STAGES & SCREENS

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...

“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 ...

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...

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...

When the Metropolitan Opera chose to open its 2025-26 season with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay , they must have felt it was a risky move. The brand-new, sweeping, three-hour adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Jewish comic book makers who invent a superhero to fight the Nazis in World War Two had only played at Indiana University, as the co-producing LA Opera had canceled what was to be its debut run due to financial constraints. The top brass decided not even to give it a slot in the “Met in HD” series, which broadcasts the operas in movie theaters around the world. So when The New York Times responded to its grand opening with the headline “A ‘Kavalier & Clay’ Opera Doesn’t Meet Its Moment,” it seemed like a potentially serious hit to the Met’s recent ambitious, financially perilous effort to introduce as many as six new operas each season. However, after that review the full multi-week run of the opera nearly sold out every night...