Step stage left, Tupac. OG Maria Callas is taking center stage now. Over 42 years after her death, the definitive La Divina diva is performing at the Lyric Opera on […]
By June Sawyers “Call me Ishmael.” Even if you have never read the novel, you know the sentence, one of the most famous opening lines in American literature. But Jake […]
Chicago’s Lyric Opera fêted their fabulous creative consultant Renée Fleming last week. She debuted on that stage on October 9, 1993, and has since performed in 10 roles. She’s presided […]
As operas go, La Traviata is perhaps among the best known. Giuseppe Verdi’s adaptation (with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave) of a play that itself was based on a novel by […]
Whether it’s Rogers & Hammerstein, Disney, the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, the story of Cinderella, her fairy godmother, the glass slippers and happily ever after is, even in these […]
There are certain experiences, certain accomplishments that, understandably, pop up on most people’s Bucket Lists, those to-do lists of what we’d all like to check off before we leave this […]
I don’t like musicals. I’m an atheist. I love Jesus Christ Superstar. I was a budding theater nerd when my cool uncle Tommy turned me on to The Who’s Tommy […]
If Lin-Manuel Miranda reinvented the modern American musical with Hamilton in 2015, one could say John Frame, production designer on the world premiere of Faust now at Lyric Opera of […]
When I think of a fun night at the theater, I don’t typically think of the opera. Blame it on my generation, my relative poverty, my lack of sophistication. What […]
At the pre-show lecture in advance of Monday’s performance of Turandot at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, WFMT’s Carl Grapentine observed that, in the end, Puccini’s final opera—about a cold, unloving […]
Opening night of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2017/18 season kicked off with Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice (Paris version), and included a first-time collaboration with the Joffrey Ballet. […]
The Police drummer Stewart Copeland has turned the 1940 Argentine novel into his fifth opera that’s a mix of island dwellers like Dr. Moreau and Gilligan’s Professor, while extending Bill […]