Displaying items by tag: Jeanine Tesori

Before Alison Bechdel became famously associated with her “Bechdel Test” for evaluating fiction by how women are portrayed, she published the now classic graphic novel ‘Fun Home’. Through meticulously created panels, Bechdel explores her splintered relationship with her father who died shortly after she came out to him.

Renowned composer Jeanine Tesori collaborated with Lisa Kron to adapt Bechdel’s graphic novel into a stage musical. Following significant rewrites, the 2013 off-Broadway production transferred to Broadway in 2015. The production went on to garner several Tony nominations as well as a nomination for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize.

Porchlight Music Theatre brings ‘Fun Home’ back to Chicago in an all-new revival directed by Stephen Shellhardt. There’s a freshness to this production that strives less for technical perfection but instead for a full-throated sense of emotion. Alanna Chavez leads the cast as the full-grown narrator Allison reflecting back on her childhood, While Patrick Byrnes plays her father Bruce with whom she has a complex relationship. In a series of non-linear memories and heartbreaking songs, ‘Fun Home’ combs through Bechdel’s memories for explanations for her father’s apparent suicide.

This revival isn’t trying to be the Broadway tour and it’s all the better for it. As evidenced by the part of Allison’s mother originated by Judy Kuhn played here by Neala Barron with a wildly different take. Gone is the passive mid-century housewife this part is typically played as. Barron takes Helen in a darker direction that perhaps more accurately captures the suppressed rage flowing through Tesori’s music.

In many ways, ‘Fun Home’ is a story about how emotional abuse as a child impacts the adults we become. Shellhardt’s interpretation doesn’t gloss over the more unsettling details of Bechdel’s relationship with her father. Byrnes gives a cool, but certainly not reserved performance that thrillingly straddles the line between scary and vulnerable.

Small but cleverly dressed staging helps the beautiful harmonies soar. One thing Porchlight can always be counted on for is the music. Even the arrangements seem slightly reinterpreted for this production. As the 100-minute show narrows its focus onto the exact moment Bechdel’s father’s life reached a crisis point, Tesori and Kron’s score goes for the jugular in duets like ‘Telephone Wire’ between Barron and Byrnes.

Though ‘Fun Home’ deals with heavy issues around suicide, closeted homosexuality and dysfunctional family relationships, it’s also a story of queer celebration. Bechdel’s father may not have been comfortable with who he really was, but Bechdel’s life and success is a living testament to shifting generational mores. Thanks to a more tolerant world, Allison Bechdel was able to live her life in a way her father never could.

‘Fun Home’ continues to shine as one of Broadway’s most original queer musicals, specifically because of its female protagonist. The sumptuous music by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron brings out the bittersweetness of Bechdel’s graphic novel. Porchlight’s version feels as relevant today as ever and in the hands of this well-curated cast, ‘Fun Home’ soars off the stage.

Through March 2 at Porchlight Music Theatre at Ruth Page Center for the Arts. 1016 N Dearborn. (773) 777-9884

When Francesca Zambello, director of The Glimmerglass Festival, commissioned an opera about race in America, the country was reeling from a spate of police shootings of young African-American men in Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. By the time the commissioned work Blue premiered at The Glimmerglass Festival in 2019, police killings of unarmed African-American men and women had soared to nearly 135.

While Blue holds up an often times uncomfortable mirror to racism in America, it is much more than a “protest opera” or an opera about police violence. In the words of director and librettist Tazewell Thompson, an internationally acclaimed director for opera and theatre, “I wrote [Blue] from an obsessive need and responsibility to tell an intimate story behind the numbing numbers of boys and men who are killed.”

And that is exactly the powerful appeal of Blue, which recently premiered at the Lyric Opera. Through Thompson’s intense and profound libretto and the soaring score composed by Tony-Award winner Jeanine Tesori, Blue draws us in beyond the names and the headlines to the unimaginable suffering of the families who have been torn apart by these tragic and senseless deaths.

Blue is a powerful, passionate, and yes, painful depiction of a family and community coming together in crisis and faith. Hailed by critics as a “new American classic,” it was named the Best New Opera of 2019 by the Music Critics Association of North America. Tesori, who won recent Tony Awards for the music to Kimberly Akimbo and Fun House, brought her considerable talent and success as a Broadway composer to create a score that is both contemporaneous and timeless. Thompson drew on a canon of African-American literary greats, including James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Claude Brown, to write a libretto that is passionate and unapologetic.

The story centers on a Black middle-class couple living in Harlem, whose lives are shattered when their teenage son is shot and killed by a white police officer. Compounding the tragedy is the fact that the Father himself is a so-called “Black in Blue” – a member of the very same police force.

The two-act opera opens with the Mother performed by Lyric favorite Zoie Reams, who has gathered her girlfriends to share her wonderful news of her pregnancy. As her girlfriends, a charismatic trio led by Ariana Wehr in her Lyric debut and Lyric veterans Adia Evans and Krysty Swann, titter and exclaim over the Mother’s husband (“Damn girl,” they sing), the mood shifts suddenly as they learn her child is a boy. Oh no, no, no, they lament, reminding Mother that she is breaking the cardinal rule – “You shall not bring a black baby boy into the world.” Through a poignantly performed plea, Mother prevails upon her girlfriends to bless her child, whom she vows to bring into this world with love and hope.

The scene segues to Father, expertly performed by bassist Kenneth Kellogg in a role written specifically for him, as he reveals the news of his pending fatherhood with his three fellow police buddies (Terrence Chin-Loy, Jonathan Pierce Rhodes, and Christopher Humbert, Jr.) at the local watering hole, who can barely tear their eyes from watching the football game. Yet, they share in Father’s joy, peppering him with lighthearted advice and warnings about being a dad.

The first act concludes sixteen years later, when the Son, performed magnificently by tenor Travon D. Walker, and the Father engage in a bitter argument. The father confronts his son, who has been frequently at odds with the law for his involvement with non-violent political protests. “Look at yourself,” the Father intones. “Pull up your pants. Take off that hoodie.” The son pushes back, derisively accusing the Father of being “a cop,” “A clown in a blue suit,” upholding an oppressive system. Act 1 concludes with the Father, despite his son’s bitter words, offering an emotion-filled pledge to love and hold his son always.

As the second act opens, we discover that the Son has been shot and killed by a white police officer at a protest. The heartbroken Father meets with the Reverend, powerfully performed by Lyric veteran baritone Norman Garrett, who attempts to console him and encourages him to forgive. But the Father, in an ironic twist, adopts much of his son’s attitude and words, angrily lashing out at the Reverend. “I’m not here for redemption,” the Father says, “I’m here to confess” the revenge he plans to exact against the white officer. Yet, the Reverend continues to console the Father, and in a groundswell of pain, the two perform the beautiful heartrending duet “Lay my burden down.”

Meanwhile, the grief-stricken mother is attended once again by her girlfriends, to support her as she buries her son. In a particularly heartbreaking moment, Mother falls to her knees and begs God to return her son to her. “I don’t care if he’s blind; if he has no hands or feet. Just that he is alive,” she laments. But then, she bitterly remembers that “We are not God’s favorites.”

At the funeral, Father and Mother together wrestle with their grief. But with the prayers and support of the congregation, as the theme of “lay my burden down” is reprised, the two find consolation in their faith and community. The opera concludes with a flashback to the Son’s last night at the dinner table with his father and mother, pledging that this will be his last protest and promising that “nothing will happen. Nothing.”

Blue is an important, relevant opera, touching on themes and issues in a way that is not confrontational but heartfelt and profound. You may feel uncomfortable, but you will not walk away from this performance untouched and hoping for a better world.

Blue is in a limited engagement at the Lyric, with performances on Nov. 20, 22, 26 and December 1. For ticket information, visit Lyricopera.org.

Sometimes you just need to go green. No, not a vegan diet and compostable paper plates, though a little more of each would help the planet. Go green with Shrek: The Musical, which runs through the end of 2023 at North Shore Center for the Performing Arts. Music Theater Works’ production, directed by Joanna McKenzie Miller, has many offbeat delights, including green-hued fart clouds blooming onto the upstage screen. Would those count as vegan and compostable? It doesn’t matter.

Based on the Dreamworks animated film Shrek, the musical pairs Jeanine Tesori, composer of such serious fare as Violet and Fun Home, with David Lindsay-Abaire, author of equally rigorous works such as Rabbit Hole and Kimberly Akimbo (which he and Tesori recently turned into a musical). With Shrek: The Musical, the creative team stays within unremarkable territory.

Taken on those safe terms, though, the show does not disappoint. The salty fairytale follows its ogre hero Shrek – who is cast off by his parents as a child and dwells alone in a swamp – and heroine Fiona – the princess who is cast off by her parents and grows up alone in a tower – to their happily ever after. Thanks to Lord Farquaad, the nasty royal who needs a queen to make him a king, Shrek and Fiona meet and conflict and fall in love with competing farts and belches.

Dana Pike as Fiona fills the stage with her rich voice, determined personality and droll humor, all of which align with particular power in “Morning Person.” While she clings to her quest to marry her fantasy man on a steed, she’s also a pragmatist who adapts to circumstances that contradict her fictional assumptions.

Jordan DeBose lets us love him as smelly Shrek (though a few of his lines got muffled in the Scottish accent). Eustace J. Williams as Shrek’s sidekick Donkey makes his incessant jabber always entertaining. Full-sized Michael Metcalf plays pint-sized Farquaad with such finesse, it’s easy to forget the actor does it entirely on his knees. And Michaela Shapira as Pinocchio seems to have hinges in her elbows.

A word about the set, a sure sign that stage technology marches on even as love stories remain timeless. The vast upstage screen uses motion graphics to chart shifting scenes and moods, from placid sunflowers to molten lava. Media designer Anthony Churchill’s projections mostly follow traditional storybook illustrations, but they are likely, in their sheer un-trendiness, to keep audience members of all ages transfixed.

It's been a hell of a year. Time for a few “F’s” that can be printed, like family, friendly, fantasy, free parking and, okay, farts. As a distraction from dire world news for adults and a variation on Christmas culture for the kids, Shrek: The Musical does the job with lots of jolly and its own shade of green.

Music Theater Works’ production is playing through December 31^st at North Shore Center for the Performing Arts. Go to Music Theater Works for tickets and information.