Novelist Sandra Jackson-Opoku carried a stack of her books to the balcony outside her apartment, where we sat at a table facing Nichols Park. Describing herself, she said, “I’m a Chicago writer, born and raised, but I write about the world.”
After more than a year without live audiences, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s final concerts of this season are back in Orchestra Hall. Last week saw four performances of their penultimate season concert. As in the first outing since the pandemic struck, audience capacity was very low in o…
“We Are Out There”
The DuSable Museum of African American History has launched DuSummer, its seasonal schedule of outdoor activities, as it prepares for a public reopening on June 19.
Though the Silver Room Block Party and Chosen Few Picnic and Music Festival have both been cancelled again this year, the neighborhood's third major summertime event, Hyde Park Summer Fest, is a go, likely after Labor Day.
It’s not just Lollapalooza that’s back. Live audiences at concerts, both indoors and out, are now underway in Chicago’s classical music scene. Of the very largest organizations, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was first off the block, having resumed live audience concerts last week. (See my a…
As with many other human gatherings, it was better to do it on Zoom than not to do it at all. But Marsha Melsheimer was quick to confess that her freewheeling family music sessions are better in person. Now that “class” can be held outdoors, things are looking up for Marsha’s Music.
Court Theatre is set to resume live productions in the fall. Hyde Park's renowned professional theater won't be picking up exactly where it left off before the pandemic, but the new three-play season does include shows that had been on the schedule.
“No dancing in the aisles!”
Court Theatre's return to live theater was supposed to be “Titanic (Scenes from the British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry, 1912),” February 4 to March 7, 2021. The idea was that Owen McCafferty's courtroom docudrama would be performed for small audiences of 50 people maximum and also availabl…
The story of the star-crossed lovers Tristan and Isolde is an ancient one. It has been told many times, with significant variations in the main narrative and its details, for about a thousand years. One of the most famous versions is the opera by Richard Wagner, but that is only a single bra…
Walk into the lobby of the One Two Pru office and retail building downtown, and you'll be met with a taste of art from the African Diaspora. The installation, which is currently open to the public, is put on by Gallery Guichard, the Black-owned art gallery located in the Bronzeville Artist L…
Sir Andrew Davis has conducted some 700 performances at Lyric Opera of Chicago. This represents 61 operas by 21 different composers. He first conducted at Lyric in 1987 when he led performances of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro”. He became music director in the year 2000, upon the retireme…
The pandemic has prompted a perfect pivot for “I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.”
Twenty-seven years after it opened, the Museum of Science and Industry's "Take Flight" exhibit — a Boeing 727, narrow-body jet airliner built between 1962 and 1984, suspended in the museum's atrium — has reopened after a restoration.
Seven years after its establishment, a South Shore nonprofit dedicated to centering and celebration of Black women, girls and gender-nonconforming creatives in film and television is getting a physical space.
The covers of Mike Phillips’ basement book stock feature screaming skulls, robot skeletons, murderous snakes, space cavemen, and mad scientists. They are gaudy, loud and scary but, at the same time, polished, absorbing and beautiful. And they are all for sale, through Phillips’ home-grown, H…
Though the weather was chilly and wet, Mother’s Day this past weekend was brightened by the solidarity on display between mothers and sons at a Washington Park march. The Mother and Son March, which took place on the north lawn of the DuSable Museum of African American History, called for ac…
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra continues to produce fascinating videos available on demand. A moving performance of the Quartet for the End of Time is reviewed below, but first the CSO has even more exciting news. Live concert performances with an audience are returning to Symphony Center be…
What would you do if you inadvertently discovered that you were about to cause a catastrophe? Would you do anything you could to prevent it or would you pretend you didn't know and just continue following orders?
The city announced this week that the first concert of the Protect Chicago Music Series, held every month for fully vaccinated Chicagoans, will take place in Hyde Park on May 22.
On Tuesday evenings, anyone walking through Harper Court will be pulled in by the sounds coming from the Connect Gallery. Upon peeking inside, many may decide to stop and enjoy the musical stylings of Isaiah Collier as he rehearses with an ensemble of his band, The Chosen Few.
As part of the "Open Chicago" reopening campaign, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the "Open Culture" initiative on May 5, with a return to summer cultural events, including festivals, theater and concerts — and attractions in Hyde Park are included.
“What is your dearest wish for 2021?”
It can be fun and even necessary, from time to time, to wander through life like an alien which has little understanding of what it is seeing and which is just now learning what the things of the world are. It freshens life and eliminates jadedness, an important thing for a critic to do, esp…
Lots of plays address athletes' struggles and stresses, but Anna Ziegler's “The Last Match” does an unusually balanced job of presenting the ambition and anxiety, promise and pitfalls, triumphs and trials.
Richard Wagner’s Ring operas are big propositions: they feature large casts, big choruses, huge orchestras, spectacular settings, and take about 17 hours in total to perform. This makes full Ring cycles costly propositions.
In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 Chosen Few Picnic & House Music Festival will be held virtually on July 3, as it was last year, and not live in Jackson Park.
Times haven't been this good for audio plays since before the advent of television. Less complicated and costly to create than Zoom or filmed works, they range from comedies and dramas to musicals and mysteries. Many have short runs but some are podcasts posted long-term. Here are a handful …
COVID-19 has become part of the story of our lives and now also of our entertainment. Chicago Opera Theater has mounted a production of “La Hija de Rappaccini” (“Rappaccini’s Daughter”), the 1991 opera by Mexican composer Daniel Catán. American author Nathaniel Hawthorne is the grandfather o…
There ought to be a word like “ennui” which, though it travels the world over, retains its linguistic specificity (in its case, a specifically French flavor of dissipation) but instead refers to the feeling of being overwhelmed at the vastness and hidden violence of American systems.
When a child was born in Renaissance Italy, the family would often commission a "desco da parto" — a wooden birth tray, usually painted with narratives from literature or ancient history — to mark the occasion. (Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Florentine banker and art patron, kept the one given to …
Millions of eyes this past weekend were trained on St. George’s Chapel in Windsor, England, the place where Prince Philip, consort to the Queen of over 70 years, had his funeral. I tuned in for the music, which even under strict pandemic regulations — resulting in a choir made of only four v…
The title character in Tim Crouch's “I, Cinna (the poet)” has a severe case of writer's block. Even as he invites us to compose a poem along with him, the man torn apart by the mob in Shakespeare's “Julius Caesar” after being mistaken for a namesake conspirator questions the purpose of the p…
A pair of exhibitions showcasing talent from Black Chicagoans and artists worldwide opened at the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) last week as part of the institution’s Black Creativity Program.
"Artist Descending a Staircase"
Lyric Opera of Chicago released its latest free video on Sunday afternoon, a splendid collection of excerpts from Verdi’s “Attila” featuring four soloists, members of the Lyric Opera Chorus, and two pianists.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations represents one of the great masterworks in all of classical music. It was written for harpsichord, but is often performed and recorded on piano. Mahan Esfahani, an Iranian-American harpsichordist, recently played the Goldberg Variations in a perfor…
Like most 20-year-old college students, Khavon Thomas spends his time trying to balance school and life. Except in his case, “life” includes a budding career as a working photographer, in which he’s already had the chance to shoot the likes of Chance the Rapper and Juice Wrld, as well as wor…
History is littered with posthumous success stories. Vincent van Gogh became a commercial and critical success only after his death. Most of Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” were published after his death, so he too did not live to see the enduring success of his pathbreaking work.
"How Do We Navigate Space?"
Lyric Opera of Chicago has released a free video celebrating the Ryan Center, the program at Lyric that offers intense training for singers at the beginning of their operatic careers and now also includes training for collaborative pianists as well.
Before the pandemic, Theatre in the Dark was starting to make a name for itself with a novel concept. The company's first show, the noir mystery-thriller “Three Stories Up,” was performed completely in the dark. Literally “noir,” it featured two actors playing multiple characters and live Fo…
Chicago Opera Theater has now streamed the second new opera written as part of its Vanguard Emerging Opera Composer Residency, a commissioning and mentoring program for composers. The first opera was “The Transformation of Jane Doe” by composer Stacy Garrop and librettist Jerre Dye, a haunti…
In his program letter for Northlight Theatre's presentation of Marin Theatre Company and Round House Theatre's digital world premiere of “The Catastrophist,” artistic director B.J. Jones says he once asked playwright Lauren Gunderson, “How do artists respond to this astonishing pause in our …
The timing couldn't have been better for the release of “Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!” as part of the Steppenwolf NOW Virtual Stage if the theater had planned it. Coming just a few days after Oprah Winfrey's interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry on CBS, Vivian J.O. Barnes' 35-minute pl…
A decade ago, Regina Harris Baiocchi formed 6 Degrees Composers, a collective of women composers who would regularly collaborate to present concerts of their own music. The composers themselves were often among the performers, but nestled in among them were also many of Chicago’s most vibran…
Back in the before times, when I first learned that Court Theatre was planning a site-specific production of “An Iliad” at the Oriental Institute to celebrate both that institution's centennial and artistic director Charles Newell's 25th anniversary at the theater, I was thrilled.
"Ground Floor," the Hyde Park Art Center's latest biennial exhibition of work from master of fine arts graduates at five Chicagoland schools in 2019 and 2020, is on through April 3, finally allowing last year's artists to show off their work.
Haymarket Opera continues its tenth season with an all-Handel lineup. October’s “Acis and Galatea” showed that they could offer up serious opera and create a compelling production while imposing physical distancing on cast members. Lightning has struck twice, as Haymarket’s “Apollo e Dafne” …
Chicago Opera Theater’s latest offering shows that the company continues to pioneer new ways to offer opera productions when in-person audiences are not permitted. Composer Kamala Sankaram’s “Taking Up Serpents” is a fascinating short opera centered on a small family: father, mother, and dau…
