Chicago Opera Theater Archives

Packaged cookies and other items on display at a supermarket

Food, glorious food!

by Deanna Isaacs May 3, 2023May 4, 2023

Chicago Opera Theater is trying out a new opera at the Athenaeum next week. Titled The Cook-Off, it’s about a televised contest in which three young chefs face off over the same meal. The exotic dish they’ll be cooking? Mac and cheese—the mainstay of American tables during the Great Depression. It’s an apt choice at […]

Jonathan Michie, a white man with short light hair, sits left. He is wearing a red silk dressing gown and biting into an apple. On the right is a table filled with glass flasks, rubber tubing, and other lab equipment.

Arts & Culture

A timely Turing

by Deanna Isaacs March 28, 2023

After a promising Chicago workshop performance four years ago, Chicago Opera Theater’s The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing returned for a two-performance world premiere at the Harris Theater last week, conducted by COT music director Lidiya Yankovskaya. It’s a gut-wrenching piece in a well-crafted production, with two major themes that couldn’t be more contemporary: […]

On Culture

Spring awakening

by Deanna Isaacs March 22, 2023March 22, 2023

Never mind those icy patches on the sidewalk: spring is here, bringing with it our seasonal theater and arts preview issue. Accordingly, while the global banking system teeters, Xi and Vlad (nukes in their back pockets) rendezvous, and Trump seems poised to take the first-ever presidential perp walk, the issue I’m stewing about is this: […]

A young white male, Miles Mykkanen, stands center stage wearing a grocer's apron over a yellow vest and white shirt with a dark tie and trousers. Behind him is a green-and-red set resembling an early 20th-century grocery store, with an old-fashioned cash register on the counter and various items in jars backlit behind him.

Arts & Culture

Albert Herring balances indie aesthetic with traditional music

by Matt Simonette January 26, 2023January 31, 2023

Benjamin Britten’s 1947 opera Albert Herring (set in 1900) has been a perennial production for Chicago Opera Theater. But the new mounting opening tonight at the Athenaeum, helmed by director Stephen Sposito, promises to infuse Britten’s story with what the company is calling an “indie-film vibe.” Sposito—who was associate director for The Book of Mormon, […]

A group of performers in American colonial-era clothing stands in a line in front of a bridge, where two men stand.

Arts & Culture

In search of freedom

by Deanna Isaacs April 25, 2022April 25, 2022

This commission by Chicago Opera Theater brings to town a new opera by the prolific and celebrated Belize-born British composer, singer, pianist, and performer Errollyn Wallen, with librettist Deborah Brevoort. Loosely based on S.I. Martin’s novel Incomparable World, the story is grounded in the little-known historical fact that the Brits recruited enslaved people in the […]

Performing Arts Review

Risking all for opera

by Deanna Isaacs September 20, 2021September 20, 2021

A Verdi classic, a twist on Bizet, and a doubleheader of new work kick off the opera season in Chicago.

Music

Will Liverman and Paul Sánchez celebrate Black composers and writers on a collaborative album

by Hannah Edgar March 2, 2021August 18, 2021

While listening to Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers, the most recent release by operatic baritone Will Liverman with pianist and recital partner Paul Sánchez, I realized with a start that time had ground to a halt. But when? Had the clock stopped with H. Leslie Adams’s churning 1992 composition “Amazing Grace”? […]