Opera as oratorio
It's safe to assume that any Haymarket Opera Company performance will transport you from the blare of contemporary life to the more genteel soundscape of the baroque. Last weekend's producti…
It's safe to assume that any Haymarket Opera Company performance will transport you from the blare of contemporary life to the more genteel soundscape of the baroque. Last weekend's producti…
Gioachino Rossini's rambunctious 200-year-old score for his comic opera, La Cenerentola, gets very serious attention in Lyric Opera's current revival of a 55-year-old production. Original di…
When Michael Fanone, the former Trump supporter and D.C. cop who nearly died at the hands of the January 6 mob at the U.S. Capitol, comes to the Chicago Humanities […] The post From domest…
Move over, Grandpa. You think ageism is your cause? Last week, Created Equal, an Ohio-based organization opposed to ending unwanted pregnancies came to town, making stops at the city's large…
Lyric Opera introduced Chicago audiences to director Barrie Kosky last year, when it brought his production of The Magic Flute"created for Komische Oper Berlin, where he's been music directo…
It's impossible to summarize everything that's happening onstage this season. (It's also hard to tell you exactly what COVID-19 precautions are required at venues now; we suggest checking ah…
Starting Sunday, for three consecutive nights, WTTW will air a new six-hour Ken Burns documentary series, The U.S. and the Holocaust. Burns and his filmmaking partners, Lynn Novick and Sarah…
Thanks to CNN, this weekend I went right from Lyric Opera's season-opening production of Ernani"featuring Charles V of Spain"to the pomp and circumstance surrounding the launch of Charles II…
Last Sunday, stuffed with antibiotics, numbed by painkillers, and facing a date with an oral surgeon the next morning, I made my way to the International Museum of Surgical Science […] The…
When Anne Ford interviewed Adam Selzer for the Reader in 2014, it was all about his job as a ghost tour leader. You didn't have to read between the lines to sense that it wasn't the perfect …
So, a bicyclist walks up to a beach on the North Shore. It's hot, he's been riding, he just wants to put his feet in the cool Lake Michigan water that he can see sparkling behind a booth and…
Nothing was said about it on the July 4 television interviews I saw, but among the security experts interviewed during coverage of the Highland Park parade shooting, one face and name had re…
There's a whole lot of story in history. And so much depends on the perspective of the storyteller.  What, for example, will the future think it knows of our fraught time? What will b…
Summer is officially here, in case the sweat and lightning bugs weren't enough of a clue. In addition to the shows and artists we profiled in our summer arts preview issue this week, we've g…
They were there. No fuss, no ballyhoo, but queer artists have been a significant part of Bronzeville's South Side Community Art Center since its founding in 1940. You might or might not see …
Last week, amid the usual tsunami of grim news about inflation, mass shootings, pandemic, and war, came word that the New York Court of Appeals is considering whether the Bronx Zoo is violat…
Regarding the recently revealed U.S. Supreme Court draft ruling on Roe v. Wade: WTF? Because, it's the F we're talking about, right? That little itch we're biologically programmed to scratch…
"Helmut Jahn: Life + Architecture" at CAC offers big pictures and tiny buildings. It's sad but true that we're never so much appreciated as when we're newly dead…
In "Roots, Branches: Ancestor(s) Stones," Monica Brown traces ancestral legacies. Memory is an abstraction. It holds our entire history, but how much of that is …
Dr. Charles Smith and other artists find a new home at the Art Preserve. Before Black Lives Matter was a movement, Black lives mattered in the work of Dr. Charle…
The "musician-governed" Chicago Philharmonic looks to innovative programming for the future. Last week the Chicago Philharmonic Society announced the appointment…
North Park Village Nature Center provides an ideal setting for Lyric's Hansel and Gretel. There's no more perfect setting for Lyric Opera's Hansel and Gretel in …
The Pritzker Museum highlights Bill Mauldin's 50-year fight with injustice. Editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose bedraggled "Willie and Joe" characters famou…
Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Joffrey Ballet announce in-person 2021-2022 seasons. At a joint press conference today on the stage of the opera house, Lyric Oper…
Can we save his most important Chicago building? We didn't need the death of architect Helmut Jahn to bring the plight of the James R. Thompson Center to our att…
While Chicago opera plays on your phone, Symphony Center announces May opening. We'll have to wait until sometime this summer to get the video stream Lyric Opera…
The Museum of Contemporary Photography's "Reproductive" raises questions about the future of Roe v. Wade. In startling news today, doctors in Missouri are report…
A year after the shutdown, they're bringing it back. It was Friday, the 13th of March, 2020, when Lyric Opera general director Anthony Freud had to cancel the c…
But Protect Our Parks says more legal challenges are coming for the Jackson Park plan. It was hot on the August day in 2016 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel presented the…
The nuns are in COVID shutdown, but she's got a new, Chicago-centric book Vicki Quade had a new show opening at the Royal George Theatre the weekend of March 15,…
That shouldn't cost her, right? It was great to hear, late last month, that Chicagoan Angela Jackson has been chosen as the new Illinois poet laureate. Great bec…
Her quilts draw upon historic photos and family albums for inspiration. The first and only time I've seen Bisa Butler's artwork "in the flesh" was at EXPO 2018, …
A new documentary celebrates cliteracy. Given that"as legal pundit Jeffrey Toobin recently and so unexpectedly reminded us"everyone is sexual, here's a question:…
A new biography examines Edith Rockefeller McCormick's stranger-than-fiction life. It's common knowledge, though not commonly admitted, that biographers tend to …
The comedy powerhouse is on the market for only the second time in its 60-year history. Yes, And . . . Second City is for sale!…
Jamil Khoury and Malik Gillani have been facing more than COVID closure. I'd been thinking about Silk Road Rising, the mission-driven performing arts company fou…
Modern in the Middle is a groundbreaking compendium of Chicago's midcentury residential architecture. Chicago's skyscraper modernism"the Hancock, Marina City, Se…
Lyric hosts a free, multigenre online concert this weekend. This weekend, just about the time when"minus the virus"we would have been plopping our posteriors int…
But the AIA board stays mum on the reasons for exec's abrupt exit. The brief missive that appeared on the AIA Chicago website August 13 was mystifying. Posted by…
The former Chicago Dancers United executive director raises a social media storm about the organization and its annual benefit. COVID-19 couldn't stop the 2020 D…
In Sahar Mustafah's debut novel, The Beauty of Your Face, a terrorist attack opens a window on the story of a Palestinian American family in Chicago. Sahar Musta…
Arts & Business Council of Chicago invites nominations and votes for the greatest moments in Chicago music history. Chicago has sent a lot of great sound int…
Chicago History Museum is collecting the city's pandemic experience. This COVID-19 interlude will have a place in history. We can too.…
Chicago Symphony Orchestra institutes across the board cuts in musicians and staff salaries. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association announced today that its …
Major performing arts organizations recalibrate for COVID-19. After the crushing decision last month to cancel its long-awaited Ring Cycle, Lyric Opera today ann…
Departing president Gary Johnson talks about going digital in a pandemic. At this outlier moment in our history, every story is about coronavirus"even last week'…
Americans for the Arts wants you to speak up, now. The federal government's getting ready to unleash a flood of coronavirus relief cash, much of which will, as u…
Chicago cultural institutions keep their cool. The coronavirus has prompted some unimaginable recent news: NCAA basketball in empty arenas; Harvard University (a…
Preservation Chicago releases its 2020 list. Preservation Chicago announced the 2020 edition of its annual list of the city's "7 Most Endangered Buildings" today…
Deal yourself in for Tchaikovsky's operatic exploration of obsession at Lyric. In the dicey business of bringing historic opera to contemporary audiences, Lyric …