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AN ISOLATE FROM THE PEOPLE: IBSEN'S CANON AND SOCIAL INCOMPETENCE

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“It might seem harsh to say so, but the truth is that I am more and more convinced that as an all-round thinker, or, more properly, as a systematic thinker, Ibsen really doesn’t fit the bill. … But of course Ibsen is Ibsen, and I should be the last to complain that he is not Herbert Spencer.” - William Archer upon meeting Henrik Ibsen, as quoted in Henrik Ibsen: The Man & The Mask by Ivo De Figueiredo. Absent from the end of Timeline Theatre’s new production of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People are the last lines of dialogue in the original play. The lead character, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, has been driven almost out of town by a mob angry because he has revealed to them that the water in the springs of his spa town are contaminated. Focused only on the money they stand to lose, and not the risk to people’s lives, the townspeople refuse to accept the inconvenient truth about their environment. Does this 1882 plotline sound familiar today? Paradoxically, however, Ibsen ends this...
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DON'T SAY "ACCESSIBLE": "OPERA WARS" AND THE FIGHT OVER WHAT OPERA CAN BE

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Nine pages before the end of the new book Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for its Future , author Caitlin Vincent quotes a more than 40-time contemporary opera librettist about the stigma against accessibility in modern opera. "Librettist Mark Campbell recalled being confronted by a composer collaborator after Campbell described his music as ‘accessible’ in a public forum. ‘He took me aside and said, Don’t ever use that word again. Critics will use that against me. And I said, I didn't mean it was dumbed down. I meant the audience will connect with it.’" When I read Opera Wars , I thought of an opera aria that managed to crack this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Song, beating out eligible pop luminaries like Ed Sheeran, Brandi Carlile, Miley Cyrus, Sara Bareilles and Stephen Schwartz to the coveted nomination. It was the first classical number to win such a nomination in a decade, according to the entertainment publication The Wrap . The aria, “S...
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FOLLOWING THE GREAT MIGRATION, AND A MONTH'S CHICAGO CULTURAL ROUNDUP

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“Whether this music came from Alabama or Mississippi or other parts of the South doesn’t matter anymore. The men and women who make this music have learned it from the narrow crooked streets of East St. Louis, or the streets of [Chicago]’s Southside, and the Alabama or Mississippi roots have been strangled by the northern manners and customs of free men of definite and sincere worth, men for whom this music often lies at the forefront of their conscience and concerns. Thus they are laid open to be consumed by it; its warmth and redress, its braggadocio and roughly poignant comments, its vision and prayer, which would instruct and allow them to reconnect, to reassemble and gird up for the next battle in which they would be both victim and the ten thousand slain.” – August Wilson, introduction, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom , page xv-xvi Two shows have opened in the last month in Chicago about the impact of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to North in the 20 th ...
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SPRING CLEANING: A ROUNDUP OF CHICAGO THEATER AMID THE LAST TWO MONTHS OF WINTER

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T.S. Eliot is known for his reservations about spring. Yet the author of the line "April is the cruelest month" wrote a friend in April 1911 to tell her about how beautiful the season was. "Paris has burst out, during my absence," Eliot wrote, "and it is such a revelation that I feel I ought to make it known. At London, one pretended that it was spring, and tried to coax the spring, and talk of the beautiful weather; but one continued to hibernate amongst the bricks ... But here!" Chicago has been more like Eliot's London than his Paris recently, but spring is almost here, so it’s time to clean out my notebook of winter stage observations from the last seven weeks of Chicago theater. After a somewhat sparse fall season for Chicago theater, with few productions that I personally found exciting, the winter has been productive. These nine shows, ranging from opera to musical theater to straight plays to one Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, show a little o...
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RANKING ALL 13 "ANDREA CHENIER" VIDEOS

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Some operas reward repeat listens, but relatively few reward back-to-back repeat watches. Many librettos boil their stories down to the essentials, with a love triangle at the center and little historical or imaginative detail going on around it in the words. And they can be long, with the longest operas running six hours. (Hi, Wagner.) Umberto Giordano’s  Andrea Chénier , however, is a rare counterexample. With a libretto by Luigi Illica ( Tosca, La Bohème ), the opera runs just two hours but gives a sweeping account of the cultural and political life during both the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The experience is often more like watching a play than an opera, with an emphasis on dialogue that does not interrupt the sweep of the melodies but explores many details outside of the standard love triangle (which can be found here as well for those who love that). This packing of detail into a tight package might help explain why, in the last two years alone, at l...
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