Friday, May 29, 2009
Bruce Mau at Art Club
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTgamm8cGiY
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Tempest at Steppenwolf
From Time Out Chicago's review:
"Landau’s production is visually ambitious, if not terribly cohesive. Scenic designer Takeshi Kata strips the stage to bare walls; in this blank space, he deploys an ever-moving array of sheets and masts that suggest the nautical world while serving as canvases for Stephan Mazurek’s bizarrely inconsistent projections. His choices range from subtle and gorgeous, as with the simulated rush of water that accompanies Miranda’s first encounter with Ferdinand, to a jarring sequence illustrating Ariel’s recounting of the shipwreck that unaccountably recalls the video-art aesthetic of the 1980s.
Mazurek’s projections are part of Landau’s kitchen-sink visual approach. The spirit Ariel (Jon Michael Hill) races down zip lines for no particular reason; he’s shadowed by a trio of lesser spirits who, similarly, perform aerial rope tricks in the background just for the heck of it. The director’s tendency for excess is certainly indulged.
But there’s enough cleverness in Landau’s bulging bag of tricks—from James Schuette’s playful costumes to an entrancing original score by Josh Schmidt—to cut through the chaos. And her smartest choice is making astoundingly good use of the company’s ensemble. Terrific supporting performances by the likes of K. Todd Freeman as the slave Caliban, Yasen Peyankov as doltish drunk Stephano and, most inspired, Lois Smith as wizened royal adviser Gonzalo enliven the far-strewn subplots.
As Prospero, Frank Galati is a presence less raging than calming, the eye at the center of the storm. The force of nature here is athletic, electric Hill, whose Ariel confidently guides the action. The uniformly exceptional cast elevates Landau’s sometimes-messy extravagance above insubstantial pageant."
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Owen Wingrave at Chicago Opera Theatre
"Based on the gothic novella by Henry James and composed to a libretto by Myfanwy Piper in 1970, Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave was originally commissioned as a BBC television production, although Britten always intended for it to be performed onstage.
Rejecting the soldier’s life he has been primed for since birth and casting aside the fate determined by his ancestors, Owen Wingrave enters one of the most ferocious battlefields of all—the family argument. Matthew Worth, in the title role, portrays the young pacifist with all the necessary fortitude and stoic courage one expects from such a character, and his fine, bright baritone expresses the most poetic lines in what is otherwise a fairly dry and serious opera.
It’s a timely choice for COT to produce an opera about liberation from oppression, and it certainly got the audience talking. During the intermission I overheard the crowd discuss everything from Britten’s pacifist views in a contemporary context to the opera’s various possible readings: “It’s a metaphor for coming out of the closet!”
There’s very little action in Owen Wingrave, but Britten’s hostility toward war provides the backbone for much of his art. As Wingrave declares in Act 1: “Courage in peace, the kind that poets know, wins everything.” Tonight was no exception."
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Bike the Drive
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Piano Lesson at Court
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Planting Day
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Art at Steppenwolf
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Carmen at Chicago Opera Theatre
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Friday, May 01, 2009
Clemenza di Tito
From Chicago Tribune Review:
"La Clemenza di Tito," as director Christopher Alden rightly observes, has gotten a bad rap for most of the last century. Only in recent decades have opera companies welcomed Mozart's penultimate opera into the repertory, as performers and audiences discover a psychologically probing drama set to one of his greatest, if least well-known, scores.
Chicago Opera Theater added "The Clemency of Titus" to its Mozart canon Saturday at the Harris Music and Dance Theater in a gripping production by Alden that represents the work's first professional staging in the area in nearly 20 years. Once again, COT general director Brian Dickie's casting of exciting, young artists in congenial roles pays off in consistently impressive singing. It's bolstered by the incisive authority Jane Glover brings to her conducting and the splendid playing of her orchestra.
Alden's brilliant theater mind can sometimes lead to reckless revisionism, as his 2000 "Rigoletto" at Lyric Opera unfortunately proved. But here his brilliance illuminates rather than obfuscates. The director turns the Roman emperor Tito's central dilemma—should he reward the treachery of the people he loves and trusts with death or forgiveness?—into a psychodrama at once edgy and disturbing.
The emperor (Dominic Armstrong) is weak, troubled and borderline loony, shambling around his marble palace in purple pajamas. Tito's hold on power, not to mention his sanity, is tenuous at best. Yet his love for Sesto (Renata Pokupic) explains his tortured hesitation to sign the young man's death warrant. Sesto is torn between his loyalty to Tito and his devotion to the scheming Vitellia (Amanda Majeski), a sexual predator who will stop at nothing to revenge herself on the emperor and seize his throne.
Andrew Cavanaugh Holland's minimalist unit set consists of a towering diagonal wall on which Sesto scrawls graffiti. Terese Wadden's costumes mix Roman togas and helmets with tacky 1950s dresses. The chorus members are grotesques done up in white masks and head scarves. Lighting designer Chris Binder freezes the protagonists in stark shadows.
Behold, if you will, "Clemenza di Tito" boldly liberated from the stilted conventions of opera seria. This is an evening of modern music theater you mustn't miss."