Displaying items by tag: Nederlander Theater

In 2023, “iconic” is a word often used hyperbolically. It is flippantly used to describe and categorize an incredible movie, a famous influencer clap back, a beautiful piece of fashion, or even used to describe a viral TikTok video. When we overuse or misuse a word enough it loses its meaning. In 2023 I submit we reclaim the word and apply it to those in life that truly exemplify to word, where all generations can come together and for a fleeting moment bask in the glow and apt use of the word. Because there is only one word that can describe the biopic of the often revered Queen of Rock and Roll, only one word that can encapsulate her lifetime, her career, and her legacy that will live in the new musical medium of her life. Tina Turner. Iconic.

Much like the artist’s life, TINA-The Tina Turner Musical is a hard-hitting, fast-paced, exhilarating rollercoaster chronically Tina Turner’s extraordinary life and career. Spanning from her childhood days in Nutbush, Tennessee, her early career as the lead singer of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, her turbulent marriage to Ike Turner, and her incredible comeback as a solo performer which has often been hailed as the greatest comeback in music history. 

TINA- The Tina Turner Musical follows a similar style to some other blockbuster bio picks and plays such as Rocket Man (Elton John) and Mamma Mia (Abba), though it blows all other musical biopics out of the water. Tina’s catalog is sequenced into a timeline to tell her life’s story; “Nutbush City Limits”, released in 1973, opens up Act One of the musical where we meet Tina, born Anne Mae Bullock, who sings too loud for her 1940’s choir, “River Deep Mountain High,” released in 1966, is performed in lockstep to her storyline as she records the track with Phil Spector at the height of her career with Ike Turner, and “I Don’t Wanna Fight,” released in 1993, closes Act One as Tina is making up her mind to leave Ike after 16 years of marital abuse. Tina Turner’s catalog is filled with soulful, emotional, and powerful songs that provide the soundtrack to her life.

The audience is guided through the decades of Tina’s life through seamless stage transitions and beautiful costume design. A shuttered wooden door and simple cloth dresses for the 1940s, the big hair and glittering sequence against a tinsled 1970s Vegas stage backdrop, a microphone and desk in Phil Spector’s studio, bigger hair, a synthesizer, and a denim jacket for the 1980s. 

Zurin Villanueva and Garrett Turner, and cast, in the Broadway tour of "Tina - The Tina Turner Musical" at Nederlander Theatre. Photo by MurphyMade / Handout.

TINA arrives to Chicago and the theater circuit at a pivotal moment. Recent years have been tumultuous for women from the Me Too movement and recent infringement on bodily autonomy. The iconic Turner herself lived through horrid abuse at the hands of a man, and that abuse is still pervasive today. Skinny trends are threatening to plague women and further rollback the body positivity movement. Millennial women are equally too young to have a voice and not old enough to sit at the table despite having children of our own.As we look for hope or simple escapism in 2023, we can draw inspiration from Tina Turner’s remarkable career. She overcame segregation and performed in the Jim Crow south, facing rampant and often unchecked racism, sexism, and physical abuse. Women in Tina’s life loved and supported her as best they could at a time when women had little to no power or belief in their stories. Tina Turner still battled racism during a European resurgence during her work with her Australian manager, Roger Davies, and battled ageism at 45 being told she’s over the hill.As the bevy of female Oscar winners this year will show, the narrative that women’s lives are over at a certain age is patriarchal  nonsense. Without the fighting supportive and uplifting strength of women, Tina Turner would not have prevailed in her career and the world would be all the more dim without her light.

TINA- The Tina Turner Musical is the broadway musical we need to get us out of our seats and singing as Proud as Mary. The musical runs through April 2nd at the James M Nederlander Theater (24 W Randolph St), tickets are available at Broadway In Chicago, get your tickets today before this show rolls on down the river.

It’s hard to cheer and yell with a mask on. But that I did right along with the entire crowd at “Paradise Square,” as Joaquina Kalukango delivered a shatteringly powerful show-stopper, “Let It Burn,” holding the audience in her thrall for every second.

This was the best but not the only great moment in “Paradise Square,” which opened its five-week, pre-Broadway run November 2 at the Nederlander Theater and officially opens November 17. It’s the relatively unknown tale of the Five Points District in New York City, the tough section that is portrayed circa 1846 in “Gangs of New York.”

Set during the Civil War in 1863, “Paradise Square” tells of the Black community of free-born men and women who lived in harmony with Irish immigrants, intermarrying, and singing and dancing together. The score draws on the music of Stephen Foster, who had lived and worked in the Five Points. 

But as the Civil War rages on, the Union declares an unprecedented military draft, affecting only white working men. Blacks were exempted from the draft because they were not  considered citizens. Wealthy people could hire substitutes. The immigrants resisted, and eventually turned on their Black neighbors to vent their rage, leading to the infamous New York Draft Riots of July 1863. This is not glossed over in "Paradise Square" but is the main plot point. 

Kalukango plays the central role of Nelly O’Brien, proprietor of the saloon in which the action takes place. Her Irish immigrant husband is Willy O'Brien (Matt Bogart); her sister-in-law Annie O’Brien (Chilina Kennedy) also works in the saloon, though her husband is a preacher, Reverend Samuel Jacob Lewis (Nathaniel Stampley).

Kalukango is the dramatic anchor throughout the show, but it is her transcendant performance of "Let It Burn" that also serves as the climax of the plot, and its denoument. We’re talking Jennifer-Hudson-in-Dream-Girls calber, perhaps even better. Really!

Other spectacular moments include the performance of A.J. Shively as newly arrived Irish immigrant Owen Duigan. Shively is a sensational singer and dancer. Each time his lilting, filigreed tenor launched into “Why Should I Die in Springtime,” tears welled in my eyes. 

Chilina Kennedy gives us an Annie that is a firebrand and a spark plug. The beauty of her soprano is a perfect complement to Kalukango’s powerful mezzo-soprano. When the two sing a duet, it is sublime.

But this is even more a show about dance. Featuring choreography by Bill T. Jones, it shows off many dance styles, emphasizing Irish step-dancing and Black American Juba, as well as tap dancing, believed to have originated in Five Points. Jones’s choreography greets us as soon as the curtain rises in an opening scene in which the preacher blesses departing soldiers, two wraiths do what might be described as a liturgical dance.

Jones also crafts the visual representations of the Underground Railroad, which in this show is given parity with Ellis Island as a point of entry for Black immigrants from the South. "Paradise Square" breaks new ground in its full embrace of the Black journey as a part of all of our stories in the formation of America.

Produced by Garth Drabinsky, “Paradise Square” is directed by Tony Award nominee Moisés Kaufman and a book by Christina Anderson Marcus Gardley, Craig Lucas and Larry Kirwan. The production features the “re-imagined” songs of Stephen Foster and original compositions, with a score by Jason Howland, Nathan Tyson, Masi Asare, and Kirwan.

There are some weaknesses in "Paradise Square." As might be expected with four hands scripting and five composers involved, we have a story that is everything and the kitchen sink, plus music and dance. The music is continuous and at times, soaring. But much of it is undistinguished. The second half is refreshingly direct, and regardless of its shortcomings, "Paradise Square" is not to be missed. 

TICKET INFORMATION:
Tickets are available for groups of 10 or more by calling Broadway In Chicago Group Sales at (312) 977-1710 or emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..  
Paradise Square is part of theBroadway in Chicago subscription which launched in August. Individual tickets for Paradise Square are at www.BroadwayInChicago.com. 
 
All Broadway In Chicago schedules and productions will continue to be reviewed as further guidance and recommendations are provided by the CDC, State of Illinois, and Chicago Departments of Health. Currently that means proof of vaccination must be provided to gain entry, and a mask must be worn throughout. For the latest health and safety procedures and guidelines visit BroadwayInChicago.com/COVID19.

Though I loved her music and her voice, I knew little about the celebrated Queen of Disco, Donna Summer - before seeing the Broadway in Chicago show about her. Summer: The Donna Summer Musical tells it all, an engaging narrative spiced with the diva’s great music, beautifully performed.

Musically, Donna Summer was distinctive from other techno-driven disco singers when she burst on the scene in the late 1970s. Her music had a spirit to it, an emotional depth, a poignancy suggesting a trapped soul yearning to escape and express itself.

In Summer the stage musical at the Nederlander in Chicago, her songs are set against the arc of her life. Three singers play her at various points: Alex Hairston is the younger Disco Donna; Dan’yelle Williamson is the older Diva Donna; and Olivia Elease Hardy, “Duckling Donna,” plays scenes earlier in her life. 

Donna Summer wrote or co-authored many of her hits. Not every song is sung in total (though many are) - but we hear enough of each one to be satisfying, and to advance the action. Of course not all her hits would fit in the show - which is one hour and forty minutes with no intermission.

We hear the incomparable "McArthur Park" cover - the first release that fulfilled her ambition to be more than a just disco queen. We hear “She Works Hard for the Money” and learn it was the completion of a contract obligation as she left her old studio for a better agreement.

Reared in Boston, third of seven children in a close-knit, nurturant family, she was the irrepressible performer, the ham, always putting together shows with her sisters performing and her family as audience.

As a teenager, she cut school to audition for a new musical, Hair - and was cast in the Munich production. (Her first single was "Aquarius," was recorded in German.) She found her way into another German recording studio on the strength of a demo track - where she was later discovered by another recording studio on the strength of a demo song, “Love to Love You.” From there she entered the wild ride of the pop star career - but Summer kept a level head. 

As the show recounts it,  "Love to Love You" got her branded as a “Disco Queen,” a label she resisted at first. She always wanted to be a full-range vocalist. But the gates to fame and fortune beckoned, and she walked through them. 

We follow her home life - two husbands, both German, the second one Bruce Sudano, a bass player who fathered two of her three daughters. Played by Steven Grant Douglas, his duet with Alex Hairston as Disco Donna dancing within his guitar strap to "Heaven Knows" is a delight. 

This show is not a typical jukebox musical. Unlike Carole King, Tina Turner or Cher, the inspiration for Summer on stage passed away (from cancer, at age 44, in 2012.) Instead of a living legend, she is now legendary. And Summer the Donna Summer Musical at Broadway in Chicago will give you an appreciation of her life, well lived, through her songs, well sung. It runs through Feb. 23 at the Nederlander