger-scaled, three-part “Brother/Sister Plays,” which do stand separately, Taylor’s three-hour cycle really presents a unity. “Jarfly” – the title is a southern term for cicada – might work alone, though its very dark final implication becomes transfigured over the two remaining acts.

And where McCraney’s work extends across generations, Taylor’s play embraces just 18 years, from 1978 to 1996, starting on Iris’ 17^th birthday. That’s the day her older, free-spirited cousin Jasmine gets her drunk on the girl’s first taste of liquor. And her uncle comes home to find her throwing up in the kitchen sink.

Which brings me to the other striking difference between “The Brother/Sister Plays” and “The Trinity River Plays.” McCraney’s story places a Southern black community in the oppressive world of The Man. Taylor’s family is black but as recognizably middle class as any family might be. Despite occasional references to what it was like in the old, harder days, it should be no stretch for anyone from any cultural background to grasp what’s driving these characters, what’s daunting them or the battles they wage with their loved ones and within themselves.

Much as one might admire the Goodman’s superb ensemble of actors, or the deft work of director Ethan McSweeny, it is designer Todd Rosenthal’s splendorous garden set that requires first praise. You walk into the theater and, wow, there it is, this grand, multicolored and beautifully manicured garden occupying the forward half of the stage, with the interior of a suburban home behind it. What you can’t yet know is that it’s a garden of metaphors.

Iris’ mother Rose is a gardener. But Iris, who has a strained relationship with her mom, doesn’t know a shovel from a hoe. No, the Iris we meet is an owlish dreamer with a writer’s flair. She perches on a low tree branch and muses on cicadas but hardly notices that extraordinary garden.

As Iris, Karen Aldridge makes a credible and harrowing progression from buttoned-up, naïve schoolgirl to a woman on the roiling seas of emotional disaster. For sheer virtuosity, however, Penny Johnson Jerald, as her mother, upstages everyone with her indelible impression of a cancer victim in final decline.

Jacqueline Williams’ Aunt Daisy is an irresistible blend of wisdom, drollery and maternal comfort. And Christiana Clark, as the self-destructive Jasmine, paints a sad portrait of a young woman seemingly determined to make her ruin complete.

The play’s key male roles, Iris’ uncle and her ex-husband, raise an intriguing psychological issue. Taylor has them conveniently, and economically, assigned to the same actor, here the adaptable and appealing Jefferson A. Russell. And thus Iris goes pillar to post, from a spectral uncle to a husband who in actuality resembles him and who doesn’t work out. Or are they getting back together?

That’s a psychiatrist’s sandbox. Can’t wait for the sequel.

Through Feb. 20. www.GoodmanTheatre.org. Call (312) 443-3800.

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From a deep vein in old California, an opera gleams

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 evocative of musical comedy, surely hasn’t helped the opera’s image.

But “Fanciulla” lies as far from comedy as “Madama Butterfly,” Puccini’s other glimpse into the American psyche and culture. As the Lyric Opera’s engaging revival attests, the same dramatic insight and lyric genius that already had produced “Butterfly,” “Tosca” and “La Boheme” struck true coin again when Puccini’s created “Fanciulla” in 1910 on a commission from the Metropolitan Opera. The composer wanted to write a specifically American opera. He delivered both a credible portrait of the wild and lonely West and a masterpiece of music-drama, as touching as it is imaginative.

Like the Lyric Opera, the Met also chose the centenary of “Fanciulla” to bring it once more before the public, even including the opera in its Met Live in HD series of cinema transmissions earlier this season. And like the Met, the Lyric settled on the same two singers for the lead roles: soprano Deborah Voigt as Minnie, the pistol-packing young woman who keeps a mining camp saloon called the Polka, and tenor Marcello Giordani as Dick Johnson, a notorious robber who sets his sights on the Polka’s gold stash until he enters the world of the beautiful and compassionate Minnie.

Having seen the Met production in New York, I can report one key gain in the Lyric staging: the set for Act I, which takes place in the saloon. Where the Met presented a vast space that challenged any sense of intimacy among the Polka’s habitués, the Lyric achieves precisely that with a saloon whose snug proportions we first grasp from the outside – only to see the walls open to reveal a cozily cluttered interior worthy of a mining camp watering hole.

“Fanciulla” is not a simple story of bad man meets good girl and reforms. The towering mountain range that looms behind the Polka in this production implies Puccini’s larger story of rugged souls thrown together in collective loneliness, prospectors far from home and family, mutually dependent, living at the outer limits of law and creature comfort. In all three acts, Puccini took great pains to establish these conditions and circumstances – moving to a tentative love scene in Minnie’s mountain cabin as a blizzard rises, then to a bleak impromptu gallows and cold darkness as fate closes in on the outlaw Dick Johnson. In the local sheriff Jack Rance, who lusts after Minnie and draws a bead on Johnson as both wanted man and rival, Puccini gives raw adversity a human form.

Puccini’s vocal writing, mostly through-composed in the manner of Wagner, is spectacular not only in its free-wheeling and soaring lines but also in its concise expression. Voigt and Giordani bring to this production the same vocal luster and passionate yet resistant interaction that lit up the Met stage. These are real, feeling characters whose hard lives resonate in the speech of their music. The saloon affords a golden wealth of such grappling souls, among them the jealous, vengeful sheriff, and in baritone Marco Vratogna’s chilling rage one hears a distinct echo of Tosca’s demonic pursuer Scarpia.

Sir Andrew Davis conducts with a sure sense of dramatic arch, and stage director Vincent Liotta manages to evoke through his large cast a spirit of shared venture and common risk against that rough vastness.

Through Feb. 21. www.lyricopera.org Call (312) 827-5600.

  

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Home sweet home, and the bitter road back

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 acting career in the early 1970s with New York City’s Negro Ensemble Company, which first produced “Home” in 1979.  The bittersweet comedy soon moved to Broadway and garnered a Tony nomination as best new play in 1980. 

As imaginative as it is touching, "Home" offers a testament to self-understanding and faith. Coming of age in Crossroads, N.C., Cephus Miles has his roots in the soil his family works as share-croppers. His life, to his way of thinking, is bountiful. He has the soft earth beneath his feet, a canopy of stars and people who love and guide him: a stern grandfather and a kindly uncle. He also has a prospective wife in the beautiful, spirited Pattie Mae.

Then, one by one, the seams of his neatly knit-up life begin to split, until one day, in the fullness of his young manhood, Cephus finds himself alone, displaced, bereft of every treasured thing, every joy.  Family, sweetheart, home, freedom itself: all are lost. Now, disoriented and clinging to life by its rough edges, Cephus begins an unmapped journey through darkness and briars.

But there’s a funny thing about life’s buffeting, about stumbling and falling and getting up and getting back on the road, maybe the road home. Viewed from a distance, from the front porch steps, such a history can lend itself to a poetic retelling replete with colorful characters, fanciful incidents and slyly seasoned humor.

Samm-Art Williams’ “Home” offers nothing less, and it is brought ever so sweetly to light by an enchanting, multi-hatted cast of three players directed with impeccable style, wit and grace by Ron OJ Parson.

Kamal Angelo Bolden brings a disarmingly simple honesty to Cephus, whose tribulations he attributes to an inattentive God who must be overstaying his vacation in Miami. Thus Cephus rolls with the bad stuff and waits for a break when God finally gets back.

But life’s little annoyances turn serious when Cephus is drafted for duty in the Vietnam War, and runs afoul of Uncle Sam by pointing out the commandments that say “thou shall not kill” and “love thy neighbor.” Bolden is both a natural story-teller and a skilled actor of arresting fluency. As Cephus’ tumultuous fortunes take him to the North with the promise of a new, swingin’ lifestyle, Bolden makes us resonate first to this rube’s inflated expectations, then to the despair that besets a man whose heart we’ve come to know.

All along the way, from farmstead to the city lights, Cephus’ journey is attended by a multitude of wonderful characters impersonated by two quick-change actors, Ashley Honore (whose primary role is that of Cephus’ beloved Pattie Mae) and Tracey N. Bonner, whose trunkful of guises and riotous shifts in persona infuse this play with a great part of its charm.

Honore is lovely as the buoyant farm girl destined by the two families’ mutual agreement to be Cephus’ wife. She also’s very funny as Pattie Mae spars with Cephus on the issue of how much sparking crosses the line of pre-marital propriety.  Honore takes on assorted identities, at one point marching through Cephus’ beleaguered life as a soldier of the Salvation Army.

But it’s Bonner’s one-person population that fills the stage with memorable characters – a jumpin’, Bible-thumpin’ preacher, a big-city temptress, a home-boy writing to the folks from Nam, a village scold. One character exists for a scene, another for a few zesty seconds. They’re all priceless. And all are put to evocative use by director Parson in a narrative that ebbs and flows at such perfectly gauged tempos that you never notice this show has run an hour and 45 minutes with no intermission.

Through Dec. 12. www.CourtTheatre.org. Call (773) 753-4472.

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Julia Child, from pummeled eggs to French cuisine

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 aroma holds promise of something delicious, and “To Master the Art” delivers.

In witty, touching fashion, playwrights Brown and Frew – abetted by Karen Janes Woditsch’s exuberant performance as Julia Child – have captured a kitchen-clueless woman’s discovery of food that became a passion, then an obsession that changed the way Americans thought about cooking.

Woditsch is delightful as the tall Californian who followed her husband Paul Child to France, where he was promoting American interests for the U.S. government, only to find herself idle and isolated by a language that baffled her.

But Julia McWilliams Child, who had worked in U.S. intelligence during the war, was not a woman to sit on the sidelines. And once she got the bug to learn how the French transfigured food into a magical experience, she went at it with a vengeance, pushing through Gallic prejudice against this Yankee interloper and even testing her devoted, indulgent husband Paul.

 In the end, after a decade of unstinting, meticulous labor came the fruit, Julia Child’s landmark tome “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” This charming, vivacious play tracks Child’s emergence from mangled eggs in her first days at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris to complex dishes that were models of the culinary art, absolument parfait!

Woditsch embodies Child – her high-pitched voice and direct, sometimes earthy manner – without creating a caricature. Her rhapsodic enthusiasm is palpable, her setbacks and frustrations real. Genuine as well is Woditsch’s unvarnished zeal for Paul, portrayed by Craig Spidle with a middle-aged lustiness and barely contained world-weariness.

In a chilling digression evoking that convulsive post-war era, Paul Child is summoned to Washington to be grilled by the House Un-American Activities Committee on suspicion of consorting with known communists. As Child’s loyalty is being questioned by a pair of over-determined inquisitors, Spidle reacts with an honest amazement, then outrage, that surely resonated in every soul in that very quiet little theater.

Playwright Brown also directs this production, moving it along with a light hand and sure sense of when to slow the action and dwell on the spirit of his subject, which is food no less than Child herself.

One illuminating set piece finds Julia in her first cooking class at Le Cordon Bleu with a group of ex-GIs presided over by a patiently enduring chef (played with twinkling affection by Terry Hamilton).  They’re making what we would call scrambled eggs. Who can’t do that? Hamilton’s philosophical chef answers: none of them. He then explains what it means to love cooking, to contemplate its elements – and how to crack and whip an egg properly. One can only wonder how many eggs Hamilton massacred in learning to crack the shell and pop out the contents with one hand. He does it so magnificently.

Indeed, an aura of authentic time and place pervades this lovely show. That authenticity has a physical center in the person of Jeannie Affelder, whose fluent French lends genuine style to not one but three different characters: the owner of the aforementioned restaurant, a street vendor of vegetables and Julia Child’s collaborator on the cook book, Simone Beck. In that last and largest role, the petite, winsome Affelder presents an irresistible foil to Woditsch’s imposing Julia.

Keith Pitts’ scenic design is a picture postcard of efficiency, readily adaptable as brasserie, kitchen or street scene. I happened to catch “To Master the Art” just after returning from two weeks in Paris. At the end, I yearned only for a bistro where I might order a slice of paté and raise a glass to Julia Child. And reflect upon the true meaning of “bon appétit.”

Through Dec. 19. www.timelinetheatre.com. Call (773) 281-8463.     

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Tapping the musical wealth behind an opera's mask

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 Maschera” (“A Masked Ball”) came at the end of a decade that began for Verdi with two such consummately integrated and compelling music-dramas as “La Traviata” and “Rigoletto.” But in “Ballo,” which suffered torments of censorship at the hands of both state and papal authorities, Verdi ultimately was obliged to hang his music on a libretto that had been squeezed and reshaped to comply with political, rather than dramatic, exigencies.

The story, which censors found either too inflammatory or too raw, centers on the unstable reign of King Gustavus III of Sweden and his amorous designs on Amelia, wife of the king’s personal secretary. While his foes plot his assassination, Gustavus pursues Amelia, who admits she returns his affections but keeps to the high moral ground of fidelity to her husband. After a course of mystical silliness and ridiculous plot turns, the opera ends badly for everyone.

But never mind that, the music transcends all – and so does a marvelous Lyric Opera cast doubly well served by stage director Renata Scotto and the Israeli conductor Asher Fisch.

As the precariously perched king, tenor Frank Lopardo cuts a capricious figure oblivious to all signs of danger and royally reckless in his quest for Amelia. Lopardo also brings a regal, free-spirited voice to the role. A highlight in an evening that offered many was Gustavus’ Act III soliloquy in which he contemplates the difficulty of Amelia’s position and resolves to end the unconsummated affair.

The simplicity of that scene is typical of the clarity that Scotto – one of the great Amelias during her stage career – brings to this production. Also evocatively staged is the pivotal second act in which Amelia at midnight searches around a hangman’s scaffold for an herb that might quell her passion for the king. She is found there by Gustavus, and the two then are caught not quite in flagrante by her husband Renato.  

That dramatic scheme allowed Verdi to transform an act into a musical monument, beginning with a prodigious soliloquy for the tormented and fearful Amelia. Soprano Sondra Radvanovsky’s brilliant, tremulous, impassioned singing brought down a stormy ovation. But that was merely her warm-up: When Gustavus joins Amelia, the two share music of soaring ardor as he presses his love for her and she finally confesses that she loves him as well. In matched voices and in convincing chemistry, Radvanovsky and Lopardo lit up the house.

Despite the improbable  story, Verdi’s intimate musical portraits make us care about Amelia and Renato and respond to their very real distress, which comes to a head when Renato, believing his wife unfaithful, declares his intention to kill her – much like Othello informing Desdemona that she is about to die for her imagined sin. Baritone Mark Delavan’s proud, wounded and now vengeful Renato created a chilling foil to Radvanovsky’s lyrical protestations of innocence.

There’s a certain old-school quality in Verdi’s use of set pieces in “Ballo,” and a distinct homage to tradition in the coloratura trouser role of the king’s page Oscar. Soprano Kathleen Kim’s pixie presence was nicely complemented by her agile singing. But the voice that nearly stole the night belonged to mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, as the fortune-teller Ulrica. Blythe’s huge, supple, gorgeous delivery of Ulrica’s vision brought this show to a roaring pause.

Asher Fisch’s musical direction provided sympathetic accompaniment while shaping the opera at dramatically purposeful tempos. He also drew fluent, opulent playing from the Lyric Opera Orchestra.

The sets and costumes from the San Francisco Opera lend this “Ballo” equal parts of luxury and eeriness. Luxurious as well is the contribution of the Lyric Opera Chorus in a formidable assignment.

Through Dec. 10. www.lyricopera.org. Call (312) 332-2244.

  

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Paavo Jarvi and his shining orchestra on the Seine

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 hard to believe any connoisseur could have come away from the concert I heard Nov. 4 at the Salle Pleyel unconvinced that this orchestra ranks in the top class.

For that matter, I might say the same about the Estonian-born conductor Paavo Jarvi, who at age 48 has just begun his new directorship of the Orchestre de Paris. Jarvi steps down as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at the end of this season.

In an electrifying performance of Sibelius Symphony No. 2 in D major, the rapport between conductor and orchestra was so thorough-going that one might have surmised they had been a musical family for several years rather than a few weeks.

While Jarvi’s conducting style tends toward open, exuberant gestures, he works with a clear purpose that these musicians obviously understand down to the last nuance. This was a fairly brisk Sibelius Second, but animated rather than frenetic and – notably in the brasses -- brilliant rather than merely clamorous.

In Sibelius’ plethora of grandly sweeping tunes, Jarvi allowed the Paris strings to glisten and to sing; and shine they did, from opulent cellos and violas up through gossamer textures spun by a superb choir of violins. The Orchestre de Paris also boasts a prize group of wind players who made impeccably poised chamber music in passages that sometimes get lost in the storm and stress of the mighty Second Symphony.

Just as Jarvi’s penchant for sudden accelerations injected the performance with hair-raising bursts of energy, his masterfully contoured peroration in the finale – a sound that grew ever more majestic and seemed to tap every possible resonance of the Pleyel’s splendid acoustic – was pure, unrelenting excitement.

The balance of the program offered Elisabeth Leonskaya’s lyrical, romantically old-school Russian account of the Grieg Piano Concerto and the premiere of Arvo Pärt’s “Silhouette: Homage to Gustave Eiffel” for strings and percussion, a short piece of winsome lyricism commissioned to welcome Jarvi to Paris. Pärt was on hand to acknowledge the applause.

It seems likely Jarvi – whose predecessors at the Orchestre de Paris include Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim -- will be present at the Pleyel for many an ovation to come.

As for the orchestra coming to a U.S. concert hall near you, that doesn’t appear to be in the offing near term. While Jarvi is quoted in an Orchestre de Paris publication espousing the value of tours and citing extensive plans to take the orchestra to cities around Europe in the coming year, the U.S. is not on that agenda.

But the new maestro already has begun recording with the orchestra. Their CD of works by Bizet – the youthful Symphony in C, the Jeux d’Enfants” and a second symphony called “Roma” – is available at Amazon.com.

Jarvi’s extensive discography includes some excellent Telarc CDs with Cincinnati, where he has been music director since 2001. Notable are Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps” and Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony on one disc and Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique.”

You can also listen to the Orchestre de Paris’s vault of concerts dating back to 1982, without charge, here.

         

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Strauss early and late, with panache and precision

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.

“Metamorphosen” (1945) inevitably brings to mind Schoenberg’s 1899 “Transfigured Night,” not only in its transformational form but also in its broadly romantic spirit and its use of strings alone. But in truth, across its 30-minute expanse, Strauss’ richly contrapuntal rumination, inspired by the calamity of World War II, reaches back much further, to the deeply personal reflections of late Beethoven

Nelsons, the 32-year-old music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony, allowed the music its full dramatic flowering, from an initial lyrical transparency to an ultimate solemnity of funereal weight and portent. Indeed, in its final pages, the “Metamorphosen” makes several fragmentary, subsurface references to the tragic slow movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony.

The Orchestre de Paris strings responded with a performance of warmth, pliancy and precision. The profound sadness evoked in the music’s dark conclusion was more than compelling; it was breath-stopping.

The full orchestra showed its brilliant colors in a virtuosic turn through “Also sprach Zarathustra,” Strauss’ tone-poem on Nietzsche’s grandiose philosophical novel. Yet, despite the composer’s evocative “chapter” headings – “Of Great Longing,” “Of Joys and Passions,” etc. – the work can be construed (much like “Heldenleben” or “Don Quixote”) as a purely musical adventure of full of marvelous surprises and charm.

That pretty well sums up Nelsons’ imaginative and authoritative account, in which the Paris strings, winds and brasses provided as rich and subtle a palette as any conductor might wish for.

Between these Straussian bookends fell Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, with the Romanian pianist Mihaela Ursuleasa delivering a performance that transmuted this 18^th century composer into one closer in form and content to Liszt.

The egregious histrionics of Ursuleasa’s playing – leaning into the audience a la Victor Borge, rising from the bench a la Jerry Lee Lewis – were matched by the extremities of her interpretation with its sudden dynamic leaps and free-wheeling rubato. The pianist has technique aplenty. It’s just that she clearly prefers doing Mozart her way, whereas I’m stuck preferring something more akin to his.

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Down on the farm, a harvest of pain and passion

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 performances of a large cast of characters --  this “Seagull” offers a direct path to the troubled heart of Chekhov’s morally harrowing play.

In no small part, Falls’ production is so effective because it feels so natural, like episodes unrehearsed, without the artifice of entrances and exits. The players sit at the far end of a long rectangular stage built especially for this show. They are neither out of sight nor noticed. When they spring into view and into the conversation, their “entrances” seem spontaneous rather than cue

So well-considered and skillfully portrayed is this collection of unhappy, frustrated, insecure characters that you come away not quite sure who’s story it is: Who exactly is the seagull, the one soul most like that poor beautiful bird, shot and stuffed, lifelike but dead? Here, on this farm so far removed from the city and its clamoring voices of approval, which of these characters is most bereft of life?

At the core of that question is the grand dame Arkadina, the celebrated actress wholly consumed by her career, clinging to her fame, ever replaying her latest ovation. She has a younger lover, a writer called Trigorin, the current rage in literary circles. And, oh yes, Arkadina has a son Konstantin, a fledgling writer, living on this farm, always in his mother’s shadow and now further obscured by Trigorin as well.

Mary Beth Fisher’s portrayal of the self-absorbed Arkadina is a tour de force. She catches not only Arkadina’s endless posturing, but also her barely veiled anxiety over beauty’s flight and her deeply conflicted feelings about motherhood – about nurturing, when her own emotional need is to be at the center of any stage.

As Konstantin, Stephen Louis Grush effectively sets the bar for this production with his spot-on first speech, the harangue of a young playwright about all that’s false in theatrical tradition – not incidentally, the tradition that sustains his distant, uncaring, ever-preoccupied mother.

In a defining scene, as Arkadina tenderly freshens the bandages on her son’s self-inflicted wounds, Fisher and Grush move with inexorable gravity from laughter and remembrance to the ugly conflict that has come to alienate them from each other.

Between mother and son now stands the doubly threatening figure of Trigorin, a compulsive writer in his early thirties played with palpable world-weariness by Cliff Chamberlain. Nothing really happens to Trigorin in the play, but much happens because of him. Chamberlain’s measured, quiet speech provides all the romantic spark required to steal not only Konstantin’s mother but also the young man’s sweetheart, Nina – the play’s nominal seagull.

Nina, the exuberant and vulnerable Heather Wood, identifies herself with the slain bird, shot down in the fullness of its beauty only to be preserved, contained in time and place. In Nina’s final scene with Konstantin, when her dreams have dissolved into despair, Wood offers a heart-stopping account of a life that was not to be.

These four performances are matched by four more in Chekhov’s farmstead of the damned.

Francis Guinan is radiant as Arkadina’s infirm brother Sorin, a man who never aspired to much and is now bitter to see his life ending with his low expectations exactly fulfilled. And Scott Jaeck brings rugged presence and cynical truth to Dorn, the aging country doctor and ladies’ man made bitter by the numbing passage of time and opportunity.

As Polina, miserable wife of the farm’s manager who wishes only to flee with the doctor, Janet Ulrich Brooks is wretchedness personified, a gull with clipped wings gazing skyward. As her daughter Masha, hopelessly in love with Konstantin, Kelly O’Sullivan gives a performance of incandescent passion and compressed rage.

The Goodman has added six performances to its run. Six more reasons not to miss this stellar “Seagull.”

Through Nov. 21. www.goodmantheatre.org. Call (312) 443-3800.

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Where the wild things are comfortably married

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.

Such is the happy domestic storyline of Edward Albee’s “At Home at the Zoo,” a funny and frightening study in dysfunctional marriage brought to sharply detailed life at Victory Gardens.

Albee’s two-act play is really two complementary one-acters, “The Zoo Story” (1958) and “Homelife” (2003). The latter, a painfully revelatory scene between the aforementioned Peter and Ann, provides a back story for Peter’s immediately ensuing encounter with a curious loner called Jerry in “The Zoo Story.”

Little wonder Albee rechristened the combined plays “At Home at the Zoo.” In the apartment shared by Peter and Ann, wild things are but tenuously pent up. It’s little short of Peter and the wolf.

As the mellow husband and his combustible wife, Tom Amandes and Annabel Armour make a clinically fascinating pair, a once-perfect match now splitting along fault lines of the unconscious. They have come to occupy the same space physically, still protesting an unabated love for one another, but have lost all capacity to communicate.

She speaks but he does not hear. He proclaims his boredom, though he says the ennui lies in the dreadful, albeit highly profitable tomes he must edit. When she does get his attention, she forgets what she wanted to say. Then, as if through free-association, a conversation begins to evolve. Matters of sex quickly come into it. She is frustrated. No, she is not unhappy -- most of the time. It’s just that they never…it’s just that he’s…

By way of explaining why he’s, well, the way he is, Peter reveals a long-held secret about himself. He struggles to get it out, and as he falters, Ann begins to urge him on. Or is she egging him on? Her close attention turns to thinly veiled mockery, oiled with vitriol. Like some ill-begot chamber music, this fragmented give-and-spite demands precise interplay between actors, and Amandes and Armour bring it off with chilling effect. Peter has exposed his sensibility and in her leaking fury Ann goes for blood.

Thus the scene is set for “The Zoo Story,” which doesn’t happen at a zoo but in a park near Peter’s apartment where he has found refuge on a particular bench every Sunday afternoon for years. On this afternoon, his space is invaded by the slightly scruffy but loquacious Jerry, who has just walked from the zoo. Jerry wants to talk – about a lot of things, among them his visit to the zoo. Peter is obliged to put down his boring manuscript and listen.

Jerry, in the person of Marc Grapey, may not exactly be a stand-up guy, but he’s a magnetic stand-up comic. Grapey simply takes over the stage and suspends time with a prodigiously funny monologue about the grubby conditions and assorted tenants at the fourth-floor walk-up where Jerry lives. I’d go back to this show just to hear Grapey’s schtick again.

Jerry knows people, and he quickly gets Peter’s number. He tells Peter a story about a foul, evil dog that belongs to his landlady, and how he finally reached a stand-off with the dog: They’ve achieved a relationship almost like love, he says, well not really love but a kind of mutual indifference that allows dog and tenant to co-exist. And by way, Peter has something Jerry wants and intends to have. Here, now, in this park, in this state of nature.

Director Dennis Zacek and designer Mary Griswold work from the same book of clarity. Everything about this production is purposeful, concise, clutter-free. That is equally true of Griswold’s minimalist living room set for “Homelife” and the park backdrop’s suggestive wash of color and two plain benches in “The Zoo Story.”

Yes, two benches. One of them is Peter’s. He has marked it.

Through Oct. 31. www.victorygardens.org. (773) 871-3000

  

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Two takes on human nature: vicious and cynical

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 double bill but on separate evenings.

And that’s probably just as well for reasons beyond our limited capacity for theatrical mayhem.

“Oleanna,” about a female college student who brings serious charges against a professor, caused heated reactions in 1992 but now reads a bit dated. Moreover, the performance I saw showed too many of the fine seams in Mamet’s careening, blistering-fast dialog.

But “Speed-the-Plow” (1988), which concerns two Hollywood film producers who make a clear distinction between art and profit and give their all to the latter, was Mamet at full tilt, outrageous and precise, smart and deliciously dismaying. Here was  a cascade of dazzling dialog, supercharged and  laughter-inducing.

ATC’s “Speed-the-Plow” brings – or hurls – together Darrell W. Cox as Bobby Gould, a pragmatic Hollywood producer newly ensconced as the studio’s No. 2 man, and Lance Baker as Charlie Fox, his long-time second banana. Gould and Fox are self-described “whores” without any pretense of principle. They follow the money, of which Gould has raked in quite a lot and Fox, well, not so much.

But this is the day Charlie Fox’s luck changes. Like manna from heaven, he has been offered exclusive rights – for 24 hours -- to a sure-fire blockbuster movie. When he brings the deal to Gould for financial backing, the two men wax ecstatic at the prospect of cash rolling in. But a speed bump slows their plow: A pretty temp secretary (Nicole Lowrance) turns Gould’s head and leads him on the upward path toward a different film and its noble message of spiritual transmutation.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on Charlie Fox’s option. The stage is set for a showdown.

Did I mention virtuosity? Cox and Baker toss off Mamet’s rocketing dialog in the opening scene – fusillades of mutual praise mixed with hysterical confessions of their common whoredom – with the bow-fraying madness of two ace fiddlers trying to top each other. And later, when it looks like goodness is about to trump gain, Baker takes it up another notch in a hopping harangue made the more bizarre by the now-transfigured Gould’s indulgent calm.

How Gould gets to his new spiritual place is half the fun. At his apartment, the cute new temp shows up to report on her reading of the more uplifting screen play. Of course, Gould’s real objective is to bed the lass, but he listens – incredulously, as she makes her pious, feel-good case for the picture. This very funny production gets one of its biggest laughs as Cox, patiently taking in Lowrance’s moralistic harangue, punctuates one long paragraph with silence – then lifts his martini glass to his lips in wordless, voluminous reply.

Such spot-on timing isn’t always there in ATC’s companion staging of “Oleanna,” which stars Cox as a haughty college professor and Lowrance as a struggling student who visits his office with a desperate appeal for help in understanding his class.

The gist of the play is that the barely articulate girl accuses the self-important prof of sexual advances, and as they continue to meet the accuser gains in elocution and command as her teacher becomes progressively unglued and verbally impaired.

Written at the time of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas flap, “Oleanna” created a great stir, prompting feminist complaints that Mamet’s near-caricature of the girl as a vengeful demon impugned the just cause of women’s rights on campuses and in the workplace.

That was nearly 20 years ago. Viewed at this distance, the play might be construed quite differently, even as psychoanalytic theater. As the girl stammers her self-doubt, the professor reassures her by spelling out his own improbable journey into academia – and indeed his abiding skepticism of the whole educational process.  We get a very clear picture of a posturing man who conceals his self-loathing beneath a cloak of superiority.

What we have are two deeply neurotic characters who resonate to each other’s self-abnegation. Still, when the girl breaks down in convulsive sobs, the teacher – who has a child – reacts with a gesture of fatherly comfort. It will be his undoing.

Meanwhile, off-stage and between encounters, the girl connects with a Group and returns spitting polemical phrases at her embattled mentor. By now she seems a soulless, engineered automaton -- an assassin, not unlike the Manchurian candidate. Caught up in her newfound righteousness, she supplants her teacher at the pulpit of arrogance.

Cox and Lowrance go at it with fur-shredding vehemence, though (at least on opening night) they did not have Mamet’s rapid-fire, fragmentary dialog quite in place. In the opening scene especially, they weren’t so much interrupting each other as suddenly breaking off in mid-sentence and waiting a heartbeat for the other to speak.

Little matter.  Incendiary as it remains, “Oleanna” also feels inherently contrived and artificial. To experience Mamet at his searing best, at full crackle and pop, catch “Speed-the-Plow.”

Both shows play through Oct. 31. www.atcweb.org. Call (773) 409-412.

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Of woe well waxed, and life that wanes too soon

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 and Joy Farmer-Clary’s exquisite Juliet unmatched by Jeff Lillico’s monochromatic Romeo.

Australian director Gale Edwards’ intensely physical and hilariously bawdy approach, in a modern setting, begins with a bang as the Sharks and the Jets – oops, sorry, the warring Montagues and Capulets -- spring into view in the backstreet prospect of a deep-thrust stage.

Surveying Brian Sidney Bembridge’s severe, contemporary urban set – complete with blinking construction barriers -- I did half expect an opening flourish of Leonard Bernstein’s music with Riff bounding onto the stage and the other leaping Jets close behind.

But any concern about confusion with “West Side Story” was blasted from mind as Edwards’ opposing factions strutted into view, rapiers at the ready and challenging each other in Shakespearean language made to sound effortlessly vernacular.

And then, pow, swords are out and clashing like you’ve never seen. Fighting director Rick Sordelet should get a special award for the show’s brilliant and harrowing swordplay. That electric virtuosity only increases in the later combat between Mercutio and Tybalt (a worthily swaggering and petulant Zach Appelman).

Edwards’ notion of the warring houses as something like two mafia families, both dominated by willful men, resonates in several scenes. The most stunning instance finds old Capulet (the burly John Judd) forcibly bringing Tybalt to his knees when the kid wants to dispatch Romeo instantly at the dance in Capulet’s home.

That display of spleen and violence neatly sets up Capulet’s outburst at Juliet when she, by then secretly married to Romeo, defies her father’s instructions to marry the eminently eligible Paris. It’s a chilling confrontation, and Judd’s enraged Capulet seems fully capable of throwing the girl into the street right then and there.

We’re also the sadder for Farmer-Clary’s Juliet because in her thrilling discovery of love, in her vulnerability and in her radiant expression of newfound bliss, she has won us over utterly.

What makes Farmer-Clary’s girlish charm so infectious is her consummate mastery of Shakespeare’s poetry. This Juliet recites nothing, exudes all. Juliet is not yet 14 years old. Life and the world lie before her, and suddenly in this amazing young man she has found the key to both. The bubbly transport Farmer-Clary brings to the balcony scene, this moment of confession and vow, is an unalloyed delight.

Lillico’s fair and gentle Romeo looks the part of a lad who might steal a girl’s heart on sight. And like the object of his passion, Lillico delivers Shakespeare’s intoxicated lines with impeccable clarity. Yet one listens in vain for the heart behind the sentiment. Lillico has the rhythm down, the measured emphasis and the articulation. The impulse, the ardor, the madness are missing.

Those are the very strengths of Shafir’s magnetic Mercutio, as expansive and devilish a portrayal as one might hope to see. This Mercutio is a winsome rascal, self-assured, proud and a swordsman to be reckoned with. His death leaves a void in the production.

Indeed, Edwards’ troupe seemed to lose its spark in the tale’s dark winding down. Despite smart and funny performances by Ora Jones as Juliet’s nurse and David Lively as Friar Laurence, the collective momentum slowed through a final tomb scene that lacked a genuine edge of tragedy. And without that last full measure of poignancy, the play’s still-vital warning goes unsounded.

Through Nov. 21. www.chicagoshakes.com. Call (312) 595-5600.

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Deck reshuffled, the cards confound 'Carmen'

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 the stage 10 years ago. While there are musical moments of real pleasure, this is a “Carmen” in need of dramatic heat and constrained by singing that too often only hints at the opera’s earthy core of passion, seduction, jealousy and lust.

But the Lyric Opera is perhaps also victim of an unlucky tarot card. Mezzo-soprano Kate Aldrich, who was supposed to sing the title role in all but one of the October performances, dropped out a week before opening due to complications of pregnancy. In her place was Katharine Goeldner, who was originally scheduled to sing only on Oct. 29.

Goeldner is now slated to sing all the October dates. Nadia Krasteva remains the scheduled Carmen for a second run of performances in March.

It’s possible this tepid enterprise will warm up, but opening night (Oct. 13) still felt like everybody was still getting to know each other – really well, if you know what I mean. Where we expected a certain animal magnetism between Goeldner’s Carmen and tenor Yonghoon Lee’s Don José, we were confronted by two characters circling cautiously and singing by the book.

Indeed, in Carmen’s signature aria, the sensuous and tantalizing habanera, Goeldner as a hot-blooded Gypsy seemed more the prancing school-girl – rather like José’s demure sweetie Micaela sans shoes and with her shoulders bared. Goeldner’s singing was secure but contained, insouciant perhaps but hardly torrid.

Given the replacement situation, opening-night nerves may have taken more than their usual toll. To be sure, Carmen’s rendezvous with José in the Act II tavern scene displayed more genuine ardor, and Lee’s soulful delivery of Don José’s “Flower Song” saw the first-act flint in his voice modulated to a more supple quality. Still, to the end, Lee gave the impression of a singer yet to find his way into the psyche of this Spanish country boy suddenly caught up in a fatal attraction.

The expressive arc of Goeldner’s vocal performance continued to rise through Carmen’s fateful tarot reading in the mountain darkness of Act III, that insistent prophecy of death as she turns up card after card. But in her long and dramatically precarious showdown with José in the opera’s grim dénouement – the crazed lover stalking his prey outside the bull ring much like the toreador Escamillo within – Goeldner’s singing never quite reached the pitch of supreme defiance that transcends even the words themselves.

The night’s real vocal successes belonged to soprano Elaine Alvarez as Micaela, whose ardent prayer of chaste devotion won a huge ovation, and Kyle Ketelsen as the strutting, virile toreador Escamillo. His bravura song of the bull fight brought bouquets of cheering from the house. Bizet’s intricate Act II quintet of brigands – Carmen, Frasquita (Jennifer Jakob), Mercédès (Emily Fons), Dancaïre (Paul Scholten) and Remendado (René Barbera) – was a delightful peak as well.

Lyric Opera’s choristers, notably the women, made Bizet’s generous music ring, and the pit ensemble -- conducted by the Frenchman Alain Altinoglu in his Lyric debut -- infused even the intermezzos with vibrant colors. At all points, Altinoglu’s well-considered tempos buoyed the opera’s ample joie de vivre and brought real weight to its darker side.

Robin Don’s naturalistic sets, especially the sun-drenched beiges of the opening village scene, still charm the eye a decade later. But either director Harry Silverstein or lighting designer Jason Brown should be sent to the stockade for the blatant, moment-freezing flood of red light apparently intended underscore a portentous look between our femme fatale and poor José.

And if Silverstein is innocent here, he’s as guilty as sin, in the final scene, for having folks on a promenade above the plaza toss flowers down upon Carmen at the instant of her doom. Not very verismo.

Through Oct. 29 and March 12-27, 2011. www.lyricopera.org. Call (312) 827-5600.

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Pouring light on Mahler's nocturnal Seventh

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 “Requiem” that ailing CSO music director Riccardo Muti was to have conducted – surely will prove a season highlight irrespective of what wonders may await in programs to come.

Boulez and the CSO gave a magical performance that captured not just the technical finesse of Mahler’s grand scaled, minutely inflected work but also its poetic mystery and the many connections to its antecedents in the composer’s creative evolution.

The Seventh Symphony, written in 1904-05, might be viewed as a spiritual ascent from the despair of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 in A minor, composed two years before. In its five-movement layout, the Seventh also harkens back to the Fifth Symphony, and in its skittering shadows and lyrical nocturnes even recalls the folk-music inspiration of Mahler’s earliest symphonies and the songs of “The Youth’s Magic Horn.”

It’s almost ironic that Mahler designated the Seventh Symphony’s second and fourth movements as serenades (literally Nachtmusik I and Nachtmusik II), for the unbroken sweep of the first four movements registers as music of the night. And Boulez, in his undemonstrative but pointed fashion, charged these tableaux, moonlight streaked and haunting, with a chiaroscuro intensity worthy of Delacroix.

The Seventh calls for an outsized orchestra, from heavy brassworks and a big wind choir to a wide assortment of percussive instruments. Yet between the darkling tumult of an expansive opening movement and a sunburst finale wrought in dazzling counterpoint, that grand army is deployed mostly in the commando squads of chamber music.

Boulez’s precise voicing, and the orchestra’s impeccable response, produced a nightscape of supernatural beauty across the three middle movements – and especially in the central scherzo, a marche macabre fraught with impulsive syncopations against yearning lyricism.

But the CSO also generated plenty of firepower when it was needed, in the brassy fanfares of the opening movement and again in the finale’s life-affirming contrapuntal riot.

As setup and foil to the Seventh Symphony, Boulez offered Webern’s Passacaglia, Op. 7. Written in 1908, the year the Mahler Seventh received its premiere, Webern’s formally framed essay seems at this distance quite romantic, even reminiscent of Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night” of nearly a decade before. The CSO gave the Passacaglia a disciplined, radiant performance.

Yet, in this intriguing matchup, it was Mahler who emerged the modernist.

Repeats at 3 p.m. Oct. 17. www.cso.org. Call (312) 294-3000.

The concert was recorded for airing in the PBS television series Great Performances on Oct. 27 at 8 p.m. on WTTW11 and WTTW HD, with a simulcast on 98.7 FM WFMT.  

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4 characters (and a play) with an identity crisis

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 the Steppenwolf Theatre, and the playwright’s commentary in the program book. Whereas D’Amour talks about “Detroit” in terms of community relationships, and what happens when neighborhoods change and conventional interaction is upset, to my mind this rather troubled play has nothing to do with any of that. 

What D’Amour has written is a psychodrama of almost clinical particularity, the collision of four deeply troubled souls (two couples) that could be set almost anywhere. Its stark intimacy rings of Samuel Beckett and its themes of lies and delusion seem to reprise Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” Indeed, D’Amour’s debt to Albee will become evident enough when Steppenwolf produces “Virginia Woolf” later this season.

It’s as if D’Amour set out to write one play and ended up fashioning something quite different. In the program notes, she says Detroit could be any urban center, but that the real setting of her play is a “first-ring” suburb, where the modest homes were all built half a century ago and all seem to have been stamped from a few cookie cutter designs.

Yet, in the “Detroit” that finally reached the stage, no such sociological motifs have any apparent meaning or relevance. Kevin Depinet’s impressive set does show us the backside and back yards of two closely proximate houses, one nicely kept with the requisite suburban trappings of grill and picnic table with umbrella. The other place, devoid of life signs or improvements and in need of paint, betrays its long vacancy.

So much for the transforming neighborhood as a theme. D’Amour does, for just a moment, seem to be headed down that path in the opening scene as middle-aged, longtime residents Mary and Ben are hosting their younger new neighbors, Sharon and Kenny, at a barbecue.

But we quickly learn our true course when we discover that these kids met in drug rehab, and that they dwell in a version of reality well outside the ring of suburban normalcy. We are not in a play about social alienation, but rather about personal isolation and terror.  And the two youngsters are not the only ones here struggling against the fly-paper of life.

D’Amour’s women are more convincingly drawn than her men. Laurie Metcalf is fascinating as Mary, bored with a dead-end job, resentful of her husband’s new leisure, yet posturing like him as the properly attuned suburbanite. She’s also a desperate alcoholic.

A lovely, vulnerable Kate Arrington nearly makes this her show as the emotionally reeling Sharon, a comfort to the boozy Mary and yet never quite free of her own addictions. Happily, some of the play’s best writing falls to Sharon in crazy-quilt monologues that Arrington renders as magnetic as they are mystifying.

No clear personality emerges in Mary’s husband Ben, a recently unemployed banker who envisions independence as a Web-based financial adviser. Ian Barford’s Ben is a vaguely expansive character, though ever-conscious of the need to appear the centered, regular guy. When it’s time to grill, he cheerily refers to the steaks as “these puppies.”

Kevin Anderson faces the greatest challenge as Sharon’s co-dependent, Kenny. The most broadly sketched of the play’s characters, Kenny is more catalytic than active. Still Anderson does make the best of an amusing scene in which Kenny and Ben, left alone, contemplate a guys’ night out.

Ultimately, the thin veil of delusion burns away in a catastrophe that registers as less than plausible. So does the aftermath. While this uneven enterprise has its moments, they are mere memories at the end.

Through Nov. 7. Steppenwolf.org. Call (312) 335-1650.

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Fission, confusion and death – oh my!

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 instantly exposed him to a lethal dose of radiation.

 Perhaps because Slotin’s agonizing death – he lingered through nine days of disintegration – seemed so compelling a mirror image of the numberless thousands of Japanese who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his catastrophe has been revisited in several fictionalized accounts.

But it’s probably safe to say none has engaged the wonder, the risk, the moral conundrum or the madness of Slotkin’s work and death with quite the theatrical bravura or invention of Paul Mullin’s play “Louis Slotkin Sonata,” which Chicago’s A Red Orchid Theater now recreates with ambitious flair.

The very title offers a first hint that this may not be an altogether       conventional affair of the stage. But neither is Mullin’s play musical theater. The “sonata” bit is reflected in a dramatic structure that roughly describes sonata form in classical music: that is, an exposition of material, with some repetition of themes; a development section more or less equivalent to improvisation in jazz, and a recapitulation of principal themes that may (and in the present case certainly does) set them forth in considerably altered appearance. Finally, the requisite coda – a free-wheeling last hurrah.

But let’s not get too distracted by musical parallels, though one might reasonably suggest that, in the end, Mullin’s form is his content. Anyway, his point – that man plays with fire when he plays with, well, fire – is driven home by fantastical variations on themes refracted through the dying Slotin’s moral prism.

Director Karen Kessler pursues Mullin’s mad possibilities well into the realm of farce and even beyond its borders to a cavorting absurdity. But of course we’re talking about fiddling with nuclear fission to create world-snuffing bombs, which is already theater of the absurd.

Kessler’s adaptable cast – almost everyone plays multiple roles – is headed by Steve Schine as Slotin, a burned-out bomb putter-togetherer (this historical self-description comes from his lips here) who’s about to hand over the job to his successor and take a position at the University of Chicago.

Schine brings a cowboy swagger to the part, a plausible hint at how the awful accident might have happened. What we do not see, as Slotin’s fatal irradiation begins to destroy him, is a man in agony. We get instead a droll fellow with a quick wit and a reassuring word for everyone.

More interesting than this too-cool Slotin is his nightmarish second self. Hallucinating under the influence of morphine, he descends repeatedly into a pit of moral rebuke for the misery his work has caused. He imagines himself, among other things, the monstrous Nazi physician Josef Mengele, the so-called Death Angel of Auschwitz.

As Mullin’s sonata spins into a fitful recapitulation, Slotin leads his fellow scientists, all reconfigured through the poor soul’s dementia, off the deep end of Dadaist theater. I leave their ultimate transmogrification to your discovery and delectation.

A Red Orchid makes a spirited effort to corral Mullin’s cautionary tale. But careening as it does between Sartre and Groucho Marx, “Louis Slotin Sonata” is, if not exactly a neutron bomb, at least a fission experiment gone curiously awry.

Through Oct. 24. aredorchidtheatre.org. Call (312) 943-8722.

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Asher Fisch's classic Beethoven with the CSO

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 might be characterized as radically classical.

This was a Beethoven Third more connected to Haydn than foretelling of Wagner. At brisk tempos that the composer surely would have endorsed, Fisch forged a clearly structured symphony illuminated by impeccably balanced strings, winds and brasses. This was no craggy monument to Romanticism but the brilliant, forward-looking work of a 33-year-old composer who was a child of his time.

From the decisive proclamation of those two mighty E-flat chords that announce this watershed symphony, it was evident that Fisch would not be gazing at the “Eroica” through a Wagnerian lens.  And just as the opening movement was impulsive, joyous, confident, the ensuing funereal centerpiece spoke with a grandeur that Fisch did not gild with egregious flourishes of tragedy. When he came to the towering fugue, the conductor again let the music’s internal drive shape the musical drama; and it was thrilling.

The scherzo, like the finale’s scintillating variations, flew with a lightness and agility that once more pointed back to Beethoven’s classical models. Fisch’s “Eroica” was whole cloth, exhilarating and thoroughly convincing. And the orchestra played for its guest maestro with an elegance, esprit and attention to detail that would have gratified Muti himself.

There was more to the Muti-designed program, but not much more of substance. Carlos Chavez’s 1936 “Sinfonia India” (Symphony No. 2), a single movement of 12 minutes’ duration, offered the CSO a chance to showcase its burnished ensemble in heady flights of syncopation.

Wagner’s “Centennial March,” commissioned by the CSO’s founding music director, Theodore Thomas, for a celebration of the American centenary in Philadelphia, is a pot-boiler of embarrassing banality. Indeed, Fisch charmed his audience with an artfully spoken disclaimer about this bit of Wagner that’s little known for good reason.

At least in the U.S., Asher Fisch seems to be little known, as well. Now we know there’s no good reason at all for that. Much admired in Europe as an opera conductor, Fisch will lead Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in November. A return engagement with the CSO is greatly to be wished.

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Lyric's 'Macbeth' bubbles with great singing

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 Verdi’s distillation of Shakespeare within a stark majesty that suggests both the curvaceous surfaces of architect Frank Gehry and the imposing monoliths of sculptor Richard Serra. Noone’s multiple, rotating structures can focus the viewer’s attention on a small stage, as in Lady Macbeth’s extended monologue as she awaits her curiously honored husband, or open into the splendid panorama of the fateful banquet-sans-Banquo.

Yet it almost doesn’t matter how Michael’s Lady Macbeth is framed. When this lithe, leggy singer is on stage, her intrinsic magnetism – abetted by costumer Virgil C. Johnson’s high-slit skirts -- rivets the eye. And every moment of her singing feels like a musical and dramatic revelation.

Michael paints in vivid hues a woman who descends from overreaching to overwhelmed. From the opulence and power of her first prodigious soliloquy and her scolding challenge to the waffling Macbeth, through the distracted incantation of Lady Macbeth’s madness, she is electrifying.

And Hampson is in every detail her match, even if Verdi clearly found more appeal in Shakespeare’s venomous lady than in the thane who would be king. One hears in Hampson’s dark, tremulous baritone all the confusion, hesitation, fear, fury and ultimate resignation to his fate that define the arc of Macbeth’s ascent and plunge. One of Hampson’s finest moments evokes Macbeth’s consternation and terror in seeing Banquo’s ghost, the conjuration of his own blood-stained conscience.

That banquet scene also happens to be the one trouble spot in director Barbara Gaines’ otherwise imaginative and engaging approach to the tale.

Gaines, artistic director of Chicago Shakespeare Theatre making her opera debut, seems to lose her grip on dramatic logic at this critical juncture. Whereas Verdi keeps Shakespeare’s framework scrupulously in view, with Lady Macbeth trying desperately to reassure her guests and keep control of the situation as Macbeth reels from his vision of the murdered Banquo, Gaines creates something quite different.

She has an increasingly inebriated Lady Macbeth cavorting on the table top and generally behaving badly until she joins Macbeth in oblivion. The tension of the scene is lost, and so is the critical turning point where Lady Macbeth comes to understand how blood has begot blood and so begins the only retreat she can make – from reality.

On the other hand, Gaines’ witches are wonderful. Verdi didn’t settle for Shakespeare’s mere threesome, but seized the opportunity to write for a whole chorus of hags. Gaines maneuvers the Lyric’s raggedy, shaggy-haired, vocally splendid choristers not in a choral cluster but with energizing fluidity. They’re a happy sorority, about to ruin several lives.  

One who’s vanquished after some glorious singing is bass Stefan Kocan’s Banquo. One who survives is tenor Leonardo Capalbo’s Macduff, whose ringing aria of grief and vengeance nearly brought down the house on opening night.

From a purely musical standpoint, the Lyric’s new “Macbeth” is an unalloyed triumph, thanks in great part to conductor Renato Palumbo’s clear-sighted and wisely paced direction. The orchestra delivers Verdi’s vibrant score with equal parts of passion and finesse. In the end, it is sheer musical heat that keeps this cauldron boiling.        

Through Oct. 30. www.lyricopera.org. (312) 332-2244

    

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Muti explores the far side of Haydn and Mozart

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 illustrated connections and differences that often go unobserved. In all four symphonies – Haydn Nos. 39 and 89 and Mozart Nos. 25 and 34 – Muti and a classically scaled CSO offered stylish performances of exquisite beauty.

To be sure, Muti is a consummate conductor, a technical master and architectural builder with an interior decorator’s eye for detail. Not least, as the Mozart-Haydn encounter attested, his performances bespeak a love for the art of music that makes him any composer’s plausible surrogate.

Lest anyone miss the shared Sturm-und-Drang proto-Romanticism of Haydn’s Symphony No. 39 in G minor and Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in G minor, Muti prefaced these readings with some spoken program notes. Beyond the obvious minor keys in common, he suggested, the shadowed and fretful agitation of Haydn’s finale (1770) seems to be taken up almost as continued thought in the opening movement of Mozart’s work (1773).

Mozart also borrowed the older composer’s distinctive wind complement of pairs of oboes and bassoons plus four French horns. But he did not emulate Haydn’s slow movement, a delicately spun episode for strings alone that Muti plumbed for its full measure of sparkle and grace.

The Mozart 25^th, sometimes tagged (perhaps dismissively) as the “Little G minor” in reference to the great Symphony No. 40, was surely the most familiar work on the program. It’s the opening music in Milos Forman’s 1984 film “Amadeus.” It’s also pregnant with things to come, especially things operatic, from the 17-year-old composer.

Its dark, tremulous opening plainly foretells “Don Giovanni,” just as the slow movement’s liquid lyricism anticipates the spirit of “Cosi fan tutte.” Little wonder that Muti the opera maestro should turn both to splendid effect.

The comparison of later works began with Mozart’s brilliant but curiously under-performed Symphony No. 34 in C major (1780). The grandly sweeping first movement, its trumpet flourishes gleaming here, sounded like a study piece for the majestic “Jupiter” Symphony written eight years later. In Muti’s measured care emerged Mozart the fully mature symphonist, sketching an expansive slow movement that the CSO imbued with an assured intimacy and poise.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 89 in F (1787) crowned the concert. Gone were the storms of yesteryear, and in their place a confident nobility as well as those numberless touches of wry humor that stamp the aging composer as a perpetual scamp. With a restraint that kept tension on the line while allowing Haydn’s dazzling interior voices to shine, Muti left this listener with no wish but to take the whole evening once again from the top – and then to explore every last one of Haydn’s symphonies.

Repeats Oct. 1 at 8 p.m., Oct. 5 at 730 p.m. www.cso.org. (312) 294-3000.

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Goodman's 'Candide' as one possible world

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.

In respect that a capable cast of singers manage Bernstein’s vivacious music with enthusiasm, it is charming; in respect that the singers cannot muster the vocal brilliance required of this exacting operetta, I like it not.

In respect that Doug Peck’s distillation of Bernstein’s symphonic score to 12 instruments makes “Candide” possible in the small pit of Goodman’s Albert Theatre, it is admirable; in respect that it is not symphonic, ’tis dull.

“Candide,” drawn from Voltaire’s 18^th century novel satirizing religion and other expressions of man’s inhumanity to man, has seen a checkered history since its Broadway premiere in 1956, the year before “West Side Story.” In the mid-‘70s, Lillian Hellman’s original book for the show was jettisoned in favor of Hugh Wheeler’s spin on Voltaire’s story. And a long string of lyricists extends from Richard Wilbur and Dorothy Parker to Stephen Sondheim and Bernstein himself.

The wry tale seems a natural for musical comedy. Candide, a young man of common birthright raised in an aristocratic household, has grown up under the tutelage of the optimistic philosopher Pangloss, who rationalizes every misfortune, small or catastrophic, as confirmation that this is the best of all possible worlds.

Candide also falls in love with Cunegonde, daughter of the master of the house, and gets himself promptly cast out into the rude world when he asks for permission to marry the girl. Candide’s endless tribulations, fomented mainly by the wickedness of his fellow men and the perversity of clerics, form the heart and substance of the show.

An unbuttoned farce involving a large cast, “Candide” abounds with witty songs and, certainly in this production, wacky gags. Designer Daniel Ostling’s cartoonish unit set, with its toy ships and rolling cardboard seas, stylized cannon and well-used trap doors, underscores the caprice and helps to keep characters and audience off balance, sometimes literally.

And Mara Blumenfeld’s vividly imaginative costumes accentuate bright hope as well as bleakness as Candide (Geoff Packard as the very model of dogged optimism) perseveres through one daunting escapade after another.

If the best of all possible worlds is one full of friends, Candide has reason for cheer: It seems like old home week whichever direction he drifts. And from Lauren Molina’s sweet-voiced, splendidly comedic Cunegonde to Larry Yando’s durably affirmative Dr. Pangloss, this beleaguered pilgrim’s friends are true, and truly funny. Include in that band are Erik Lochtefeld as Cunegonde’s straight-laced (but emphatically laced) brother Maximilian and Hollis Resnik’s hilariously earthy Old Lady, whose sly romp through “I Am Easily Assimilated” stops the show.

The inevitable problem with “Candide,” which not even Zimmerman’s streamlining can avoid, is that its clever parts begin to feel redundant. (The downstage trap door may wear out before this production ends its run.) At three hours, it is too much of a modest thing. The Goodman’s riotous “Animal Crackers” was no less crazy than “Candide,” but it felt tighter. (I’m still wondering how that elephant got into Capt. Spaulding’s pajamas.)

Not the least troublesome is the miniaturized orchestration. Bernstein’s effervescent score, echoing Rossini and Johann Strauss, needs to glitter. It’s too great a challenge for a wind sextet and a handful of strings. While there’s something to be said for the Albert Theatre's intimacy, you know from the overture’s first pale flourish that it’s going to be an oddly quiet night in the pit.

Through Oct. 31. www.GoodmanTheatre.org. (312) 443-3800.

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Muti and Chicago Symphony are 'Fantastique'

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 10^th 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 rejected lover who has sought oblivion in the embrace of drugs. The music evokes constantly shifting dream-states, and as much has anything Muti’s account was remarkable for the delicately tangled webs it spun and the deep-level rhythms that animated the music from within.

From the sighing first utterances of Berlioz’s opening movement, “Dreams – Passions,” Muti showed his mastery of music-drama, building from string phrases of near-inaudibility through an upward sweep to brass flourishes of great passion indeed. Though tempos were generally on the slow side, Muti’s carefully gauged rhythm kept the music moving forward with palpable urgency.

At every turn, but notably in the second-movement waltz and the flickering shadows of the ensuing pastoral scene, the CSO strings displayed the pliancy and sparkle of chamber music writ large. If timpani and virtuosity are not words typically conjoined, the colorful effects – the elegant touches as well as the chilling swells – evoked by the CSO’s two timpanists afforded a line of constant delight.

Muti kept a rein on Berlioz’s mad business right through a taut, ominous “March to the Scaffold,” never really unleashing the full force of the CSO sound until the crowning “Dream of a Witches Sabbath” when brass salvoes lit up Orchestra Hall.

Along with the famous symphony, Muti also offered Berlioz’s seldom performed sequel “Lélio: The Return to Life,” with actor Gérard Depardieu in the substantial spoken role of the dispirited lover and artist struggling to regain perspective and purpose.

In the “Symphonie fantastique,” Berlioz was describing a dark chapter in his own life – the winning and losing of British actress Harriet Smithson, for whom the composer swooned upon seeing her portrayal of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”  In “Lélio,” which might be termed a melodrama, it is the composer’s zealous enthusiasm for – and identification with – Shakespeare that shapes the work.

Well, shapes it to the extent that this curious pastiche has any shape. To call the hour-long “Lélio” free-form would be generous. Berlioz cobbled the music together from patches of earlier works. He wrote the rather garrulous text in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style that hardly veils what is little more than a herky-jerky sequence of non-sequiturs.

Besides Lélio as narrator, the work calls for tenor and baritone soloists and chorus. To be sure, the two singers are given beautiful songs (capably managed by tenor Mario Zeffiri and bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen), but their inclusion is rationalized by the musing Lélio as, almost literally, “Ah, yes, and then I wrote this.”

There is far more spoken text than music as Lélio caroms from thought to offended thought about the artist’s wretched lot in this world of philistines and fools. Depardieu, reading from a French script as a partial translation appeared above the stage, declaimed Lélio’s perturbation in grand voice, if not always with perfect clarity.

But the very idea of pairing “Lélio” with the “Symphonie fantastique” bespeaks Muti’s flair for creative programming and his willingness to take risks. And what the maestro achieved with the real masterpiece signals a brilliant new day for the Chicago Symphony.

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Muti raises his flag over the Chicago Symphony

It was a banner night for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the spectacular public welcoming of conductor Riccardo Muti as its 10^th 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 orchestra spokeswoman Rachelle Roe. Some 12,000 filled every seat and patch of ground from the pavilion outward across an adjacent green dotted with high-quality overhead loudspeakers. A still larger throng spilled out over the surrounding plazas where they could enjoy at least an auditory connection to the event.

This was Festa Muti, as thousands of brightly lettered flags in the hands of listeners attested. What’s more, the next month has been officially dubbed Festa Muti by the Chicago City Council, which also temporarily renamed a stretch of South Michigan Avenue – from Millennium Park past Orchestra Hall – as Muti Mile. And lest anyone fail to notice just who is the city’s man of the month, a giant banner bearing the maestro’s image hangs down the front of Symphony Center as a reminder.

At the center of all this hoopla was the 69-year-old Italian conductor, who had finally succumbed to the Chicago Symphony’s relentless entreaties to assume artistic leadership of an orchestra whose distinguished history of leadership goes back through the likes of Daniel Barenboim, Sir Georg Solti and Fritz Reiner. Muti lost not a moment in demonstrating to his super-sized audience that he is up to that tradition.

Known as a great Verdi conductor, Muti led off with the Overture to “La forza del destino,” and in the very first, emotionally suspenseful phrases drew from the CSO a tension and controlled opulence that indeed invoked this orchestra’s distinctive lineage. Turning next to Liszt’s symphonic poem “Les Preludes,” Muti tapped the CSO’s section-by-section virtuosity, notably an elegant woodwind sound that registered even in this al fresco setting.

Muti the dramatist showed his colors in a riveting account of Tchaikovsky’s fantasy-overture “Romeo and Juliet,” which left one wishing only to hear those vibrant strings and singing winds again in the greater intimacy of Orchestra Hall. For Muti’s finale, an expansive turn through Respighi’s “Pines of Rome,” a double phalanx of brasses at the forward corners of the stage augmented those at the rear of the orchestra to light up the night in the stentorian peroration of “Pines of the Appian Way.”

Then real fireworks erupted at the rim of the pavilion, an exclamation point to the whooping ovation.

Finally, the new man in town addressed his new admirers with characteristically droll humor. Muti said it’s usually a better thing when the conductor does not speak – especially in rehearsal, where “after three words he’s speaking nonsense.” Turning to the orchestra for confirmation, he asked: “E vero?” (Isn’t it true?)

But Muti had a real message for his audience: to thank them for such a show of support for the Chicago Symphony, to remind them of the greatness of their orchestra and to point out that while a concert “in fresh air” is a pleasure, the authentic experience awaits at Orchestra Hall.  That’s where Muti makes his official debut as music director Sept. 23.  But here, in the fresh air, he had already won Chicago.

Here are three videos of Chicago Symphony musicians rehearsing with Muti and talking about him. 

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Jazz, and the lost world of Bach and Beethoven

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 Christian McBride and pianists Mulgrew Miller and Kenny Barron, among others, brought to mind what I’ve always found most compelling about classical music: the imaginative elaboration of a motif. That’s essentially what jazz is all about.

The real art of serious, or classical, music lies in the skillful permutation of core ideas, whether broadly stated themes in Mozart and Schubert or mere cells in Beethoven. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always reveled in variations like the ultra-concise passacaglia that crowns Brahms’ Fourth Symphony or the elegantly crafted double variations that form the second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

By the same token, what I’ve always found exasperating about classical sonata form is the typical brevity of development sections. This is exactly where jazz takes flight and carries me on journeys deep into the possibilities of harmony, melody and rhythm. To hear creative jazz musicians push and pull an idea into a hundred different shapes is to re-imagine Bach’s great chaconne from the D minor Violin Partita as improvisation – and to think how amused, if not disdainful, Mozart and Beethoven would be to think all their spontaneously fashioned cadenzas had given place to ossified formality.

Jazz is where the generative spark of European art music went.

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Pianist Cecile Licad takes a jazz tour

            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.
            No, Licad will not be playing riffs on Marsalis’ trumpet flourishes. She’ll be contributing the sort of thing she does best: music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (which she has recorded for Naxos) to lend the film what director Dan Pritzker calls an aura of silent-film authenticity.
            Pritzker makes no pretense that his film, which opens Aug. 25 in Chicago, is a bio-pic. He calls it a fantasy on Armstrong’s street-wise, musically irrepressible youth in New Orleans. Here's a sneak peek. And why did he pick Licad to supply Gottschalk’s romantic atmosphere?
            Because, he says, she imbues that New Orleans-born composer with just the right gutsy, opulent sound, “like Chopin after he’s been to Dodge City.”
            The “Louis” screening tour continues Aug. 26 in Detroit, then goes on to Bethesda, Md. (Aug. 28), New York City (Aug. 30) and the Philadelphia suburb of Glenside (Aug. 31).

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