Music

Blue Heaven – Black Ensemble Theater – Closes October 26, 2025

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Blue Heaven is not a show you go to for the plot or the monologues, which are jammed into the middle section of this 90-minute show to provide some background on the lives of the depicted artists – Howlin’ Wolf, Big Mama Thornton, Muddy Waters, Stevie Ray Vaughan and B.B. King – before it heads into full concert mode.

You do go for the music, and it’s a treat. The only things missing from my days of going to blues clubs were a layer of cigarette smoke and a bottle of beer in hand.

And, if you closed your eyes, the talented cast, aided by a terrific backup band, might make you think you were listening to the original performers. My favorite was probably Cynthia Carter, as Thornton, who brought a delicious feistiness to her part.

The only one of the featured five I ever saw in person was King, as the opening act for the Rolling Stones in 1969. Unforgettable.

I was familiar with about 40% of the songs in Blue Heaven, but, if you’ve listened to enough blues, you think you know the songs even if you’ve never heard them before.

New Faces Sing Broadway 1960 (Porchlight Music Theatre) – The Rhapsody Theater – September 30, 2025

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The government may have shut down, but I still get out and Porchlight Music Theatre still puts on entertaining shows.

It was my first time at The Rhapsody Theater (including under its previous incarnation as the Mayne Stage), although I did see the owner, Dr. Ricardo T. Rosenkranz, perform his magic act, and get called up on stage by him, in 2016 at the now-defunct Royal George Cabaret.

Michael Weber, the Porchlight Artistic Director, also calls people up to the stage, as part of the New Faces programs, to ask them often impossibly-difficult Broadway trivia questions, from which he seems to derive great satisfaction, all in good fun.

But the real entertainment comes from the performances by the young cast (introduced by long-time Chicago area performer and director Johanna McKenzie Miller, who also treated us to a song), some of whom may go on to great things in the theater, as suggested by Weber when he mentioned three recent graduates of the 10-year-old New Faces program who are now making national names for themselves.

This incarnation of New Faces took me down memory lane, as one of the featured shows, the Lucille Ball star-driven vehicle Wildcat, was inexplicably the first Broadway musical album I ever heard. As I listened to Lisa Buhelos and Kaitlin Feely sing Hey Look Me Over, I reflected on how much better singers they were than Ball.

1960 produced some memorable shows, and they were represented, but Weber also likes to extract songs from less-than-successful productions, such as Christine, which probably would have done better had it been based on the Stephen King story of the same name, rather than a book by Hilda Werhner (who?), closing after 12 performances.

The evening ended on a high note, actually two, the one concluding Somewhere from West Side Story, and the one confirming my earlier decision to park on the street, as I observed the long line of people trying to retrieve their vehicles from the valet-only, practically inaccessible, paltry parking lot.

Donna Herula – Navy Pier – August 30, 2025

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After seeing Donna Herula at the Old Town Art Fair, and good to my word (see my June 14 blog), I went to see her at the Navy Pier Beer Garden, or, in my case, the bottled water garden.

As before, she played some classic blues numbers and a bunch of songs from her award-winning Bang at the Door CD, adding some recently-recorded ones that are part of a forthcoming release, including Backseat Driver, not to be confused with the three other songs of the same name I found online.

The biggest difference from June was that her husband Tony was in attendance, resulting in Herula calling him up to the stage to sing Can’t Wait to See My Baby with her. Thankfully he then went back to his seat. The duet was better (and amusing) last time when he was absent and she sang both parts.

There was a short interruption at one point for Herula to adjust her guitar (one of four she had on stage), whereupon she apologized by saying “we tune because we care.” I’m guessing she’s used that line before. I’ll be waiting for it next time I see her play.

Last Week Today, Musically – August 24, 2025

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I went to my first, and last, since the season is now over, Rush Hour Concert of the year at St, James Cathedral. I went for the Florence Price Concert Overture No. 2 (Iso trendy) and stayed for the Dvořák Wind Serenade, Op. 44, not just because it was so good, but also because it allowed me to exercise my skill at putting the appropriate accents over the letters in the composer’s name. I would tell you the name of the group, but it didn’t have one, apparently being an assemblage of a dozen top-flight musicians who found themselves together in a rehearsal hall at some point and decided to put on a show.

The week took a downturn with the Noonday Concert at Fourth Presbyterian Church, where I suffered through about 20 minutes of Carla Gordon’s attempts at humor and less-than-fulfilling vocal presentations of what she inaccurately described as early 20th-Century Broadway show tunes. One attendee used the time to do deep knee bends. On the other hand, to paraphrase Julius Caesar, and perhaps quote Sid, Veni, Vidi, Verti (I came, I saw, I gave up).

Order was restored on Saturday, starting with the two guys who entertain every week on the sidewalk by the Green City Market Lincoln Park, playing a combination of the blues and Motown on guitar, keyboard and kick drum. Next time I need a small band for an event (which will be the first time) they’re my choice, though I have no idea what their names are or if they are in witness protection.

Finally, I topped off the week’s musical adventure at the Thirsty Ears Festival, which I wrote about three years ago and returned to once again to see pianist Marianne Parker, whom I’ve written about many times before, this time paired with violist Michael Hall, who, among many other things, is the co-founder of the first professional orchestra in Indonesia.

Before that excellent duo, I saw a fun performance by the Chicago Sinfonietta and a weird one, by my standards, by pianist Alex Reyes, who not only played some with his elbow, though not in an entertaining Jerry Lee Lewis way, but also, at times, with the aid of what appeared to be an old rag or dish cloth, perhaps due to either a fear of germs or the sudden urge to clean. Fortunately Parker and Hall followed, so as to calm my otherwise urgent need to depart, as if Gordon had followed me to the event.

If I Only Had a Brain – Grant Park Music Festival – August 13, 2025

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As explained in the program, composer Chelsea Komschlies’s Mycelialore combines her interests in neuroscience and fungi. I would have preferred something that combined interests in timbre and rhythm.

Komschlies starts from saying that mushrooms have a root-like structure that can function like a human brain, and then wonders whether, if they “can remember and tell their own stories, what would they say and how would they sound?” Her musical answer led me to conclude, I don’t care. I wish conductor Giancarlo Guerrero had not waited for nearby sirens to die down before giving the down beat.

Fortunately, after 10 minutes of this fungal brain scan, pianist Clayton Stephenson and the orchestra cleansed the auditory cortex and nucleus accumbens with a terrific rendition of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No.1 that left Guerrero bouncing with joy at its conclusion.

Stephenson earned his standing ovation, but didn’t stop there, giving the audience a delightful encore with his performance of Art Tatum’s jazzy Tea for Two.

Last, but not least, we were treated to Saint-Saen’s Symphony No. 3, wherein, I am happy to report, an organ (not the brain) is used well as an accent, and not as a droning focal point, and certainly not as a representation of the communication skills of something related to athlete’s foot or fungal meningitis.

The Emperor’s New Clothes – Millennium Park – August 6, 2025

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This is not a piece about a fashion show, although I did go to one once at an El Crab Catcher restaurant in Kaanapali on Maui in the 1980’s, before blogs were invented.

The Price Quality Heuristic (PQH) suggests that the more expensive something is, the higher quality people will attach to it. I believe I saw this principle in action at the Joshua Bell concert at the Grant Park Music Festival.

The event was not on the original Festival schedule, which, along with higher prices for the paid seating, apparently thrust it into PQH territory.

The seats and lawn were filled by a crowd enormous enough to suggest the possibility of an underlying ploy to set up an immigration raid, but park security was unmasked, so I think not, especially since some potential attendees were turned away.

When Bell completed his playing with the, as always excellent, orchestra (augmented not by an encore, but rather by an endless string of curtain calls that strained credibility), he was given a rousing standing ovation, which I confess may have been people just wanting to stretch their legs, or in some way related to a new Presidential fitness test.

As for my thoughts about Bell’s performance, it was fine, worthing of a sitting ovation. It was not, in my opinion (and some others I spoke with) as good as that of Augustin Hadelich, who earlier in the season had thrilled us with his artistry in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (and played a fun encore).

Bell has been praised and criticized for his body movements while playing. He did remind me a little of the way Elaine Marie Benes dances, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Maxim Lando – Grant Park Music Festival – July 23, 2025

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Maxim Lando is a 22 year-old pianist who started playing when he was three years old and went on to win his first major competition when he was 13. I’m guessing that he didn’t have a normal childhood.

Nevertheless, it gives me hope that I may yet turn the corner in my playing, when I reach ten years of practicing, though I suspect that he put it more hours and didn’t spend time writing blogs.

He has a unique style, sitting very close to his instrument (against everything I have been taught) and hunching over the piano, almost never looking up. I guess he has the music memorized (another difference).

While delighting the audience with Manuel De Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain and Franz Liz Liszt’s Rhapsodie espagnole (arranged for full orchestra), Lando spent much of the time jerking his head all about, while playing, in a manner that suggested a likely future need for chiropractic services. At the end of passages, he would then practically jump up off the bench in dramatic fashion. Definitely a show within a show.

The evening opened joyfully with Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville, which the conductor, Lee Mills, acknowledged first drew his attention in Looney Tunes (as with all of us).

The finale was the ever-popular Bolero by Maurice Ravel, bringing a resounding climax to the evening, even for those of us who did not sit there counting the 18 repetitions of the melodic theme (as mentioned by Mills) or the 169 rhythmic repetitions by the snare drum (repeat after me – carpal tunnel syndrome).

Ian Murrel and Jeremy Vigil – Fourth Presbyterian Church Noonday Concert – July 18, 2025

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Ian Murrel has a strong baritone voice that he put on good display while singing an eclectic selection of pieces (accompanied by Jeremy Vigil on the piano), ranging from some French thing to a sing-a long Take Me Out to the Ballgame, with stops in between for Lerner and Loew, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Elvis Presley..

But I had my issues, or rather he did. How could he not know that his iPad, with his lyrics, would overheat after 30 minutes in the sun? Fortunately, a move to the shade precipitated a fairly quick recovery.

Hasn’t anyone ever told him (I would have but left instead) that the correct lyric in Take Me Out to the Ballgame is “Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack” not cracker jacks? If you don’t believe me, look it up in the Baseball Almanac.

What possessed him to sing “The New Suit (“Zipperfly”) by Marc Blitzstein, which includes the lyric “Racka moochy wicky wachy and a woo haggedy goo,” which is not nearly as meaningful as “A-boogity-boogity-boogity-boogity-shooby-do-wop-she-bop Chang-chang, changity-chang-shoo-bop?”

One Night Only: An Evening with Sutton Foster and Kelli O’Hara – Ravinia – July 13, 2025

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For those of you who might be interested in seeing this power coupling, they will be at Tanglewood on Friday with the Boston Pops (and in Utah and Virginia after that). The flight to Boston probably won’t take much longer than the drive to Highland Park.

Foster has seven Tony nominations for Leading Actress in a Musical, as does O’Hara (who also has one for Featured Actress in a Musical), though Foster kiddingly reminded the audience that she has two wins to O’Hara’s one.

Backed by the CSO, the program included only two songs from their nominated performances (I would have liked more), a duet from O’Hara’s turn in Light in the Piazza (which I actually saw in a pre Broadway run at the Goodman Theatre before I, and most anyone else, knew who she was), and, of course, the required Foster, change into her tap shoes, show stopper of Anything Goes.

I was very happy that O’Hara performed her show stopper They Don’t Let You in the Opera (If You’re a Country Star), which is well worth a YouTube visit if you’ve never seen it.

The rest of the show was rather eclectic, with the ladies demonstrating camaraderie and comedic skills to go along with their famed vocals. Personally, I would have rather heard more Broadway tunes instead of their 1990’s Medley, though, as they stated, they were emulating, in this and other ways, the legendary Carol Burnett-Julie Andrews television special that featured a 1960’s Medley. To that end, there was interaction with an audio recording of the latter two until it malfunctioned (oops), but Foster and O’Hara covered and quickly moved on, as professionals do.

I fully expect to see a video of this concert (probably the longer version done in Carnegie Hall in 2023) on some streaming service in the near future.

5th Wave Collective – Washington Square Park – June 28, 2025

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Wallace Shawn, as Vizzini, in The Princess Bride, reminded us that it’s a classic blunder to “get involved in a land war in Asia.”

I would add “never perform at an outdoor venue without a microphone.”

Inconceivable, yet, that’s exactly what the 5th Wave Collective chose to do. Perhaps that would have been okay in the middle of nowhere, but in Washington Square Park, no more than 30 feet from a street that wasn’t closed off to traffic, it wasn’t a great idea.

It also might be okay for a brass band, but not so much for an ensemble featuring five string and three reed instruments and a lonely French horn.

That said, the crowd could mostly hear well enough to very much enjoy the hour-long tribute to the music of Florence Price.

The song introductions that the group’s members took turns delivering were less audible, but fortunately, for me, I already had some knowledge about the rebirth of Price’s work, thanks to information gathered at other concerts over the last several years.

Perhaps next time the group will use a microphone, as I wish.