FOLLOWING THE GREAT MIGRATION, AND A MONTH'S CHICAGO CULTURAL ROUNDUP

“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 Century on Chicagoans. First, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which tells a story of the real-life Southern jazz star Ma Rainey and her time recording in Chicago. And second, Chicago Poet Laureate avery r. young’s new opera safronia, which relays the story of a family’s century-long trek from Oscarville, Georgia northwards to a city clearly modeled on Chicago. I saw both over two weeks. Below is a round-up of reviews of those two shows with their common themes, and a month of theater that was otherwise widely varied for me, featuring four nights of opera and three stage plays. 

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson, Goodman Theatre
April 25

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, my second favorite of the 10 plays in August Wilson’s Century Cycle, is a standout in many ways. It is the only play in the cycle centered around a real historical person. It’s the only play set anywhere other than Pittsburgh. It’s the only play other than Seven Guitars with a lot of music, played by the actors in a live band on stage. It’s the only play that opens with white characters, demonstrating directly that the black characters live in what could be called a white man’s world. And it’s the only representation of queer life in the cycle, depicting Ma’s relationship to a sultry young siren named Dussie Mae. In the Goodman Theatre’s new production of Ma Rainey, director Chuck Smith takes full advantage of those unique characteristics to show off one of the best plays in Wilson’s oeuvre. One can tell that Smith had the chance to work with the playwright himself on a production of Ma Rainey, at the Goodman in 1997. “August Wilson actually came to our very first preview of that show,” Smith said in the program of his production of Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in 2024, “and really worked with me firsthand in polishing it up to be a first-class show.” The cast of the new show shows the fruits of that experience, led by a husky-voiced E. Faye Butler. Having shouted and sung her way through weeks of performances already, by the time I saw her Butler was struggling with an even more raspy voice than usual, which threw off some of her comic timing but also lent a world-weary resonance to her performance. Every member of the cast lives up to her lead, with a particular standout coming from the manic, ever-dancing energy of Al ‘Jaleel McGhee’s Levee, and the more stolid wisdom of Kelvin Roston Jr. as the literate Toledo. In addition to the unique aspects of Ma Rainey, the play also captures something that is depicted throughout the Century Cycle: The exilic Black man’s relationship to history. Toledo, the only literate member of Ma Rainey’s band, sums up that relationship by likening Black people to leftovers from a historical stew: the ingredients in the stew are the various tribes of Africans who have ended up in America, he says. Once “your history is over” and “you done ate the stew,” there are leftovers: “You done made your history and it’s still there,” Toledo says. “See, we’s the leftovers. The colored man is the leftovers. Now, what’s the colored man gonna do with himself? That’s what we waiting to find out. But first we gotta know we the leftovers.” Wilson doesn’t lecture us on Black history, he lets his profound commentary emerge from every-day details and the poetry of his characters’ expressions. The picture of the Great Migration is refracted like light into this array of colorful characters. It’s Wilson’s funniest, swingingest, bluesiest work.

safronia, by avery r. young, Lyric Opera of Chicago
April 18

“This moment is about how opera, as a genre and institution isn’t rich & White (or at least it shouldn’t be),” Chicago Poet Laureate avery r. young writes in the Lyric Opera’s program for his new opera safronia, for which he writes not only the libretto but also a score filled with anything but traditional opera music, highlighting instead a range of African-American musical genres. “When we talk a classical American songbook, we must understand the songs in that book come with many skins, tongues & stories. This new work of safronia couldn’t be set in the day & time it is & not sound like the music [its characters] listened to &/or sang. Therefore this new work that is safronia seeks to present opera not only as a hallelujah dance hall, but it also presents opera as everyday as weather. As close as a coat. As near as a friend.” The 3,200-plus seats of the Civic Opera House were packed with people ready for that near embrace. Largely peopled with snazzily dressed African Americans, in one of the opera’s two performances, the audience was clearly ready for young’s redefinition of opera, with amplified voices, music from gospel, funk, R&B, pop and jazz disciplines. One might quibble (as did Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune) that this might be more accurately labeled a new musical than a new opera, but the vibrancy and energy of the performance made safronia easily one of the highlight’s of the Lyric Opera’s somewhat dull now-completed season of 2025-26. The poet young, who prefers lower case letters throughout his work and even his own name, tells a version of his own family’s story through the fictional characters the bookers, who migrate gradually over the course of 100 years from Georgia to a town much like Chicago. For both Wilson in Ma Rainey and young in safronia, not nearly as much is different in the North in the 20^th century as their characters hoped. The bookers sing that perhaps the Mason-Dixon line should have been said to be drawn at Canada, as they encounter racism in the North that equals or exceeds that of the South. The best way to understand how different this is from a traditional opera is to hear the score itself; one can hear two ensemble numbers from the show on the Lyric’s web site. “Leddimin” is a barnstorming gospel number; “norf” is a fast-paced gospel tribute to the journey northward. The poet is one of the lead singers as well, playing as he does the lead character of booker. He and Meaghan McNeal as safronia set the tone for the excellent ensemble. The opera was billed as a semi-staged concert production, but featured lively choreography and a space-like series of projections that made it feel like a full production. The show will receive its first full production next season at the Court Theatre in Chicago. Much has been written about the death of opera, and while this may not be an opera in its truest form it represents a potential jolt to the art form that could not come at a better time.

Madama Butterfly, Lyric Opera of Chicago
April 6

Director Matthew Ozawa’s Madama Butterfly at Lyric Opera of Chicago was practically designed to tick off the traditionalist opera fans. The production makes Butterfly a Virtual Reality character in a game played by B.F. Pinkerton, thus pointing out overtly that Cio-Cio-San is entirely a creation of Western minds. Having run in Utah, Cincinnati and at Yuval Sharon’s Detroit Opera (see my review of his Tristan und Isolde, elsewhere on this page), the production has garnered plenty of praise and plenty of heat. “I hate to break it to the director but It’s not about you!!” writes one local critic, Lawrence A. Johnson of Chicago Classical Review, an engaging writer who has had sharp words for directors who depart from the original choices. “Nobody buys a ticket to see Butterfly because the stage director is half-Japanese or to see him work out his personal identity issues onstage.” But that is pretty much exactly why I acquired a ticket to this production: The opera is about the Japanese, and I’m interested in what they have to say about it. The creative team, Ozawa says, is entirely Japanese and Japanese American, and the concept is daringly original, pointing out what has always been problematic about the opera while still celebrating its strengths. It is too bad that I left the opera disappointed, not because of its concept but because of its execution. When Butterfly commits suicide at the end, the moment is devastating for Pinkerton but not for us. What set off Johnson, who said he was preparing a positive review at intermission, seems to have been the director’s note by Ozawa. (The director is also Chief Artistic Administration Officer for the Lyric Opera.) “What experiences, perspectives, histories and biases do we bring with us as we engage with Butterfly’s story?” asks Ozawa. “When I investigate my own lens, I see that mine represents the East-West conflict that is core to Madama Butterfly. I am biracial—the son of a Caucasian mother and a Japanese father … Like Butterfly, I never felt at home in any single culture or space.” Ozawa goes on to explain that the opera was based on a French novel and an American play and short story. Elsewhere in the program it’s noted that Puccini “made at least some efforts to understand the culture,” interviewing the wife of a Japanese ambassador to Italy, possibly watching a Japanese actress then touring Europe, and “studying printed Japanese music that was available to him.” Complaints from Asian writers and viewers have mounted in recent decades about the orientalist representation in the opera, including in David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly, which is itself a response to the opera from an Asian perspective. So the concept seemed fascinating to me. But the production fails to be specific about what complaints are to be made about the representation. The design of Japanese costumes and sets was consciously inaccurate, to emphasize the Western nature of the opera’s vision. But to those of us who are not experts in Japanese design it’s not clear in what specific ways; in fact the sets and costumes look more realistic than the set designed for Pinkerton’s apartment, where he uses his Virtual Reality headset. Bright pinks and whites in a futuristic living room make the Western world seem at least as unreal as the VR vision of the Eastern world. While the design is uniformly attractive, the result is that the message seems muddled. The complaint has been made about the production: if Cio-Cio-San is not real, why should we care about her trauma? I was excited to see how Ozawa reconciled this, and ultimately because his central message is less than clear the complaint gains traction. The performances and the orchestra are not at fault; all tell their part of the story credibly. But the emotional impact is blunted by the failure to see a brilliant concept through to the particulars of the design.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Marco Antonio Rodriguez, Goodman Theatre
April 3

Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao intersperses scenes that depict heartbreaking repression across the history of the Dominican Republic with scenes that focus on one peculiarly nerdy Dominican in New Jersey who is obsessed with comic books, The Lord of the Rings and Robert Heinlein. That contrast is the main thing that drew me to the Goodman Theatre’s adaptation of the novel, which ran in its small Owen Theatre this winter. I have yet to read the novel, but I’d been told that its action was propelled by the suggestion that many Dominicans don’t understand nerd culture, a fascinating premise worth the ticket price. Still, the Goodman’s adaptation, written by Marco Antonio Rodriguez, does not intersperse the two settings but splits them into separate acts. The result is that the first act presents Diaz’s colorful characters largely without much of their cultural specificity and flattens the scenes into what almost seemed like an episode of “The Big Bang Theory.” When the action relocates to the Caribbean in the second act, it helps, but it’s largely too late. The characters feel almost like stereotypes. Director Wendy Mateo does the best she can with Rodriguez’s script, and Lenin Izquierdo in the title role as Oscar Wao is likeable, powerful, and appropriately eccentric. The set, livened by projections of comic book art, makes the transitions between settings aptly novelesque. But having been reduced almost to a sitcom in the first half, the production can’t fully recover its power in the second.

Two Sisters and a Piano by Nilo Cruz, Writer’s Theatre
March 29

Two seemingly unrelated things happened on March 29, 2026. First, President Trump reversed his position on whether Russia could deliver oil to the energy-starved nation of Cuba. The island nation had been in dire humanitarian straits because the United States had choked off all energy deliveries through a blockade. “Cuba’s finished,” Trump said. “They have a bad regime. They have very bad and corrupt leadership and whether or not they get a boat of oil, it’s not going to matter.” The second thing to happen that day was that Nilo Cruz’s play Two Sisters and a Piano, about Cuba at the end of the Cold War, ran its final performance at the Writer’s Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois. I was there, so I couldn’t help but contemplate both how much and how little things have changed in Cuba since 1989, when the play takes place. The play was first produced in 1999, at a considerably more hopeful moment in the island’s history. But it tells of a dark moment before the dawn. The two sisters of the title are Maria Celia (Andrea San Miguel) and Sofia (Neysha Mendoza Castro), and both are locked under house arrest throughout the play, as Maria Celia and her exiled husband are both the authors of dissident literature. The piano, for its part, is their one form of recreation. The action centers around the visits of a particularly interested Lieutenant (Adam Poss) who wants both to monitor the sisters and to make love to Maria Celia. How she reacts is the central tension of the play. Just as in that day’s news, Russia is providing a glimmer of hope for a dismally depressed Cuba as the play begins, because the Soviet Union is crumbling under Mikhail Gorbachev, and the sisters have hopes that the new freedoms might spread their way. The play is anchored by strong, if occasionally slightly over-the-top performances, and it succeeds or fails largely in proportion to the extent to which Poss manages to humanize his villain. Sometimes he seems a little too suited to a wax mustache, other times his charm shows through. Ultimately the complication of the performance wins out over the temptation to project only the evil we already know about the character, and the play succeeds as a result. The set gives us both the claustrophobia and the beauty of the place and time, and the production is well paced by director Lisa Portes. Nilo Cruz’s writing is not as elegiac or as beautiful as in his Pulitzer-winning Anna in the Tropics, which I reviewed last summer after an excellent performance by American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin. But as with Anna, the script here conveys something important about a historical moment with moving empathy. Two Sisters and a Piano captures the desperation that is now gripping Cuba again, as the entire country had been under a form of house arrest as the USA prevented deliveries of energy. The Writer’s Theatre’s production captures the desperation and fragile hope of both eras.

Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner, Metropolitan Opera in HD
March 21

Opera director Yuval Sharon, whose Tristan und Isolde I’ve waited for with eager anticipation for years, says that opera should aspire to the condition of poetry. “Unlike most narrative fiction, poetry possesses a natural aptitude for ambiguity,” Sharon writes in his 2024 book A New Philosophy of Opera. “It's looser, more associative, and more interested in potential meanings that arise from familiar words being used in unfamiliar ways … Opera, born of actual poetry (the libretto), truly achieves its power when considered poetically.” This is perhaps the most important thing to consider when approaching his hit new sold-out production of Tristan und Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera, which I saw on March 21 in a packed movie theater screening room in its HD broadcast. Boasting the first set to use the full height of the proscenium arch at the roughly 3,800-seat Metropolitan Opera house in New York, Sharon’s set designer Es Devlin provides an ambiguous take on Wagner’s classic five-hour opera that involves having two sets of performers playing Tristan and Isolde at all times: One on the stage at a table, the other above the stage in one of a variety of different imaginative sets that reflect one conceptual idea or another. Sharon has said there will be as many interpretations of the set as people in the audience. It was in the second act that I really started to love the production. My take was that the floating circles, which drifted from being one circle containing both Tristan and Isolde to being two circles separating the two, and back again, represented something unique and profound about the way couple’s consciousness drifts together and apart while sleeping together. Floating together and then apart is just what happens to a couple as they dream in bed together, and Sharon’s set seemed the perfect depiction of nighttime love. It also represented both the libretto’s observations on their togetherness during the night, and separateness by day. Whatever the purpose of the set, it focused my mind more on what Wagner’s lines had to say than any of the other five Tristans I’ve seen, because I wanted to test my peculiar thesis against what Wagner had written. It also set up the even more brilliant use of what Sharon called the “table and fable” concept in act three, which was perhaps the most moving and intelligent representation of the divide between the living and the dead I’ve ever seen. The table, to the extent it represents one thing, represents the grounded, literal world, and the fable equals an elevated symbolic space that in one moment at least clearly becomes the afterlife. If you’re familiar with the opera at all you know Tristan spends the final act in and then out of a coma, desperately awaiting Isolde’s arrival on a ship. In this production, Tristan runs from the stage area (“table”) to the space above it (“fable”) as he spies the ship arriving, ecstatically singing that he will finally be reunited with Isolde. In most productions of the opera, Tristan dies just as Isolde arrives. In Sharon’s production, Tristan realizes when she arrives on the stage that he has left her world, and that he is now in the separate world of death. I heard sobs in the movie theater when that happened. The act two usage of the circles set up act three, ironically, because it wasn’t precisely the same thematic usage of the set in each act. The idea that the set in the second act meant something different than it did in the third, however slightly, meant that the third act’s more obvious interpretation was more surprising. It wasn’t all schematically intelligible and therefore packed a bigger punch. Not everything in the production works—the use of items in the “table” area (plates, a sword, etc.) as totems that project the characters into the alternate “fable” world did not sell me entirely on its concept until the second act. I liked it more and more as the show progressed. The costumes, sometimes looking like blue and green pajamas, I was less than crazy about. But the performances carry the day even when the ambitious staging does not. Lise Davidsen was the star attraction as Isolde, and mostly lives up to her billing, though I found both singers had to compete a bit much with the orchestra in the early going. Michael Spyres as Tristan was a sound match for Davidsen, singing the role with affecting clarity. The real interpretive peak of the opera happens in the final aria by Isolde, the famous “Liebestod.” Sharon has Davidsen give birth to a baby in the final moments before the aria and then sing the aria not to the dead Tristan as usual but instead to the baby. It changes everything about the way Davidsen delivers the aria—it’s gentler, more hopeful, its longing redirected to the future—and therefore contributes an entirely new thing to the long history of the opera. Not everyone, of course, prefers such revisionism. Personally I found the best articulation of a traditional objection to the projection to be a blog entry by Conrad L. Osborne, author of the fascinating book Opera as Opera: The State of Art. Osborne finds the production, like most modern productions, not to be an interpretation of the opera at all, but instead an “installation” to be interpreted itself. He is not persuaded by the notion of a poetic reading, but if that idea lights you up this Tristan might be one of the most invigorating opera experiences of recent years.  

Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Riccardo Muti conducts Italian Opera
March 20

When I saw Puccini’s Manon Lescaut in performance in Evanston by the Opera Festival of Chicago two years ago, the last act seemed a parody of opera’s penchant for long, drawn-out deaths. Manon and her lover, Des Grieux, die of thirst for almost half an hour that felt like an hour and a half. They have been exiled to what translations of the original libretto have called “a desert plain on the borders of New Orleans,” displaying the laughable level of understanding of American geography from the at least seven people who contributed to this libretto. In fact, the swampy, wet terrain of New Orleans makes it one of the hardest places in America to die of thirst. On March 20, however, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed the act under the baton of emeritus music director Riccardo Muti, the half hour demise seemed like ten minutes. Muti, who retired as full-time music director in 2023, brought the best out of tenor Francesco Meli and soprano Lidia Fridman, whose poignant and soaring vocal lines brought des Grieux and Manon to life. Fridman wore an astonishing evening gown topped with a burnt umber that gradually lightened as it wound down her torso into a vibrant flame-colored orange and then yellow, as though Manon had died at the stake rather than of thirst. The excerpt from Manon Lescaut was not even the indisputable highlight of the evening. It began with a series of deep cuts by Muti’s favorite, Giuseppe Verdi, about whom the conductor wrote an interesting book of essays that argues in essence that society will need Verdi longer than Wagner because the former creates real characters while the latter reduces his characters to symbols. That psychological dynamic was not on direct display in this program, as the Verdi selections highlighted symphonic and choral works rather than arias or duets, but under Muti’s direction the orchestra packed a dramatic punch that made one feel one had witnessed the characters’ traumas and joys anyway. Muti opened with the sinfonia to La battaglia di Legnano, a mid-career opera for Verdi that has rarely been performed, in part because censors routinely barred its revolutionary content for fear of resonance with the present day. The program for the evening calls the overture one of Verdi’s “greatest and most original,” and with its mix of energetic brass and plaintive woodwinds one can understand why. The program continued with the prelude to Verdi’s I masnadieri, a rarely produced adaptation of a Schiller play about bandits. The overture boasts a virtuoso cello solo of a sort that is rare, if not unprecedented, in Verdi. The climax for the Verdi selections was no B-side, however: “Va, Pensiero” from Nabucco is of course one of Verdi’s most performed compositions. Under the direction of former Metropolitan Opera choral director Donald Palumbo, the almost 150-member chorus gave the most remarkable performance of the piece I’ve heard, and the hushed strain of the final note still rings in my ears. Muti also conducted pieces by Giordano (from Fedora) and Catalani (La Wally). The latter aria, “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana,” featured prominently in the 1981 movie Diva, and vies for the award for the most-performed piece from a rarely produced opera. The only wrinkle in the evening was also one of its most entertaining moments, as latecomers came for seats in my row and then were chewed out by an irate Muti, who asserted that Toscanini would have thrown them out and admonished that no one comes late to an airport. It was good to have his acerbic wit back.