Owen Wingrave at Chicago Opera Theatre

From Time Out Chicago's review:

"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."

Bike the Drive

We did Bike the Drive with Ms. S's workmate Ms. S and her husband Mr. B. It was cold and a bit windy, but a really good day!

Book Club: Midnight's Children

We went for Indian food near Ms. B-H's house for this meeting of the book club.

Piano Lesson at Court

An excellent cast and a solid production of August's Wilson's play set in 1936 about siblings arguing over whether to sell the piano for which their enslaved grandmother was once traded.

Twelfth Night

Wow. First, great set. And line readings I'd never imagined. Great fun.

Planting Day

Got my garden started the earliest ever. But not too early. And tomatoes and roses for the first time in Chicago.

Art at Steppenwolf

How much would you pay for a white on white painting? The play was a bit dated, but as always, really great acting.

Carmen at Chicago Opera Theatre

I was revved up to see this Peter Brook version of Carmen: stripped down, spare, one act. But sadly, it fell a little flat.

Ms. S in Wisconsin

Ms. S did a trip to see her family in River Falls to celebrate Mr. J's 80th birthday.

Clemenza di Tito

This was a totally over the top production, but I really enjoyed it.

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."

Mexico City

A quick work trip to Mexico City with the Dean. We had good meetings and did some touring though the downtown area and the museum of anthropology, which was spectacular. And the Avian influence hit the media the morning we were leaving. Out just in time.

Red Noses at Strawdog

Wow! Matt Hawkins totally blew it out of the water with the great production.



















From Time Out Chicago's review:

"As the black plague ravages Europe, a pious young clergyman named Flote feels a calling from God. With tacit approval from a disinterested pope, Flote assembles a ragtag band of sorry souls to combat despair—and the plague itself, personified as a black-cloaked ghoul in a Pulcinella mask—with clowning.

Brit writer Peter Barnes’s 1985 play sounds on paper a bit like an earnest, potentially patience-trying cousin of Godspell. And that’s not far off the mark, except that our patience reserves remain miraculously full. Whether viewed as a critique of the church (the pope worries that Flote will drive Catholics “out of the salvation business”) or of the Thatcher-Reagan regimes—either view is supportable—Barnes’s work feels utterly, surprisingly relevant in this inventive and kinetic staging.

Hawkins’s 18-actor production makes great use of both the Strawdog ensemble and vets of the House, Factory, Hypocrites and other storefront stalwarts; it’s possibly the canniest assemblage of Off Loop talent since last year’s Hypocrites Our Town. Punctuated by cheekily co-opted renditions of ’80s tunes by the likes of Billy Joel and the Outfield (credit arranger Mike Przygoda and the self-accompanying cast) and featuring Aly Reneé Graves’s astute modern-dress costumes, Red Noses is a major achievement for Hawkins. He skillfully enhances Barnes’s theological themes and tangible-disease schema (“sickly yellow” has never been so literal as in this production’s visual metaphor) with an exhilarating pop-cult playfulness that his performers wholly embrace. Sarah Goeden delivers mute, wide-eyed brilliance as the good-est spirit of all, while John Ferrick finds unexpected nuance in his lead role as the noble priest. In his inviting, winningly unadorned performance, Flote hopes.

Birthday 52

We had a lovely birthday dinner at Blackbird. And there were gifts.












Always have the cheese plate. And the iPod upgrade.

Final Four

Dang those Tarheels.

Book Club: Palace Walk