Actor, director, playwright, screenwriter, and professor Dr. Frank Galati died on January 2, 2023, but his impact on those he worked with and loved (they were one and the same) and his legacy are imperishable. He won two Tony Awards in 1990 for adapting and directing The Grapes of Wrath, and was a nominee in […]
Tag: Frank Galati
Posted inTheater Review
Cracking the code
First performed by Lookingglass in 1989 (with Ana Gasteyer in the original cast) and then in an expanded run at the now-gone Goodman studio theater in 1993, adapter/director Mary Zimmerman’s The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci is one of the landmark productions in Chicago theater history: long before she won the MacArthur “genius” grant and […]
Posted inMusic
Michael P. Smith deserves to be as widely remembered as his songs
The past 20 months have been such a whirlwind of sickness, grief, political madness, and worldwide protests for causes either righteous and necessary or selfish and deranged—it hasn’t been easy for music fans to do justice to the lives and memories of all the amazing artists who’ve passed away during this chaotic period. Famous folk […]
Posted inMusic
Goodbye to songwriter Michael Smith
With “The Dutchman” and other widely recorded songs, Michael Smith created emotional realities that let you feel along with his characters.
Posted inArts & Culture
The Gift Theatre gives us a stripped-down Grapes of Wrath
But the Joads are still driving a clunker.
Posted inArts & Culture
Steppenwolf’s East of Eden is a mythic misstep
Frank Galati’s adaptation of the Steinbeck novel doesn’t find a way ‘in and in and in.’
Posted inBlogs
Steppenwolf’s Terry Kinney and Frank Galati talk about East of Eden and the power of myth
Also discussed: the genius of John Steinbeck, the eternal human battle between good and evil, and the challenges of adapting an 800-page novel for the stage.
Posted inArts & Culture
Loving Repeating, a chamber musical about Gertrude Stein, doesn’t bear repeating
Kokandy Productions presents an amiably bad production of Loving Repeating, Frank Galati and Stephene Flaherty’s chamber musical about Gertrude Stein.
Posted inArts & Culture
A foggy war at Steppenwolf
A failure to focus mars Steppenwolf Theatre’s The March
Posted inArts & Culture
A Long Gay Book
Frank Galati is a noted specialist in the work of Gertrude Stein: he’s directed the Stein-Virgil Thomson operas The Mother of Us All and Four Saints in Three Acts for Chicago Opera Theater, and his 1987 tribute to Stein and Picasso–She Always Said, Pablo, produced by the Goodman–lingers in my memory as one of the […]