Theater Reviews

Lee Colston’s wonderfully unexpectant play, The First Deep Breath, celebrates two things; acceptance and truth.  We see very little of either until the end of this meaty story that challenges us to think about how high a regard we hold for these two liberating ideals.  The family we’re introduced to is the total opposite of what it appears to be.  It’s through them we learn the cost of choices.

Pastor Albert Jones III (David Alan Anderson) heads a thriving church that’s on the verge of expanding exponentially.  By edict and through force of will, he’s also the prosperous engine that propels his family.  Following his cues, the family seems in perpetual grieving for an adult daughter who died a tragic and early death.  He wears his personal mourning conspicuously while other regrets fester to compound his grief.  His wife Ruth’s (Celeste Williams) mind is being destroyed by Alzheimer’s and his oldest son is doing time for a crime smeared with shame.  Any one of these things would weigh heavily on a soul.  Always appearing unflappable to outside eyes, he keeps his Job-like “Why Me” wail to himself.  For all that he’s and his family are contending with, these trials are but mere harbingers of a wave of events that will besiege and threaten to destroy this fragile family that appears so solid.

A work of scale; unrushed, and with a great deal of intentional depth, means The First Deep Breath is long; running 3 ½ hours with two intermissions.  Stuffing the plot with action and surprises powerful enough to make you catch your breath, Colston made sure audiences would either not notice or not care about time.  He was also intent in giving us a thorough feel for each member of this secret filled family; making it wonderfully illuminating and instructive to see each of them take shape and develop.

When Alain Locke, the father of the Harlem Renaissance, met with other black intellectuals in the early 1900’s to determine what kind of theatrical performance would best illustrate the black experience during those decades of blanket race based ostracism, one faction wanted to highlight the psychic complexity black people share with the rest of humanity.   It’s that approach that makes The First Deep Breath so engrossing.  Complemented by impressive acting, the story shows how intensely personal and gripping it can be to watch people make decisions about how they live their lives. 

Conformity has been a road to acceptance for as long as civilizations have existed.  Many also consider it crucial to the cohesion of families.  When the patriarch is as commanding and authoritative as Pastor Jones, a man accustomed to being deferred to and obeyed, all that fall under his influence follow the natural order and seek his approval through acquiescence.  Dee-Dee (Melanie Loren), the surviving and less favored twin daughter sings in the choir and only winches meekly when her mother longingly calls her by her dead sister’s name.  Her love for and obligation to her family make her sublimate the love she has for her man and causes her to keep the child she’s carrying even a secret from him. 

AJ (Patrick Agada), the youngest of the three living children, is the repository of his father’s legacy.  With his older brother disgraced, and his prior predilection for following in his father’s footsteps; the inevitably of his succession is all but guaranteed.    A senior in high school with offers and scholarships from premier universities around the country to pursue divinity studies, he can’t summon the courage to tell anyone he may be auditioning for entrance into Juilliard. 

Colston draws these characters intricately.  The audience becomes an eyewitness to the carnage rampant deception can wreak on a family and see firsthand how it produces a brittle and flimsy harmony.  As counterproductive as repressing self to promote peace seems to be, we’re shown that indeed the cost in individual misery is high.  And that toll is exacted most brutally on the brother who carries his father’s name.  Albert Jr. (Clinton Lowe) who changed his name to Abdul-Malik while serving time, harbors an unspeakable love. So unspeakable he chose prison rather than reveal it.

The lives of these characters would be enough to saturate a play with energy and they do.  But Colston is a maximalist and makes his minor characters as essential as the major ones.  Pearl, divinely played by Deana-Reed Foster, is a beacon of joy, truth, and the source of much needed humor in her role as Mrs. Jones live-in caregiver sister.  Dee-Dee’s boyfriend, Leslie; faultlessly performed by Gregory Fenner, acts as an oracle of reason in a scenario swirling with the toxicity of secrets and the father’s blind ambitions.  Jalen Gilbert as Tyree, the confidant of one brother and clandestine lover of the other brother, does an equally splendid job trying to instill or restore balance to a house of teetering cards.

Some of the topics the play tackles still linger on the border of the taboo in the Black community; even though people are proving better able to confront issues relating to sexuality and mental health with a willed forbearance; if not actual tolerance.  

Celeste Williams splendid portrayal of a woman fighting a losing battle with Alzheimer’s starkly profiled the day-to-day and hour-to-hour stress an insidious disease creates for the people tasked with providing care.  Sometimes there can be periods of clarity and at other times flights of cruelty.  In the second act, as the family sat around the Thanksgiving table, clarity and cruelty came together explosively when she launched into an extended excoriation of the lies and deceits each person in the family trafficked.  The audience had been a vocal one all through the play, and when William’s character Ruth began her assault, someone uttered cryptically, “She’s goin’ in”.  And she was; meticulously and proudly resolute. Her truths proved the catalyst for change to finally happen.  

But with any good psychological cliffhanger, we don’t know exactly what that change is.  That the play closes with words of promise can only be counted as encouraging. 

The First Deep Breath

Nov 15 –  Dec 22, 2019

Victory Gardens Theater

2433 N. Lincoln Avenue

Chicago, IL    60614

773-871-3000

tickets@victorygardens.org

 You don’t often hear about how enticing the story driving The Light in the Piazza eventually becomes.  An unlikely love story viewed from the vantage point of an over protective mother; it’s so consciously refined that Piazza’s core message can be obscured in its romantic beauty.  Very much in the way the love between Clara (Solea Pfeiffer) and Fabrizio (Rob Houchen) brings two worlds together, this staging of The Light in the Piazza merges opera and contemporary musical theater to show how determined people meet intimidating challenges.

This limited run production at the Lyric meticulously captures the feel of a time and place slightly removed from care. A Southern mother of means, Margaret Johnson (Renee Fleming), has taken her daughter on a trip to Italy.  Her intent is to introduce Clara to a country she clearly loves while retracing a previous trip she had taken with her husband.  The old-world glow pouring from the stage and the unhurried patina of a Florence moving at its own genteel pace created an alluring backdrop.  One that was well suited to Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s casually luxurious mid-century costumes.  Mississippian Elizabeth Spencer originally wrote The Light in the Piazza as a story for the New Yorker in 1960. Its strong appeal led to a successful movie starring George Hamilton two years later.  But turning it into a lauded musical took much longer.  

In this adaptation, the relaxed sensibility of the physical set extends to the work’s musical foundation.  Despite its being sung in both English and Italian, it’s that easy accessibility and lack of formality that help make today’s Piazza more at home in the camp of musical theater than in the domain of opera. It took decades for Spencer’s story to make it to the world of music even though there’s long been an interest in doing so.  It wasn’t until 1998 when composer/lyricist Adam Guettel, grandson of famed composer Richard Rogers, approached Spencer about taking it on and she agreed.  Collaborating closely with the author throughout the adaptation, it’s Guettel’s vision, complemented with Craig Lewis’s writing, that the world is now enjoying and helped earn Piazza a Tony in 2005 for best original score.

Although there are hints of something uniquely uncommon in the love Clara and Fabrizio share; a sense of the dangerous or injurious lies at its center.  There’s something about Clara that’s different from most people.  It’s that insinuated secret that explains why her mother hovers over her so closely and causes you not to take this love story for granted.  Why is she “not like other girls her age”? 

During the first act, we’re introduced as much to the notion and essence of Italy as we are to the characters Spencer has created.  Full of fire and intellect, Fabrizio’s family live beyond caricature.  Drawn with confident suavity, Alex Jennings as Signor Naccarelli, who joined Ms. Fleming and Mr. Houchen in the original London cast, navigated the stage with the confidence of a lion. He symbolized a father who knew how to use both cunning and compassion to protect and guide his family.   Both director Daniel Evans and movement director Lucy Hind can claim success in making the physical flow of the musical appear so naturally graceful.  As it became more and more clear that Mrs. Johnson’s might fail in her efforts to stifle the romance between her daughter and the young Italian, the first act’s closing scene meant that hard choices must inevitably follow.

Up to this point, the music had been unequivocally pleasing; but safe.  Operatic in the sense that the beauty of the voice prevailed, the music’s message was intended to nurture the romantic ideal.  Even the orchestration was sublimated to allow the voice, through song, to lead the story.  After Fabrizio learns the woman who accepted his marriage proposal has disappeared, everything changes.  Mr. Houchen’s distraught solo introduced the fire of dramatic passion and a new boldness of theatricality.  Both were invigorating and the sequence served to showcase the broad range and mellow richness of Houchen’s voice. 

Ms. Fleming, who initially was concerned with mastering the greater amount of dialog this rendering of Piazza required, made an exemplary Margaret Johnson.  Faced with a challenge that could end in triumph or tragedy, she had to trust her instincts as a mother to allow her daughter to at least have a chance of living a fully developed life; a life no one believed her capable of achieving. 

It’s the stakes that help make The Light in the Piazza so interesting.  When you take the story seriously, it flowers into something infinitely rewarding.  Regardless of their backgrounds, all parents make conscious efforts to further the happiness and security of their children.  Sometimes they even do so at the expense of their own marriage.  This story, encased in music, shows how courage and growth can be inseparable.

The Light in the Piazza

Dec 14 – 29, 2019

Lyric Opera House

20 N. Wacker Drive

Chicago, IL  60606

312-827-5600

www.lyricopera.org

When something this wild is that wonderful, you can expect praise to flow far and wide.  Eclipse Theatre’s season closes big this winter with Christopher Durang’s wonderfully absurdist jewel, Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them, now playing to contented audiences at the Athenaeum. The title tells both everything about the play and nothing about it.  It’s not until after you’ve experienced this wise and raucous story do you realize how appropriate that gangly handle is. 

Selecting Durang as the single playwright the theatre company would be featuring this season has proven to be very rewarding.  A distinctively original contemporary dramatist, Durang’s view of the world and the way he comments on it can catch you off guard and challenge the way you digest a plot.  With his uncanny knack for making the ridiculous plausible, he subverts reality and, at least in Why Torture, turns the absurd into hilarious high art.  All in the interest in helping us see the world we live in new ways and offering better ways for responding to it.  Thanks to superb direction from Steve Scott and a cast that’s tight, razor sharp and savvy, the play makes us laugh at the travesties lamentably caustic culture wars have visited upon us.

Written in 2009, Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them is a young play.  When it played in the East Village a decade ago, the laughing was more uneasy and cautionary; if it occurred much at all.  Then, the Bush administration was attempting to justify anti-terrorism measures that including torture techniques outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Timing made aspects of the play more disturbing; even when placed on a platform with a strong levity component.

When Felicity (Tracey Green) and Zamir (Siddhartha Rajan) hook up one night as total strangers at Hooter’s, snowballing events couldn’t have more disastrous results. They meet, get black belt smashed and end up a married couple the next morning.  For Felicity, it was bad enough to wake up in the arms of a total stranger. With no recall of what happened the night before, Zamir’s blithe explanation that a person with a license to perform marriages legally joined them in matrimony, her distress is raw and palpable.  We also learn later a date rape drug was involved in the previous night’s escapades.

From there, and under Scott’s beautifully calibrated direction, Durang continues to nudge the absurdist envelop; allowing mayhem to take root as he develops his characters.  Zamir would have been enough of a wild card to contend with in any play.  As seen in Beyond Therapy, also a Durang play featured in this year’s Eclipse season, Mr. Rajan has a gift for consuming a stage.  His lightning responses can flash with such intensity and ferocity they simultaneously disarm and transfix.  When Felicity tries to gently quiz him about who he is and what he does for a living because she’d just like to know something about the man she married, it becomes clear he’s far too volatile to bear even light inquiry and unleashes a bruising tirade of recrimination.   Calming down, he takes ownership of his violent temper and confesses he’s been known to hurt women.  Terrifying words in any context.  Felicity doesn’t know if she has a serial killer on her hands or a terrorist.  We come to appreciate her ability to sustain a sense of equanimity and balance in a tale gorged with dysfunction. 

An arch-conservative who sees the world locked in an “us vs. them” dichotomy, her father Leonard (Patrick Thornton), lives to root out and eradicate anything or anyone he perceives as a threat to the national peace.  Intractable, quick on the trigger and insufferable, it was inevitable that he and Zamir clash in their version of the testosterone wars.  By imbuing his character with so much natural near innocent conviction, Thornton makes an unforgettable Leonard.    

Felicity’s mother, Luella (Elaine Carlson), who’s internalized her suffering so effectively that you almost feel she’s succeeded in completely neutering it, placates others to soothe herself.  The ruse also gives her the space to repress her distain for her husband’s political views and minimize the danger he poses to others.  It’s easier to lose herself in extended and inane conversations with her daughter about theater, a subject Felicity despises.   Carlson turns Luella into a slightly more refined Edith Bunker; but with a marvelously intriguing dynamic side.

As the play rolls swiftly through the comically inconceivable, the audience is laughing and listening closely.  It knows it’s watching an aspect of the world it lives in.  One where stark political and social positions can calcify and lead to calamitous results.  Leonard’s views are hardly passive.  Collaborating with people who share his xenophobic stance and linked to a radical “shadow” government trolling for indications of active foreign infiltration, he slips off the deep end when Hildegard (Elizabeth Birnkrant), one of his zany operatives with underwear issues, spies on Zamir and misinterprets his conversation with Reverend Mike (John Arthur Lewis), the pornographer who officiated his marriage to Felicity.  Seeing Zamir trussed, gagged and interrogated in Leonard’s secret room changes the stakes for everyone.

It’s often a question among directors and dramaturges at this juncture of the play to ask how much blood to use in a pivotal scene.  As true in Sunday afternoon’s performance, any is enough to stun the audience and make the theater shudder.  Blood’s the visual proof that events, misunderstandings and intellectual inflexibility can and do fuse to deliver calamity. 

A narrator, (Devon Nimerfroh), lightens the shock and helps unpack the dismay by using deadpan humor to mock senseless brutality.  Something Nimerfroh accomplices beautifully with cool pacing and suave delivery.

Using a ploy common in the movies, Durang does us a favor by allowing us to see how things might end differently if people would allow themselves the capacity to make different choices. By sharing that opportunity, he’s both delivering a message and making a plea.   One that we all would be wise to heed.

Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them

Eclipse Theater

Nov 14 – Dec 15, 2019

Athenaeum Theatre

2936 N. Southport Avenue

Chicago, IL  60657

www.eclipsetheatre.com

773-935-6875

Even though the marriage’s prospects looked promising; it was still surprising to see it succeed with such dazzling effect.  Chicago Sinfonietta, one of Chicago’s great musical assets, celebrated Diwali at Symphony Center Monday night with a program that merged two classical music worlds.  It also sagely incorporated the dynamic richness of South Asian dance by inviting Mandala Arts dance ensemble to perform with them during their rendition of Stravinsky’s The Fire Bird Suite.   

 A centuries old Hindu festival, Diwali commemorates the victory of light over darkness, knowledge over ignorance and good over evil.  Love + Light, The Jubilant Return of Diwali, was crafted to reflect the holiday’s optimism by paving a musical path of promise and fulfillment.  It was guest conductor’s Sameer Patel’s inspiration to use Stravinsky’s iconic Fire Bird Suite as the melodic canvas to tell the quintessential story of Ram. Stravinsky’s original score and premise as well as the tale of Ram overflow with mystery, mythology and potent elements of fantasy.  Much like the mystical firebird is so essential in helping to vanquish evil in Stravinsky’s Russian fable, a Monkey God acts as a facilitating protector to Ram in the ancient Diwali epic; allowing him to defeat the arch demon Hanuman.

Breaking up the program in three parts and making the power of love a cornerstone of each, Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, Op 72b opened the concert.  Taken from the composer’s only opera, it chronicles the courageous feats a wife will attempt to save her condemned husband.   The overture is striking in its scope; running the gamut of emotions from deep melancholy to explosive jubilance in a shockingly compressed time span.  Under Mr. Patel’s baton, the Sinfonietta glowed with the cool adroitness that typifies so many of their appearances.  The overture’s ecstatic climax revealed the physicality playing in an orchestra can entail when the entire string section erupted in sustained harmonic frenzy.

Setting expectations for the second component of the night’s entertainment, conductor Patel and choreographer Ashwaty Chennat jointly delivered a succinct and tantalizing primer on what was to follow; the grafting of a revered Indian saga onto a renowned fixture in the canon of western classical music.

Re-enacting the legend of Ram in dance to Stravinsky’s music added luster to both.  Chennat, who created the choreography, combined contemporary western dance movements with the highly-stylized poses and beguiling hastas or hand gestures that define traditional dance of the Indian subcontinent.  The hybrid she designed was a slight shift from another dance event honoring Diwali and featuring Mandala Arts last week at the Studebaker.  Here, an effort to overlay exceptional dance technique to a more literal dance narrative resulted in a tour de force.    Dance and music were synced to the note; turning the co-dependence of stylized movement to music into rapturous synergy. 

Dancing the role of Sita, Ram’s beloved and endangered wife, Chennat, along with a small corps of dancers transformed the hall’s stage into an ancient forest full of shape shifting danger.  Laksha Dantran as Rama and Keeley Morris and Berit Godo who made up the dance chorus, along with Chennat, were all unerringly splendid. The more the dance and the music continued, the less you wanted either to end. 

Doubtless there were many in the audience who had no idea what was in store for them after the break.  Even with his global reputation and remarkable artistic accomplishments, Dr. L. Subramaniam is not the household name in the United States that it may be in other parts of the world.  Although he had been exposed to music early in life and exhibited considerable musical prowess when he was very young, it was a video Dr. Subramaniam saw while in medical school that changed the course of his life.  The world is a better place as result of that chance viewing of Heifetz playing the violin; compelling Dr. Subramaniam to seriously study classical western music. 

Featuring the violin concerto, Shanti Priya in E, Ls 231, a work that laces classical music of the east with that of the west, allowed Chicago to witness the gifts of a profound talent and made the final segment of the program transcendent.  Accompanied by two percussionists proficient in the classical music of southern India, as well as the full Sinfonietta orchestra, Dr. Subramaniam’s violin virtuosity stunned with the depth of its incomprehensible beauty.  Embracing the soul piercing richness of the east and finely wrought ephemeral delicacy, the expansive concerto carried the audience through epochs of music and cultures. 

In explaining Diwali at the beginning of the evening, maestro Patel spoke of the spirit of inclusion the festival inherently embodies.  Artistic commemorations like Love + Light, The Jubilant Return of Diwali, exemplify the excellence that inclusion can bring.

The Chicago Sinfonietta

Love + Light, The Jubilant Return of Diwali

November 11, 2019

7:30pm

Symphony Center

220 S. Michigan Avenue

Chicago, IL   60604

www.chicagosinfonietta.org

When they mirror the people who live in them, cities are like living kaleidoscopes.  Holidays, festivals and celebrations turn diversity into an engine that makes the city more colorful, dynamic and interesting by allowing people to reach back to their pre-America days and bring joyful memories of the past to the present.

For most Chicagoans, the early days of November has us catching the first glimpse of our two biggest US holidays as they loom on the horizon.  Little do many of us realize that thousands of our neighbors have already gotten into the holiday mood with Diwali, an ancient festival of lights originating in Southeast Asia centuries before Christianity began.  Symbolizing “the victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance”, its concepts and purpose glow with a universality that anyone can appreciate.  Running five days long and marked with pageantry, performance and lavish feasts; Diwali is a significant festival celebrated in some form by the nearly quarter million people of Southeast Asian descent in Illinois; most of them residing within Chicago’s metropolitan ring.  

For the past four years, the performing arts organization, Mandala, has been promoting South Asian culture and presenting The Story of Ram, the classic saga of Diwali.  This year they brought the show downtown with a single performance Sunday afternoon at the Studebaker Theatre.  Mandala will also provide the dance element to Love and Light, Chicago Sinfonietta’s Diwali performance at Symphony Center next week.

For anyone who relishes the rich taste of cultural diversity as manifested in the arts, The Story of Ram is the perfect vehicle for artistic discovery.  As well as Indian cultural traditions, Mandala embraces the contributions of other cultures orbiting the subcontinent to show how varied and visually distinctive arts expression has long been in the region.  Balinese and Indonesian dance and traditions routinely find themselves woven into Mandala’s repertoire.  Dancers from a wide swath of neighboring countries participated in the Sunday event.

For the uninitiated, fear might be the first response to a performance so entrenched in unfamiliar cultures.  Displacing that fear with curiosity would be a good first step to appreciate something so new.  And the use of a cultural escort would be indispensable. Mandala’s performance provided the most ideal guide possible.  Thorough, clear and a delightful storyteller, this one introduced herself as Monkey Man; an ancient creature of fantasy whose purpose in this guise was to help steer the audience through an absorbing plot dense with characters.

Fantasy and the supernatural proliferate in lore that extends into antiquity.  Demons and fantastic creatures abound. The guide, communicating simultaneously with speech and elaborate hand gestures and body movements, was herself transfixing.  The exactness of her hand movements was so precise and her grace was so fluid, you were left with the impression that you were learning a beautiful new language.

When these very often spiritual tales were originally told, populations were illiterate and theatrical communication was primarily visual.  Intricately carved shadow puppets were frequently used as they were Sunday to bolster dramatization of the story line.  Hundreds of years later, the puppetry’s still refreshingly effective.  A major deity in Hinduism, Ram’s story follows his exile, his return to favor and most importantly, his struggle to rescue his wife Sita from an arch demon.  Despite the complexity of the plot, Monkey Man, the narrative navigator; masterfully kept the plot line crisp and orderly.  Giving the audience every opportunity to drink in the uniqueness of the dance, the ritualistic flavor of classical Southeast Asian theater and the detailed beauty of the ornate and radiant costumes. 

Like many cultural dance concerns that teach, performance skill is broad.  Dancing tykes share the stage with masters of their craft.  That range of ability only added to The Story of Ram’s all-inclusive appeal and primed the appetite for more things Diwali.

The Story of Ram

November 3, 2019

The Studebaker Theater

Fine Arts Building

410 S. Michigan Avenue

Chicago, IL  60605

Madeleine Peyroux’s visit Tuesday night to the City Winery stage couldn’t have been more curious.  A straight-ahead performance full of edgy humor and wonderful music, she casually interlaced the familiar and the new, the melancholy and the playfully salacious; all the while filling the evening with unexpected jolts of surprise.

It’s not by intention, but Peyroux’s such a mysteriously illusive artist because she’s so impossible to pinpoint. She’s been called a jazz singer, but is she?  She’s proficient in the blues.  But that shoe isn’t a completely comfortable fit either.  For Tuesday night’s show, she decided to take us down two musical paths; drinking songs and the blues.  A tantalizing combination that promised both fun and depth.

Opening with her cautionary Don’t Wait Too Long, the first thing that strikes you is the loveliness of her voice. Light and sweet and smooth, it’s the kind of nectar any ear would relish.  You can imagine how she must have sounded busking on the streets of Paris at 16 enchanting passersby strolling along the Left Bank.  Which leads back to what kind of singer is Madeline Peyroux.  Treated with much more than drinking songs and blues, it’s when she slipped gently into French that she seemed most a home and in an element she found luxuriously comfortable. Singing, La Javanaise, her contribution to The Shape of Water’s soundtrack, the melody and the timbre of her voice were ideally suited to the poetry of a song about the ethereal nature of love. Rose colored lighting and City Winery’s suggestively cabaret aesthetic added to the song’s dreamy allure.

Now a resident of Brooklyn with a nice stash of highly regarded albums to her credit, she’s a seasoned performer who has expectations of audiences just as they have expectations of her.  At times that interaction got a little frustrating for someone who enjoys stimulating interchange.  Totally devoid of affectation, Peyroux comes across as “regular people”; someone who disdains the kind of pretense that stymies connections.  And she let the audience know, with generous servings of humor, that she was having concerns.  From the floor, it simply appeared as if the audience was being overly conscientious about respecting an artist they held in esteem. That struggle to reach the audience beyond the music lasted most of the night.  In the meantime, it was more than enjoyable traveling the labyrinth of styles that define Peyroux. 

Leaning on the robust exuberance so common to keyboard driven jump blues, energy erupted when she and her gang of four hit the rhythm road.  That’s when Jon Cowherd would go a little crazy on organ and make it surge with harmonious funk. Springing into Everything I Do is Going to Be Funky, initially, it really wasn’t.  Mostly it was just sweet and wonderful.  It took Cowherd’s take-no-prisoners skills on the organ to restore the groove.

The evening with Peyroux also helped solve a mystery.  Prior to the show, comparisons to Billie Holiday somehow seemed exaggerated and unlikely.  After all, who can sound like Aretha or Callas? But Peyroux and Holiday can, depending on the song, share an eerily similar tonal quality.  It’s startling to hear that singular sound in another context other than in the milieu of Billie Holiday where a residue of pain is ever present. With Peyroux, it’s as if that sound had been lifted and taken to a different world.    Her interpretation of Dance with Me to the End of Love crystalized that sensation.  Written by Leonard Cohen, Peyroux arranged the song to project the languid ease so characteristic of French cabaret. It’s no wonder she tours France so much.

Paying tribute to another musical shape shifter at the end of the show, the incomparable Odetta, it was clear Peyroux draws her musical inspirations from many sources.  By then, she and the audience had come to a mutually satisfying understanding.  One that ended in some of the warmest applause experienced in City Winery’s cloistered musical enclave.

Madeleine Peyroux

October 22, 23   2019

City Winery

1200 W. Randolph St.

Chicago, IL  60607

313-773-9463

The Brothers Size opens with a chant proclaiming that “the road is rough” before showing what that means in a universe of two.  Stories examining relationships between brothers or between sisters are too rarely seen in serious drama.  Given their complexity and intensity, they’re an ideal source for creating captivating story telling.  Tarell Alvin McCraney’s own struggles in the world of sibling dynamics inspired the searing truths he exposed in The Brothers Size, the second segment of his renowned Brother/Sister trilogy.

Previous productions of the trilogy at Steppenwolf had critics and theater goers spinning with delight.  Earlier this year, his screenplay High Flying Bird, a sports drama about elite athletes taking ownership of their talent’s marketability, revealed how fresh movies can sound and how vividly stories can be drawn when emanating from a brilliant theatrical mind.  He’d won an Oscar for another screenplay, Moonlight, in 2017.

But The Brothers Size is not a new play.  Recently celebrating his 40^th birthday, it’s a work McCraney created twenty years ago when he was grappling with the weighty responsibility of being an older brother to a younger one on the verge of being lost to the streets. 

A conversation with anyone who is the oldest sibling will likely reveal that he or she has no love for their ranking in the hierarchy.  Many consider it a liability.  You become a surrogate parent when the real one isn’t around.  You must guide, protect and teach.  For some, it all comes naturally with love.  But for most, it’s a burden they can resent, however mildly, for a lifetime.  The feeling Ogun (Manny Buckley) has for his brother Oshoosi (Patrick Agada) lies somewhere in between. 

With no other brothers and sisters and both parents deceased, the stakes go up when the pool is small.   Raised by an unsympathetic and callous aunt, their only source of genuine love comes from each other. 

Although it’s the second play of trilogy, McCraney wrote The Brothers Size first.  All three plays tap into African notions of the origin of the universe to instill conceptual context and many of the same characters dominate all three plays.  According to Yoruba beliefs, Ogun is the God of iron and in this play the most pivotal character. As the owner/operator of a car repair shop, working on metal is his livelihood and Yu Shibagaki’s set design radiates the austere grittiness of a hard-won purpose driven existence. Ogun has struggled for a long time to find a tool that will fix his younger brother whose carefree outlook on life always seems to find a way to jeopardize his own well-being.  We meet them when Oshoosi has just gotten out of prison.  Because of Ogun’s palpable frustration, the air is charged with tension.

Pragmatic and resolute, Ogun is the consummate big brother.  A rock.  From McCraney’s pen and under the direction of Monte Cole, he’s both the kind of big brother you’d come to expect and one you’ve never seen before.  Everything McCraney creates is intentionally relevant and anchored in truths unique to Black American culture.  Brothers with black skin must navigate the world differently.  Other minorities recalibrate expectations based on race, too.  As one Angelino of Mexican heritage noted in an interview, “We’ll never be white enough for America….”.  Both black and brown Americans know the heel of the society’s boot.  And both know that it’s pressed down a little harder on Black necks.  It’s that reality that Ogun wants to instill in his free-spirited brother so that he’ll be more careful and avoid having his life any further compromised by the imbalance of consequences plaguing this country.  But true to Oshooshi’s nature, all he wants to do is get a car and ride.

Fate, individual character and the people who revolve in our personal universe can all conspire against good intentions.  Elegba, played so enigmatically and elegantly by Rashaad Hall, was difficult to read initially.  He befriended Oshoosi in prison and seemed overly devoted to him when they both got out.  Oshooshi hungered for a car and Elegba found a way to get him one.  Sometimes tiny drops of desires would spill from his lips when he talked to or about Oshooshi and he once let his hand rise tentatively to tenderly touch his friend.  Although always wildly enthusiastic about his passion for women, Elegba remained his close friend; making the possibility of Oshooshi’s sexual fluidity more and more credible. 

The youthful vivacity and sparkle Patrick Agada brought to his characterization of Oshooshi often had the audience grinning from ear to ear with his antics.  Launching into a riff on Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness, the routine soon escalated from fun to fantastic; reinforcing an appreciation for the versatility embodied in talented actors.

Techniques used to enhance the audience’s enjoyment and understanding of the play were particularly effective and even pleasurable.  Scrolling projections placed high on either side of the stage provided the text of what each actor was saying and proved essential for closely following dialogue.   When actors were seated with their backs to the audience, live frontal projection images filled the back of the stage and allowed the audience to read their faces and well as listen to their words. 

It’s McCraney’s willingness and wonderful ability to tell sturdy and engrossing stories about people you know, or people in which you recognize yourself, in beautiful and penetrating ways that make him so vital to contemporary theater.   

The Brothers Size

October 2 – 19, 2019

Steppenwolf Theater

1650 N. Halsted St.

Chicago, IL  60614

312-335-1650

Opening night at the opera remains a striking occasion.  The red carpet, the gowns, the heart racing energy flowing through the nearly 4000 people assembled to see The Barber of Seville, one of the world’s most popular operas.  It’s ironic that something so beloved isn’t exactly an original.  Rossini based his classic on a French opera of the same name written 30 years earlier by Pierre Beaumarchais.  It was Rossini’s genius that allowed him to make his version infinitely better.

There are plenty of reasons why his Barber still holds its acclaim two centuries later and they were on full display Saturday night.  Some might say it’s because Rossini’s signature opera is everything you would expect an opera not to be.  Funny, accessible and warm.  But there’s one attribute people usually don’t bother to include.  Thanks to Cesare Sterbini, the librettist who wrote the opera’s text, The Barber of Seville happens to be delightfully clever and filled with strong personalities who know what they want and have the tenacity and imagination to get it.   If all the of characters in Rossini’s 38 operas are this finely drawn, it’s no wonder he’s such a darling of the genre. 

Sitting here in the 21st century, the story seems a timeless one.  Aged aristocrat wants to marry the innocent beauty who not surprisingly has her eye on somebody else.  

Following a sumptuous orchestral opening conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, the curtain rises to reveal a world not at all like our own.  Delicate ironwork and an elegant 19^th century courtyard where Count Almaviva is standing below Rosina’s balcony with plans to woo.  Aided by the barber, Figaro, we begin to get a sense of how resourceful and determined these two are in achieving their end.   We also get a feel for how complicated this love affair might get since Rosina is already in love with a poor student named Lindoro.  She just doesn’t know that Lindoro is really the Count. 

The plotting, along with the knowing smiles and laughter it causes in the audience, never ceases in this careening three-sided love story.  Rosina’s guardian, Dr. Bartolo, whose end game is to make her his wife and claim her dowry; has already taken the (useless) precaution of sequestering her in the villa. And, through his paranoia, is just a step away from locking her in her room.  

Rosina, savvy as well as beautiful, proves to be just as canny as the cunning Dr. Bartolo.  With her lustrous mezzo soprano and evident pleasure in the part, Marianne Crebassa makes a formidable and radiant Rosina.  She’s got her heart set on Lindoro and using the versatile Figaro as her go-between too, she’s more than willing to play the stakes high.

Much of the action in any other context would be quite serious.  Played here through farce, it’s just an evening stuffed with amusingly insightful fun.  Rossini composed the three-hour opera to play at a panting pace.  The diabolically hilarious Dr. Bartolo must marry Rosina quickly before someone else slips in and steals her from him.   Which proves he may be silly but not at all a fool.  Count Almaviva and Figaro need to first, get access to Rosina and then find a way for the lovers to elope.  Immediately.    

Despite countless tense moments where lies are exposed and disguises threaten to dissolve in discovery, both the Count and Figaro play it cool.  Lawrence Brownlee as Count Almaviva is such a suave imp.  Intellectually unflappable.  Romantically, so sincere.  And he doesn’t have any reservations about going a little camp.  That combination would make any character irresistibly watchable.  A tenor known for the broadness of his tones and velvet phrasing, Brownlee; like each of these performers, shines most brightly in their solos.  The perfection of highly trained, wonderfully gifted voices is unmatchable and always exhilarating to hear.  Even Berta, Dr. Bartolo’s housekeeper, with a confident Mathilda Edge making her Lyric debut in the role, was enchanting in her aria during the second act.  The richness, depth and graceful power in her voice were all marvelous.

Like all great librettist, Sterbini knows a little bit about human nature.  And in combination with Rossini’s adroit compositions, he knows how to mine that knowledge in a way that lets us see a little bit of ourselves and laugh as we do here.  Figaro’s quite aware of his talents as a fixer.  But he’s completely devoid of smugness.  And for all the hilarity rampant in the opera, the chorus at the end of the production extending the wish that everyone find love and fulfillment in their lives doesn’t come off as maudlin in the least. It acts to extend the opera’s exuberance.

Little of The Barber of Seville’s impact opening night could have been possible without the technology that syncs and projects English translations of the opera’s songs and musical dialogue high over the stage.  The bridge of understanding it provides lets the present more thoroughly enjoy the past and helps to ensure the vibrancy of great music continues into the next millennium.

The Barber of Seville

Sept 28 – Oct 27, 2019

Lyric Opera of Chicago

20 N. Wacker Drive

Chicago, IL 60606

lyricopera.org/Barber

312-827-5600

Who wouldn’t want to see a masterpiece in a masterpiece?  The prospect had movie goers streaming into The Auditorium Saturday night to see Jordan Peele’s master work Get Out in the palatial splendor of one of the city’s most beautiful landmarks.

For almost a decade and across the country, screening movies with a live orchestra has been taking off in a big and lucrative way.  They’re regularly held at the Hollywood Bowl and the New York Philharmonic routinely hosts them at Lincoln Center.  Few, apart from perhaps Hollywood, can claim the distinction of having the composer of the movie’s score conduct the orchestra.  Michael Abel, the composer for Get Out, (as well as for Peele’s latest movie Us), was on hand Saturday night to lead the Chicago Sinfonietta in the one night only performance.  The Sinfonietta, a jewel in Chicago’s orchestral universe, makes diversity a cornerstone of their musical mission and proved the perfect match for the evening’s event.  

Abel immediately put the audience at ease by encouraging it to ditch inhibitions and feel free express itself during the movie’s screening.  There had already been an undercurrent of enthusiastic energy filling the hall.  Abel’s remarks gave the cavernous room permission to give that energy voice and his declaration was greeted with laughter, cheers and applause.

A few people at the showing didn’t know what they were about to experience.  One woman said she thought she was going to see a play and another confessed he was told he was coming to hear the Sinfonietta.  Nobody mentioned there was a movie tied to it. And, from comments overheard during intermission, several people had never seen the movie until that night.  They were the especially lucky ones. 

Peele calls his groundbreaking movie a social thriller rather than a horror movie; the way it’s usually described.  The term plays up the suspense component of the film and hints at the mental intrigue awash in this story about deception and racial vulnerability.  Never in the history of American cinema has race been made the keystone in this genre of movie making.  Watching Chris maneuver through his ordeal in the Auditorium’s opulent setting, with the man who wrote the movie’s music conducting a superb orchestra on the theater’s stage, gave the occasion a dreamlike cast.  It also seemed to underscore the movie’s cultural significance. 

When the Oscar-winning screenwriter went searching for someone to score Get Out, he knew he wanted a black composer to do have the job and was forced to resort to YouTube to find one.  Regular channels had produced paltry results. A rapport quickly took hold after the two met and Peele quite specifically asked Abel to create a segment in the music that would relay “gospel horror”.  That’s how the beautiful chorale piece with African-American vocalists singing warnings to the main character in Swahili was developed.  Boisterous approval followed the live performance featuring local artists at the opening of the movie.

Live music adds a tangible depth to film.  When he made the Get Out, Peele wanted the audience, black and white, to be able to empathize with Chris’s plight.  It was essential that the music reflect that empathy as well as convey terror.  Enveloped in a score that managed to be both sensitive and powerful, and thanks to the crucially important artistry displayed on harp and cello, the audience was at one with Get Out’s central character as he floated down to that “sunken place”.  Galvanized by the characters, plot and perspective; it remained with him all the way through to the movie’s revolutionary ending.

If there was any regret following the evening’s performance, it’s that there wasn’t even more music.

Get Out

September 21, 2019

The Auditorium Theater

50 E. Ida B. Wells Drive

Chicago, IL  60605

www.auditoriumtheatre.com

Jazz lovers have long memories and pride themselves on their loyalty to trusted music resources.  That dedication explains why the Jazz Showcase was bulging at the seams Tuesday night with fans honoring retiring 90.9 WDCB radio host Barry Winograd.  Winograd will be leaving his daily 10am to 2pm slot September 20^th with early morning host Leslie Keros slated to slide over to fill the vacancy.

Winograd’s roots in the jazz community couldn’t go deeper.  Eighteen years in Glen Ellyn with DCB and lengthy stints at WBEZ and WXRT means his knowledge of the music and the people behind it is rich and plentiful.  That command came through in the easy, unhurried and indisputably cool discourse Winograd engaged in during his broadcasts about the music many consider the greatest America has ever produced. 

A veteran musician and bandleader, Winograd not only hosted the evening’s celebrations but performed with the Eric Schneider quintet.  It was clear that he shares a lot of history with this classic jazz ensemble who knows how bring the fire. 

Although stepping down from his daily show, Winograd will not be completely stepping away from his broadcasting persona.  He’ll continue to host his Saturday morning show, When Jazz was King.  It was also clear Mr. Winograd will have few regrets about not participating in the station’s seasonal fund raising drives.  The Saturday morning segment and filling in for WDCB’s other radio hosts will complete his future commitments to the station and allow Chicago to continue relishing in his superlative perspectives and insights on the magnificent musical art form known as jazz.