The long Memorial Day weekend is coming up, and many theater companies are sprinting towards the finish line of their respective seasons, so there are a lot of plays currently running on Chicago’s stages. I thought I’d be able to publish, on a semi-regular basis, the list of upcoming performances I was planning to go to, but it just hasn’t happened, since I had to first keep up with actually being able to go to the theatre with the numerous selections on view (plus my day-and-night consulting job got really busy over the past couple of weeks). For my dear blog readers clamoring for guidance on what to see next, here are some options to consider (and I’d love to hear what folks think after I post on them): Read the rest of this entry »
Chicago’s top tier arts companies are continuing with their mostly successful efforts to reinvent and reinvigorate classic works in theater and opera (and maybe draw in younger, broader, non-traditional audiences, but more on that later) by framing them within distinctive, imaginative, unexpected “high-concepts”. For me, the pinnacle of this trend so far this year has been the Court Theater’s Titus Andronicus, which I raved about here, where the Shakespearian tragedy was performed as part of the initiation rite for an elite, Skulls and Bones-type, secret society for young men. Over the past week, I went to see productions re-conceptualized in a similar manner: the Chicago Opera Theater’s version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, set in an, ahem, S and M club; and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s play-within-a-play production of The Comedy of Errors, in which a British film company in the 1940s is filming well, The Comedy of Errors, while London is being bombed by the Nazis. Both productions, although still not surpassing the Titus Andronicus benchmark for how successfully a re-conceptualization of a classic piece can provide fresh, relevant, multi-layered insights, are spectacular, and particularly in the case of Don Giovanni, quite the cocktail party conversation starter.
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