Gene Scheer’s libretto, based on a very slight Terence McNally short-play about three Chrismases in the life of Maddie and her children told through letters and phone calls,  is admittedly sashimi-slice thin, and plays like a LOGO TV movie in parts.  But with Jake Heggie’s music (Heggie, by the way, plays one of the two pianos in the 11 person orchestra situated onstage) and the trio of powerhouse performances, some of the scenes come off so heartfelt and touching that I, for one, couldn’t stop tears from welling up in my eyes (seriously).  I especially love von Stade’s solo number “Daybreak”, a Broadway-style number reminiscing about youth and romance, warmly and simply sung; Worth’s affecting number while packing up his dead partner’s belongings; and Worth and Jakubiak’s snappy, showtopping, designer name-dropping duet about Maddy’s shoes.  Some Chicago opera critics have scoffed at Three Decembers, implying that it is not “important enough” to be von Stade’s final calling card and Heggie’s follow-up to his recent critical triumph with his new work Moby Dick at the Houston Opera, using words like “cabaret-style fluff” and “pseudo-Sondheim” and “mundane”, delivered with such sharpness that you’d think Heggie, von Stade, and COT were responsible for the Gulf oil spill.  Well, as my dear blog readers know, I don’t really give a rat’s ass about what critics say- I write as a paying arts and culture lover to other paying arts and culture lovers.  Please go and see Three Decembers at the COT – it is entertaining, vibrant, emotionally accessible, and a fine showcase for von Stade.  People (well, Chicago critics) just have to stop getting their panties in a bunch; opera doesn’t need to be “important” or “serious” or “heavy” to be compulsively watchable.  Especially if you’re stretching your arts consumption dollar to pay for it.

Three Decembers still has two more performances, tonight, May 14, at 7:30 pm, and Sunday, May 16, at 3:00 pm.  You can catch it at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, the home of Chicago Opera Theater, 205 E. Randolph St.

Chicago theater in April is being dominated by two major, highly-anticipated Shakespeare productions.  I’ve already seen one of them – a surprisingly contemporary, highly engaging take on Twelfth Night at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre (three words:  lots of water), directed by the hot, young English director, Josie Rourke, Artistic Director of the highly-acclaimed, new-writing focused Bush Theatre in London.  Watch out for my blog post on that.  The other buzzy Shakespeare is Steppenwolf’s The Tempest, directed by ensemble member Tina Landau, starring ensemble member Frank Galati, the great writer/director/actor, as Prospero, the first Shakespeare play the esteemed ensemble has undertaken in its 35 years.  I’m really excited to see it, since Galati is such a perfect match for the role, and also because the supporting role of Gonzalo, usually played by a man, is being performed by the fabulous Lois Smith.  I’ll be seeing it this week, although initial impressions from others who’ve seen previews and the opening this weekend have been surprisingly mixed.

Speaking of the Bush Theatre, a play that originated there, Abbie Spallen’s Pumpgirl, will be receiving its Midwest premiere at the Red Orchid Theatre.  It’s supposed to be a wacky Irish road trip (are there any other kinds?) so I’m excited to see what Red Orchid’s no-holds-barred sensibilities do with the material.  Artistic Director Kirsten Fitzgerald and ensemble member Larry Grimm stars.  I’m also hightailing it to the Goodman at some point in the month for the world premiere of Naomi Izuka’s Ghostwritten, a vaguely supernatural-sounding tale of an American woman who makes a deal with a mysterious Asian woman involving personal success and her first born child.  I saw Izuka’s Strike/Slip, a more insightful, Asian version of Crash, at the Humana Festival a couple of years ago, and I think she’s a very impressive writer.  Another notable opening this month is Timeline Theatre’s Midwest premiere of Alan Bennett’s Tony-winning The History Boys, about a year in the life of British schoolboys preparing to enter university.  I saw the Broadway production, which I thought was impeccably acted by an ensemble that include Tony winner Richard Griffiths and a still green but already undeniably magnetic, pre-Mamma Mia Dominic Cooper (could he have been in my past life too?), but was dramatically underwhelming.  I’ll be curious to see what Timeline does to stir this play up.  Finally, despite my inability to follow directions outside a 606xx zip code, I’ll be checking out Northlight Theatre’s production of Martin McDonagh’s well-reviewed The Lieutenant of Inishmore, directed by Artistic Director BJ Jones, IN SKOKIE.

The storefront theater scene is hopping during the month as well.  Collaboraction’s Sketchbook, that always ambitious and intriguing, sometimes disappointing mélange of short plays, art, and music, is being staged from April 16-May 10, instead of the summer, which it usually anchored.  Infamous Commonwealth Theatre is staging Frank Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the play that heralded Steppenwolf’s First Coming on Broadway in the mid-1980s.  Finally, I am very intrigued by a new theater company called Tymphanic Theatre, which is “dedicated to producing unsolicited new work”, and their new play Musing, about a belligerent Muse who starts invading the life of a car salesman.  Now that’s a new work I’d like to see!  It’s going to be at the Side Project in Rogers Park.

On the dance front, I already have tickets for Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s Orpheus and Eurydice which plays the MCA Stage only from April 17-19.  This critically-acclaimed Canadian experimental dance company is well-known for its racy, uber-sexy productions and the MCA website already has a “Recommended for Mature Audiences” advisory.

I’ve previously talked about the Chicago Opera Theater’s Opera Underground program, which I will incessantly and loudly champion, since it aims to bring new, non-traditional audiences to opera.  I’ve put my money where my blog is, and I’ve purchased my Opera Underground subscription for this year, so on April 29, I’ll be seeing their Studio 54-meets-Ancient-Rome production of Mozart’s last opera, La Clemenza de Tito, full of 70s-style togas, gilded mirrors, and the like.  Think there’ll be a Liza Minnelli stand-in?

In a nutshell, Monsters and Prodigies: The History of the Castrati basically recounts the phenomenon of surgically mutilated young boys who became celebrated opera stars in 17^th and 18^th century Italy. Claudio Valdes Kuri, the Artistic Director of Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes who also directs the production, calls the piece “a lecture”. I think that’s quite a modest description – man, if Monsters and Prodigies was a lecture, I’d be a seashell.  This is definitely not your absent-minded professor’s Powerpoint presentation.  It’s like opera theater dreamed up by David Lynch co-mingled with the Marx Brothers in a Saturday Night Live skit gone awry – erudite and articulate, yes; surreal too; edgy and bawdy at times; always with a modern feel; always walking a tightrope between the brows, high, middle, low. The story is narrated by the over-the-top Siamese twins Jean Ambroise Pare (played by Raul Roman and Gaston Yanes), a barber/surgeon, who performs the castration of young boys being prepared for a career in opera. They mince, they sashay, they dance, they perform slapstick, they mug, they come off like Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons if she were a lipstick lesbian, but they also comment on the action, move the story along, and provide invaluable pieces of information (such as those related to the sex lives of the castrati – yes, they confirm, even with the missing testicles, these men could, uhmmm, “perform” and were well-known for their sexual conquests). Kuri puts them in charge of a band of merry, memorably idiosyncratic characters: a half naked slave, who, if not grabbing his crotch, is slapped, body slammed, and thrown around like a beach ball by the rest of the cast; a centaur; a nerve-wracked composer; Il Virtuoso, the castrato himself, played by male soprano Javier Medina (who sings a couple of Handel and Gluck arias beautifully, almost supernaturally); and a real, live, white horse and his rider. Yep, a white horse. A white horse who dances a minuet with the castrati, the slave, and the Siamese twins, while the human actors narrate details around the rise of the castrati. Yep, I just wrote that sentence (This was one of my “I thought I’d seen it all, but clearly I haven’t” moments during the performance). And then there is the food fight between actors and audience. An older gentlemen stands up and starts haranguing the actors and telling them to go back to Mexico where they belong. I think the audience on Friday night was genuinely shocked, especially after the whole Goodman Strange Interlude encounter, which has hogged the Chicago theater blogs over the past two weeks- they hiss and boo, and are then pelted by bread and fruit by the actors onstage. Sensational and unexpected, I had to pick my jaw up from the floor, where it lay side-by-side with the dinner roll. By the way, food fights was a not-so-rare occurrence in operas during the Baroque period that the castrati performed in.

Which is why I think Kuri, his actors, who improvised much of the movement and the situations during a nine month rehearsal period, and his design team are so brilliant. They take historical information as well as elements of the Baroque opera period and style in which the castrati performed in, and mix them up in a mind-bending cocktail of theatricality. The lighting design is reminiscent of the murky, candle-lit ambience of the period. The costumes are faithful to the period but also flamboyantly eye-candy. The acting is stylized and theatrical, but also has a lot of physical comedy and dance movement incorporated into it. And there’s a lot of interesting and intriguing themes that you keep on thinking about even after the performance has ended: the moral questions raised by mutilation to create beauty and art; the nature of sacrifice in pursuing one’s artistic craft; the socio-political-economic-religious context that gives rise to cultural phenomenons; the shifting tides and winds and arbitrary nature of cultural taste (brought very much home by the last scene with Medina in a single hazy yellow spotlight sobbing as a recording of Alessandro Moreschi, the last known castrato, singing “Ave Maria” is played in the theater, a grim reminder that what is culturally embraced today can be the oddity tomorrow). Monsters and Prodigies maybe jaw-droppingly over the top, and is a hell of a unique time at the theater, but it also, more importantly, like all good theater, makes the audience reflect long after the house lights have dimmed.  Bravo to the MCA for bringing us this wonderful, impactful piece of theater (as one of my fellow arts and culture mavens told me, the MCA Stage is our version of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the leading presenter of cutting-edge, world-class performance in New York, and I gotta say, I agree with him).

Monsters and Prodigies:  The History of the Castrati has two more performances – Saturday, March 21 at 7:30 and Sunday, March 22 at 3 pm.  I heard tickets are selling out fast, another testament to the Chicago audience’s embrace of sophisticated theatrical material.

That’s why I am a big fan of Chicago Opera Theater, whose productions always bring freshness and delight, and erases any preconception of a staid and soporific night at the opera.  Their season is set to open on April 18, with Mozart’s La Clemenza de Tito, which, if I’m hearing the director and the designers on the website right, seems to be set in a Roman-inspired 1970’s Studio 54-type milieu.  Should be interesting.  One thing that I really admire about COT is their passion and zeal in bringing new audiences in to discover opera, and so I’m very happy to mention (and encourage my blog readers to check out) two programs that they’re running:  Opera Underground and their Youtube video contest.  I attended Opera Underground last year, and I thought it was a good start for eventually bringing together a young professionals’ council for the organization.  For a discounted ticket price, you can attend a pre-performance reception (last year, it was at the Fairmont’s Aria bar) and get “A” seats (which are mighty fine ones) at the Harris Theater.  This year, they’re offerring it as a two-opera or three-opera package (in addition to Tito, the season is also comprised of Peter Brook’s marvellous experimental adaptation of Bizet’s La Tragedie de Carmen, and Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave).  This is a great deal, so run out and become part of the Underground!

The Youtube Contest is even a better deal for you media-savvy, tech-loving, opera-curious (or already opera-initiated) folks out there.  Just put together a short video answering the question “Why do you deserve free tickets to COT?” and upload it to the COT YouTube page.  The top three winners as voted on by Youtube users will receive two free season subscriptions while the runners-up will receive two passes to the final dress rehearsal of Tito.  The contest is ongoing and ends on April 1.  Check out this link for the COT kick-off video and additional details.  Get your best Brunhildde get-up ready!  Hopefully, these two COT programs will ensure that future audiences will keep opera a vibrant, exciting, and profitable art form in Chicago for years to come.

I’ve previously written about the Eugene O’Neill Festival at the Goodman Theater, which is all set to be the major cultural event of the winter (aside from the Riccardo Muti concerts at Symphony Hall, but more on that later), but I’ve been hyperventilating and sweating profusely in anticipation, sort of like Jeremy Piven on a sushi boat, for this Friday’s performance of the Wooster Group’s The Emperor Jones.  There are only five performances scheduled for this provocative, preconception-shattering, destined-to-be-argument-causing production, which will travel right after Chicago to Hong Kong for the Hong Kong Arts Festival.  I am imploring my avid blog readers to get your tickets now – I’m sure it will be a theatrical experience you won’t forget.  I will also be at the Goodman for three successive Saturday matinees in January (starting January 17) for Brazilian theater group Companhia Triptal’s highly experimental stagings of O’Neill’s one-act Sea Plays, called Homens Ao Mar.  I hear the Owen is being re-configured so the audiences join the actors inside a big boat.  Interesting. 

But the Goodman isn’t the only theatrical game in town this month.  I was already at Chicago Shakespeare over the weekend for my first play of the year, a preview performance of a very flashy Macbeth showcasing two monster performances (and that’s meant as a compliment), from Ben Carlson as M and the can-do-no-wrong Karen Aldridge as Lady M.  More on that once the production opens.  Later this month, Chicago Shakes’ incomparable World Stage Series brings in The Investigation, from Rwanda theater group Urwintore.  This production has already garnered a lot of acclaim in the UK for its devastating portrayal of parallel themes between the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide.  This will be, again, must-see theater.   I’ll be at the MCA on the third week of January for Court Theater’s The Wild Duck, Charlie Newell’s take on Ibsen’s masterpiece. Charlie was the assistant director on the seminal mid-eighties production from great Romanian director Lucien Pintilie seen in Paris, New York, Washington DC (at the Arena Stage) and Minneapolis (at the Guthrie), so there may be both an influence and a re-thinking of this production in Newell’s version.  I can’t wait to see this!

After a beautifully-staged Grey Gardens, Northlight Theater in Skokie is unveiling a world premiere of a new play from Asian-American playwright Kenneth Lin called Po Boy Tango, which mixes cooking, race relations, and immigration.  It starts previews January 7 and sounds like it’s worth checking out.  Closer to (my) home, American Theater Company, continues its new Artistic Director PJ Papparelli’s vital inaugural season with Sam Shepard’s True West and Suzan-Lori Park’s Topdog/Underdog in rotating repertory starting January 15, with four actors trading off the roles of the brothers in both plays on alternative nights.   It’s a co-production with Congo Square Theater Company.  I think the idea is pretty intriguing, and since both plays have to a certain extent racially-tinged milieus, I’d be interested to see how the productions handle that element.

So on to the Muti concerts at the Chicago Symphony.  Everyone and their mother seems to be very curious about our new Music Director, formerly of La Scala in Milan, and one of the top-ranked classical musicians in the world (not to mention, one of the more well-preserved, ahem), since all three Verdi Requiem concerts are sold out.  There’ll be enough time to see a lot of hot daddy Muti when he begins work as CSO Music Director in 2010, so go ahead and console yourself by seeing the younger, sexier, buffer,  hairier (well, on his head), Venezuelan conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, instead, set to become the Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic this year, when he conducts Brahms, Mozart, and Barber on January 8, 10, and 11, and plays with Yo-Yo Ma on January 9.  Who thought classical music could be oh-so-sexy and spice up this frigid first month of the new year?

Here then is this year’s very diverse list of From the Ledge ten best stage productions, comprised of eight full length plays, an opera, a staged reading of a play, and a ten-minute short play performed within a collection of short plays. They all demonstrate why Chicago is not just a regional, or a North American, but a global capital for the arts.

1. Our Town (the Hypocrites) – David Cromer, both directing and performing as the Stage Manager, breathed unexpected life into a play that had ignobly borne the reputation of cobwebby chestnut over the years, proving that amidst all that misconception, was one of the truly original, resonant, emotionally affecting pieces of American drama. His knockout conceptual staging of Act III ferociously defied expectations, and deposited the shell-shocked audience somewhere south of Antartica.  New York audiences will see this production off-Broadway in 2009, and they are in for another Chicago surprise.

2. The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragic Fall of Proud Mortimer (Chicago Shakespeare) – The Hypocrites’ Artistic Director, Sean Graney, on the other hand, was rambunctiously taking down the elegant rafters at Navy Pier with a balls-out, bitch-slapping, absolutely riveting version of Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth-century classic staged with the actors in the middle of a milling walkabout audience, the theatrical equivalent of being in an Ultimate Fighting ring. Jeffrey Carlson, as Edward, and especially the jaw-dropping Karen Aldridge as Isabella, led a cast that stunningly balanced control of the text, their performances, and the crowd’s stunned heavy breathing. And I’m sure Judd Apatow would be shuddering at the thought that a mass of twentysomethings would proclaim Christopher Marlowe “awesome!” (actual quote heard after a performance).

3. Caroline, Or Change (Court Theater) – It’s very rare to have the privilege of seeing a perfect play, and the Court Theater’s version was one of those unique times. Everything came together beautifully, from Charlie Newell’s strong-handed direction, to Doug Peck’s perfectly calibrated musical staging, to a pitch-perfect (both literally and figuratively) ensemble cast anchored by a legendary performance from E. Faye Butler. When she sang, no, lived, the eleven o’clock number, “Lot’s Wife”, you were left speechlessly reaching for your neighbor’s oxygen tank. If you were at the last performance of the show, you’d be battling it out for that tank with playwright Tony Kushner and composer Jeannine Tesori, who attended that performance and were as moved as everyone else in the room, the ultimate honor for this one-of-a-kind production.

4. Titus Andronicus (Court Theater) – Charlie Newell was on a roll, since he started 2008 with this truly innovative take on Shakespeare’s tragedy, set during an initiation rite for students of an exclusive male prep school. It was a from-far-left-field conceptual take which infuriated purists, such as some of my theater-savvy friends, but which I thought was refreshing, courageous, and totally apt for material that ultimately made pungent points about class warfare, elitism, and entitlement. Its young, hip, uber-sexy male cast also proved that the phrase ”talented Shakespearian actor” could elicit visions, not just of Stacy Keach, but also of Robert Pattinson.

5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Chicago Shakespeare, World’s Stage Series) – British director Tim Supple has been touring the world with this beautifully-devised, powerfully-staged, highly-theatrical version of one of the best-known Shakespearian comedies of all time. Performed in seven languages, English and six from the polyglot Indian subcontinent, without any projected subtitles, this colorful, hypnotic Midsummer clearly demonstrated the universal joy of live theater, and it’s ability to cross, and overcome, cultural divides.

6. Gatz (Elevator Repair Company at the MCA Stage) – It was seven hours in physical time, but a nanosecond in theatrical impact time. Chicago was fortunate to see The Elevator Repair Company‘s acclaimed adaptation/reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s seminal novel, The Great Gatsby, a production that still cannot be produced in New York due to rights and licensing issues with the Fitzgerald estate. Gatz held Chicago’s most battle-scarred, been-there-done-that, jaded theatergoers enthralled and entranced throughout its running time, proving that text is king, and that the best theater is evoked, takes root, and truly lives in the imagination.

7. Speech and Debate (American Theater Company) – On the surface, Stephen Karam’s play about three marginalized high school students forming a Speech and Debate club, seemed like the equivalent of Facebook for the theater: of-the-moment, quip-filled, ADD-paced, smartly caustic. But its well-etched out themes of alienation, loneliness, friendship, and longing for human touch were timeless, not just for adolescents, but for everyone. And Sadieh Rifai as Diwata, the zany, hectoring, absolutely heart-breaking lifeline of the production, was one of the brightest stars of a Chicago theater season full of acting supernovas.

8. The Laramie Project reading (About Face Theater) – In a one night only event to commemorate the tenth year anniversary of Matthew Shepherd‘s death , About Face theater, revitalized by its new Artistic Director, Bonnie Metzgar, reminded us that theater was ultimately about community. This simple but powerfully moving staged reading of The Laramie Project, directed by co-creator Leigh Fondakowski, and with co-creator Kelly Simpkins and Tony winner Deanna Dunagan as part of the cast, was theater as memory and as tribute, but it also ably demonstrated theater’s ability to bond people together.

9. Don Giovanni (Chicago Opera Theater) – Opera is very close to theater as an artistic medium, so I feel very comfortable including one on my top ten list. And this sexy Don Giovanni was opera that subverted normal preconceptions about a night at the opera. Set in a, ahem, S and M sex club, a setting that was not just showy conceptual, but felt totally apt and organic for this opera, with its themes around sexual powerplays, this production was fresh, out-of-the-box thinking. And which proudly card-carrying gay guy wouldn’t be enamored of seeing something on stage that had lots of leather-clad sopranos and tenors singing arias while perched on a stripper pole? Fabulous!

10. “Cowboy Birthday Party” (Collaboraction) and The Mysterious Elephant and the Terrible Tragedy of the Unlikely Addington Twins…who kill him (Strange Tree Group) – Emily Schwartz is one of the Chicago playwrights whose career I am very excited about after seeing these two works.  The first one was a 10 minute play that was part of this year’s Sketchbook about, well, a surreal cowboy’s birthday party, while the other one was a full-length play that had music, wacky characters, and a textured Edward Gorey-like visual look. “Cowboy” was compact and muscular, while Mysterious Elephant was messy and outrageous, but fascinating. Both demonstrated a young playwright’s surprising creativity and boundless imagination.

Whoever thought Turn of the Century was a good idea (was that you, Robert Falls?) must have been hit by lightning and suffered a momentary lapse of taste. I wanted so much to have my preconceptions about the show (shaped by the mixed reviews it had received, including this one from From the Ledge friend Kris Vire of TimeOut Chicago) proven wrong, especially at the beginning when Jeff Daniels and the luminous and wonderfully talented (not to mention heroically game) Rachel York magically sang the beautiful Rodgers and Hart ballad, “Where or When”. Unfortunately, there were very few magical moments in the show; most of the time, Turn of the Century felt like the cringe-worthy entertainment portion of a Rotarian convention in Lisle (I was on the lookout for a buffet table to be rolled into the Albert theater!). The whole time-travel premise (Daniels and York fall through, I don’t know how, a rip in the time and space continuum and find themselves in 1899 New York instead of 1999 New York, where the play initially begins) was atrociously inane and nonsensical. Most of the musical numbers were insipid, clumsily-staged and choreographed, and cheesier than Gouda, Netherlands- especially galling for me were the “Original Three Tenors” performing “My Way” like a rejected audition for a Bartoli pasta commercial and the “Floating (or was is Flying, whatever) Septuplets” hacking into the feminist anthem “I am Woman” like a fourth-rate advertising agency’s pitch for a feminine hygiene product’s marketing campaign. It was so awful, I thought notorious American Idol reject Renaldo Lapuz directed this turkey, instead of musical theater great Tommy Tune! Jeff Daniels probably recognized Loserville when he saw it, so his performance was totally uninvolved and phoned-in. I admired, pitied, and, frankly, was embarrassed for Rachel York, whose talent and bravado lit up the stage whenever she was on it, particularly in the first rendition of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (another one of the oh-so-rare magical moments). She worked really, really hard, like a camel transporting a whole tent city in the Kalahari desert, to make this stinker smell less sewage-y than it was. Although the theater was packed, I didn’t think most of the Goodman audience members were impressed (there was no standing ovation, and boy, the Goodman audiences stand up at the least provocation, and one of my seat neighbors sniffed that this would play better in Fort Lauderdale!), but the suburban dad two seats down from me was guffawing so obnoxiously loud and heartily (and nothing was funny!), I thought he was in danger of inhaling the toupee of the gentleman sitting in front of him!

The American Theater Company continues it’s splashy, attention-grabbing season with Itamar Moses’s Celebrity Row, which has an intriguing premise: in the early 2000s, Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, and Latin Kings chief executive Luis Felipe were neighbors in the same cell block at the Colorado Supermax prison – what if they had the opportunity to talk? What did they talk about? What kind of people were they? Although all extremist ideologues, how different or similar were they from each other? And if there was a naïve, idealistic, liberal female lawyer who unwittingly falls into their path, how would they engage with her? How would they treat her? It’s a fascinating concept which unfortunately could have been better than it actually plays out. I think Moses is extremely talented, but there are so many ideas hitting you from different vantage points in the play, like a philosophical debate gone ADD, that you don’t really come away with an overarching impression of the play’s themes or it’s ultimate message. Is the play trying to paint the drivers and enablers of the extremists’ ideologies? Moses is pretty articulate about McVeigh and Felipe, but is fragmented and obscure about Kaczynski. Is this an indictment of liberal politics? The way the lawyer is portrayed at the beginning seems to say so, but the final scenes take on a more ambiguous tone. Is this a debate about the social effects of incarceration? I’m not really sure. I think David Cromer and his cast, who are all exceptional, work very hard to focus attention and illuminate, but I think there’s a lot more tightening and editing that Moses has to do to truly make this play fulfill its spectacular promise.

After recently seeing several conceptual takes on opera (like Dr. Atomic and the Chicago Opera Theater’s version of Don Giovanni), I actually was looking forward to seeing a classic opera classically (maybe more aptly, traditionally) staged. And The Pearl Fishers did not disappoint. Although not as highly regarded as Carmen, which was written after it, Bizet’s music is undeniably gorgeous (including the haunting, unforgettable “Au fond du temple saint” which is one of the most famous duets in all of opera). The melodramatic plot is well, sooo, fabulously, improbably operatic (two hunky, bromantic BFFs fall in love with the same virginal high priestess; make a vow not to pursue her; one of the cuties breaks the vow and romances, chastely, Miss Vestal Virgin, if that‘s even possible; they are found out by the villainous, possibly sex-starved, high priest and brought to other BFF who, as king of the Pearl Fishers has the sole power to pardon and punish; several dramatic arias later, lovers escape, and powerful BFF is beheaded by high priest). The Lyric, as always, visibly and haughtily demonstrates the results of its substantial endowment and grants largesse and its sky-high ticket prices, with an over the over-the-top set design and other production elements, which includes two giant Buddhas, one sitting, the other reclining; a sexy tent for powerful BFF Zurga; a temple; and other goodies. Eric Cutler and Nicole Cabell, as the lovers, sing and act wonderfully, but are of course, absolutely, irrevocably upstaged when Nathan Gunn’s six pack arrives on stage. Objectively, Gunn is an excellent baritone and a pretty good actor (he is starting to crossover into the theater, having starred as, what else, the hunky Lancelot, in the spring New York Philharmonic production of Camelot), but really when he is barechested (like two minutes after his first entrance, and during the entire Act III) and wearing flimsy harem pants, what else would you be looking at onstage? Definitely not the building-sized Buddhas! In Act III, when he sings about the torture he is feeling for having to sentence his butch BFF, Nadir, to death, almost, dare I say it, homoerotically, and with that bare chest in full, uhmmm, heaving view, you could almost see the multitudes of gay men at the opera last Saturday having epileptic seizures!

The run of Turn of the Century has mercifully ended.  Celebrity Row has been extended one more week, so you can see it until November 16 at American Theater Company, 1909 W. Byron St.  The Pearl Fishers and Nathan Gunn in all his glory (as demonstrated by the photo accompanying this blog post) has one more performance:  November 4, at 7:30 pm at the Lyric Opera House, Madison and Wacker.