Gioachino Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” is a comedy that just won’t quit. The Lyric Opera of Chicago‘s sunny production, which opened February 1 at the Civic Opera House, mines the comic vein with gusto, enhancing the story’s plot with more physical antics than I’ve seen on Lyric’s stage in years. This is the opera […]
Enchantment emanates from every moment of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s evanescent production of Antonin Dvorak’s “Rusalka.” The opera tells the story of a water nymph, Rusalka, who has fallen in love with a handsome human prince, who often bathes in her forest lake. She longs to become human and with the aid of a […]
In “Luck of the Irish,” having its Midwest premiere atNext Theatre in Evanston’s Noyes Cultural Arts Center, the Irish don’t have much. The story is about “ghost buying” in Boston in the 1950s, a maneuver in which a white man was given money by a black man to buy a house for him in a […]
Tom Jones is no Don Juan. The ladies are the ones chasing this good looking, friendly lad. But when led into temptation, Tom strays and eventually finds himself tangled in more than the sheets. The comedy “Tom Jones” has opened at Northlight Theatre in Skokie. It is a thoroughly entertaining production, with William Brown skillfully […]
You can get by with a lot when you blame the champagne. That’s the message of “Die Fledermaus,” Johann Strauss, Jr.’s romp through Vienna in 1870, which opened December 10 at Lyric Opera of Chicago. Adele, a parlor maid, borrows a dress from her mistress’s closet to wear to a party given by Russian Prince […]
Despite all the religious language in Richard Wagner’s final opera, “Parsifal” is about sex, or the renunciation thereof. Act One of the Lyric Opera‘s nearly five-hour production at the Civic Opera House opens in the Monastery of the Holy Grail with monks assigned to guard the chalice, which legend says is the cup Jesus used […]
Lyric Opera of Chicago has a real winner in its new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Traviata.” The tragic heroine, Violetta Valery, is sung by Latvian soprano Marina Rebeka in a singularly impressive debut here. She sparkles, she shines, and her bright coloratura is as fresh and flexible after three hours as it is when […]
The Lyric Opera of Chicago production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Otello” boasts a superior cast, even when one of the three main characters, Iago, was replaced by his understudy. South African tenor Johan Botha has the title role, Puerto Rican-born Ana Maria Martinez portrays Desdemona, and because bass-baritone Falk Struckmann could only complete the first act […]
“Madama Butterfly” opened at the Lyric Opera of Chicago Tuesday, Oct. 15, and it is a production the likes of which I have never seen. And like most opera fans, I rarely miss a chance to see Giacomo Puccini’s magnificent telling of this tragic tale. The curtain rises on the stage of the Civic Opera […]
It’s safe to say that no one around today attended the world premiere performance of “The Rite of Spring” a century ago. The ballet Nijinsky choreographed to the music of Stravinsky for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes was so raw and primitive it incited a riot in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees that also flowed out onto the […]
