Author Archives: George Grass

MADAMA BUTTERFLY Lyric Opera Unlike wine, shallow or muddled productions will not improve with age–even if many superstar directors seem to think they will. So it’s with a sense of comparative relief that we can contemplate the current revival of Harold Prince’s production of Madama Butterfly at Lyric Opera. Seen twice before by Lyric audiences […]

THE GAMBLER Lyric Opera A couple of years ago Lyric launched its “Toward the 21st Century” initiative, which was intended to “show the direction opera is taking as the turn of the new century looms.” Under this heading Lyric planned to stage contemporary or neglected works that had found favor with an establishment elite but […]

I PURITANI Lyric Opera Heaaad ’em up! Mooove ’em out! And the cast of Lyric’s I Puritani, a Bellini work that is the Italian equivalent of an old-fashioned Hollywood oater, lumbers dutifully back and forth across the stage. The world that Bellini and his operas inhabited is long gone. It was a world in which […]

LE NOZZE DI FIGARO Lyric Opera Mozart seems to have failed every time he tried to write a purely serious opera. A straight comedy like The Abduction From the Seraglio comes off well enough, but works like Idomeneo are rather flat. Mozart’s greatest efforts all fall into a peculiar area where ideas that are meant […]

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA Lyric Opera Breathes there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself has said, Hell, I could write a better adaptation of Shakespeare than THAT! Such sentiments were perhaps not altogether foreign to those who bugged out early from the opening-night presentation of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra at the […]

MEFISTOFELE Lyric Opera They go to the opera, not to hear music, not even to hear bad music, but merely to see a more or less obscene circus. A few, perhaps, have a further purpose; they desire to assist in that circus, to show themselves in the capacity of fashionables, to enchant the yokelry with […]

I LITUANI Lithuanian Opera Company at Morton East High School Sorting through the debris of previous generations in search of novelty is nothing new to modern opera companies. The midden heaps most frequently mined for hidden gems are the 17th and 18th centuries; the discards of the 19th century are too close in time to […]

POSTCARD FROM MOROCCO Chicago Opera Theater Against the odds, Chicago Opera Theater is completing its 1991 season, with Dominick Argento’s Postcard From Morocco. Though Argento’s name is hardly well known, this is the second of his operas to be produced in Chicago in the last eight months; Lyric Opera did his Voyage of Edgar Allan […]

MADAME BUTTERFLY Chicago Opera Theater The impression is widespread that Chicago Opera Theater specializes in obscure or unusual works. Perhaps this is because the number of smaller 20th-century operas presented by COT (Summer and Smoke, The Mother of Us All) assumes an exaggerated significance given the almost complete absence of those operas from the stages […]

IDOMENEO Chicago Opera Theater at the Athenaeum Theatre It is no secret that Chicago Opera Theater is fighting for its financial life. Disappointing ticket sales for Where the Wild Things Are coupled with unexpected costs for Carousel at the Shubert have left COT at the end of its rope. Only an eleventh-hour appeal for funds […]

CARMEN Lyric Opera Opera companies in Chicago have often had trouble surviving. The Civic Opera fell victim to economic Darwinism during the Depression. Later, during the latter part of the tenure of the late Carol Fox, Lyric managed to get itself into enough financial trouble that at one point in the early 80s the season […]

RIGOLETTO Lyric Opera It’s the practice at Lyric and other major opera houses to occasionally do productions that call for comparatively little in the way of rehearsal time and money–which conserves those scarce resources for the flashier shows of the season. So it is with a feeling of dread that the habitual operagoer approaches a […]

LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR Lyric Opera Lyric Opera’s most uneven production of the year thus far is Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The Saturday night Lyric patrons seemed ready for a change from the icily formal Alceste and the tortured Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, ready to settle down to the operatic equivalent of easy listening. […]

THE VOYAGE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE Lyric Opera Last Saturday evening an initially dubious audience attending the opening of Lyric Opera’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe discovered that a modern work (only 14 years old) can be an entirely tolerable experience, perhaps even worth a second viewing. This is not to say that it […]

THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST at Lyric Opera Lyric Opera’s third offering of this season, Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West, was its second attempt to knock our socks off with an operatic star. And Placido Domingo was rather more successful at wowing the audience than was Jessye Norman in Alceste. For those […]