Lyric Opera Archives - Chicago Reader

A woman with red hair stands left, holding a portrait and facing a man in a long dark cloak. A line of performers in dark raincoats and hats stands on a slanted platform behind them.

Little orphan Annie meets Dracula

by Deanna Isaacs September 27, 2023September 27, 2023

Director Christopher Alden is back at Lyric Opera for the first time since his racy production of Rigoletto created an uproar there back in 2000. The Alden project onstage now—his take on Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman—is of the same approximate vintage, debuting at Canadian National Opera in 1996. And yes, on opening night last […]

In this black and white photo, a Black man stands center stage aboard a ship, a captain's wheel is to his left. He is surrounded by women bearing a stick, white men with guns, and other players.

Arts & Culture

‘Because we are black, we are making black music’

by Hannah Edgar September 6, 2023September 4, 2023

Out of their place. Out of their depth. Out of their minds. Composer and researcher George Lewis has lost track of the times he’s heard those tropes lobbed, implicitly or explicitly, at Black composers of classical music. These artists, he argues, too often slip through the cracks in academic and cultural discourse: They’re shunted to […]

Maria, a Latine woman and Tony, a white man, stand embracing on a fire escape.

Theater Review

A ‘miraculous’ West Side Story

by Kelly Kleiman June 8, 2023June 8, 2023

In most productions of West Side Story (and I’ve seen half a dozen or more), Tony is the weakest link: the character just isn’t as cool as Riff or as sexy as Bernardo. He’s kind of a dork, in fact. But in the Lyric’s remounting of its own 2019 revival of the show, Tony is […]

Arts & Culture

Lyric Opera’s Proximity

by Deanna Isaacs March 29, 2023March 29, 2023

Spectacle? It’s long been the grand opera’s calling card. But never quite like this. Lyric Opera’s world premiere production of Proximity—closer to Immersive Van Gogh or Art on the Mart than to Aida—opened at the opera house last week. Directed and “mixed” by Yuval Sharon (creator of the parking garage Wagner, Twilight: Gods, which he […]

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: […]

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.

Arts & Culture

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 […]

An ensemble of 11 Black performers are lined up onstage (kneeling and standing). The set captures a south-side barbershop, with Black Lives Matter posters, photos of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Michael Jordan, and other icons on the walls.

Arts & Culture

Soul opera

by Cristalle Bowen February 8, 2023February 8, 2023

It’s been said that the soul of opera is its music, so in the case of The Factotum—Will Liverman and DJ King Rico’s original piece that is a loose take on Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville—hip-hop is at its beautiful core. The MTV generation, or hip-hop fans of a certain age, can recall the […]

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 […]

A woman in a pink gown with a large feathered collar sits next to a vanity with a mirror. She has an angry expression on her face. One hand is balled into a fist and the other is pointing to the person next to her on the right, who is a man disguised as a nun, clutching a set of black rosary beads in his hands.

Arts & Culture

The Don and the Count

by Deanna Isaacs November 14, 2022November 16, 2022

Deeply committed Verdi fans ought to get themselves to Lyric Opera’s first ever production of Don Carlos, the four-hour, five-act, 1867 French language version of the shorter Verdi opera they already know as the Italian language Don Carlo. This love vs. duty tale of historical fiction, loosely drawn from the life of a 16th-century Spanish […]

Steven Skybell as Tevye, an older bearded white man in gray work clothes and cap, sits in front of a large wooden cabinet with the doors open. He is holding up a bottle in his right hand. On top of the cabinet, Drake Wunderlich, a young white boy with dark hair and a green hoodie, lays on top of the cabinet holding a violin and bow, looking down at Tevye.

Theater Review

Tradition with a twist

by Deanna Isaacs September 21, 2022September 21, 2022

Lyric Opera introduced Chicago audiences to director Barrie Kosky last year, when it brought his production of The Magic Flute—created for Komische Oper Berlin, where he’s been music director for a decade—to the Opera House on Wacker. Kosky staged the Mozart favorite as a silent film. So the announcement that Kosky’s production of Fiddler on […]

A line of Black dancers of all genders. The male-presenting dancers are shirtless and wear dark trousers. The female-presenting dancers are in cream-colored slip dances.

Arts & Culture

Some best bets for the fall harvest of performance

by Kerry Reid, Irene Hsiao and Deanna Isaacs September 16, 2022September 16, 2022

It’s impossible to summarize everything that’s happening onstage this season. (It’s also hard to tell you exactly what COVID-19 precautions are required at venues now; we suggest checking ahead and being prepared to show proof of vax, and wearing a mask as a courtesy to other patrons.) But here are ten offerings that promise to […]

A Black man with a beard, wearing a dark frock coat, trousers, and boots, kneels on the left. On the right, a redheaded white woman in along silvery flowered gown kneels next to him and clutches at his arm. His eyes are closed. She has a pleading look upon her face.

Arts & Culture

When melodrama meets breaking news

by Deanna Isaacs September 12, 2022September 13, 2022

Thanks to CNN, this weekend I went right from Lyric Opera’s season-opening production of Ernani—featuring Charles V of Spain—to the pomp and circumstance surrounding the launch of Charles III of England. Castles, crowns, cannons—it was all of a piece. And that did something I hadn’t anticipated: it brought an evening of seldom-seen Verdi to life. […]

Three Black people onstage. A boy in a short-sleeved white shirt kneels left. A woman in an orange dress sits in a blue chair in the center. Behind her is a man wearing clothing similar to the boy.

On Culture

Coming of age in an ordinary and dangerous place

by Deanna Isaacs March 30, 2022March 30, 2022

Journalist Charles M. Blow once wrote in his New York Times column that he “likes to think of himself as a Southern writer.” His childhood in Gibsland, Louisiana, shaped his writing, and in the south, “you don’t so much say words as sing them.” Now, at Lyric Opera, his own story is literally being sung. […]

Michelle Bradley as Tosca stands behind a table with wine glasses on it. She is staring at a knife in her hand.

On Culture

A resonant Tosca

by Deanna Isaacs March 16, 2022March 28, 2022

There’s a war raging in Europe. A brutal clash that includes an entrenched repressive autocracy and ordinary civilians determined to fight for their freedom. Tyrannical power is vested in one man—a deranged “security” professional who cares only about his own twisted agenda. He decides who lives and dies; everyone trembles before him. Someone needs to […]

Front of a riverboat onstage, surrounded by blue/purple light and projections of butterflies. A woman in a light long dress stands on the upper deck of the boat.

Arts & Culture

Riverboat romance

by Yasmin Zacaria Mikhaiel November 18, 2021November 18, 2021

With the first Chicago snow of the season also came the opening of Florencia en el Amazonas, and the late Daniel Catán’s opera kept the audience warm with hot romance on a riverboat making its way to Manaus, Brazil. We are greeted with lush jungle greens that flank the stage and the El Dorado sitting […]