Wandering Through Chicago's Arts and Culture

A Writers Workshop and Development Program John Sparks founded the musical theater writers workshop at the Theatre building in 1987. The program ran for thirteen years until it was suspended in 2009. It has now been resurrected by Sparks as Midwest New Musicals and run in association with Light Opera Works. Having both a Fall and Winter/Spring term, the program teaches both the writing and production of musical theatre. The Mini-Musicals are the capstone for the Winter/Spring semester where aspiring composers, lyricists and writers showcase their work performed by professional actors in front of a live audience. This year’s theme, Spring Rains and Labor Pains, was subject to several constraints (as are all of Sparks’ exercises.) ·          No scenery or props are to be used. ·          Each mini-musical must utilize each of the following elements at least once: o    The image of a pound of rancid ...

The Theatre and Interpretation Center at Northwestern University What? Still more Judeo-Christian mythology? I wondered why anyone would want to take the time to see a rock musical based on the Biblical New Testament Gospel of St. Matthew. Then it occurred to me that the same question might be asked about wanting to see Montiverdi’s Orfeo, Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, or Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des carmélites. All four of these operas (and I include Godspell as an opera avatar that is uniquely American culturally and linguistically) fit the definition of opera provided by composer-musicologist Robert Greenberg who says: [Opera is a] whole that is greater than the sum of its parts in its combination of combination of soliloquy, dialogue, scenery, action and continuous (or nearly continuous) music. We see how music can evoke what words cannot express; the composer is the dramatist. This combination of words and music endows opera with a unique dramatic power. [1] ...

I'm a city kid that barely has any interest in the suburbs around Chicago except to avoid going there. Traffic is a nightmare and nothing is pedestrian friendly, not even the Woodfield Mall parking lot. But there is an attraction that I used to frequent when I worked in Schaumburg that's known as First Folio Theatre. Of course, they present Shakespeare, but only as an adjunct to their regular season of more main stream work. This season First Folio will mount the most controversial of Shakespeare's output, The Merchant of Venice. As a species, we never seem to tire of examining the lives of Jews. Literature, opera, theatre and film all have classic expositions of various aspects of Jewish existence. In film, Schindler's List and  Rod Steiger's masterful portrayal of The Pawnbroker come to mind. The Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof is another example of our fascination with Jewish life and tradition. In literature I can immediately name Pillars of the Earth ...