Denis Vélez Archives - Chicago Reader

J'Nai Bridges, a Black woman with long black hair, stands on a table center as Carmen. She wears a bright-red dress, and her arms are outstretched. She is surrounded by men and women, some also on the table, some standing around the tables. Bottles and glasses are in their hands, with a bottle set on the far right edge of the table.

Bad girls, brigadiers, and bullfights

by Irene Hsiao March 14, 2023March 14, 2023

The Lyric Opera was packed to the rafters with patrons twinkling with sequins for opening night of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, with libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. Premiered in Paris to moral scandal in 1875, the tragic opera, based on an 1845 novella by Prosper Mérimée, about a bohémienne and her fatal seduction of […]

Two women in children's play clothes daubed with blood stand on either side of a large mouth with bloody teeth. On the mouth's tongue is a cake with a door and a window.

Arts & Culture

Grimm and surreal

by Deanna Isaacs January 27, 2023January 27, 2023

This surrealistic production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 opera version of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale—seen twice before at Lyric—should probably be a Christmas show. But since Joffrey became Lyric’s roommate, we’re getting it now. Visually it’s nightmarish, claustrophobic, and monochromatic as a gray January day—but also striking: think fish-headed dream-scene maitre d’ overseeing a troop […]

Denis Vélez in the Lyric Ryan Opera Center's "Rising Stars in Concert"

Arts & Culture

Opera on your phone; CSO (lite), live and in person

by Deanna Isaacs May 6, 2021August 18, 2021

While Chicago opera plays on your phone, Symphony Center announces May opening.