What Was Old Is New Again

The New Classics (A Virtual Broadway Cabaret) – Lyric Opera

Those of us who have been attending live theatre in Chicago long enough to remember The Civic Theatre, which was attached to the Lyric Opera House of Chicago such that they were both part of the same edifice, still quietly mourn the loss of that famous, intimate space through gritted teeth. We all understand that Lyric Opera needed more room backstage if they were going to retain their status as one of the greatest opera companies in the world, and as the world of stage production allowed for larger and more complex sets, there was simply not enough room to keep all the flying horses and swan boats behind the scenes. So, Lyric bought the smaller house, virtually gutted it, (a bit of the proscenium remains, a stark remembrance of one of Chicago’s most renown playhouses), and now the giant dragon-puppets have somewhere to graze between flights. We “get it.” We “understand.” And we grind our teeth.

Lyric is ending their season, as they have for some time now, with what many are still calling “musical theatre,” despite opera companies such as Lyric continuing to prove that the ever-enlarging scope of the lyric stage smears that world into the realm of what many will insist on calling “opera,” if for no other reason than that the first production was mounted in an “opera house,” rather than a “theatre” With a full production being out of the question this year, Lyric has assembled a stellar group of artists, under the shepherding of David Chase and using the stage in what was once The Civic Theatre, have invited us into this little temple that shone so brightly for so many years, to hear some of the American songbook’s newer numbers, along with some re-interpreted gems that will be more familiar to Lyric’s regular audience, tying the storied together with numbers that our grandchildren will consider the “standards” of the genre, “songs from the new golden age of musical theater.” (I have decided to say nothing about someone’s decision to spell the final word of the last sentence in such a manner. Alright, I did my best.)

Now, what is to be said, right now, in this moment? How do we acknowledge what we have been living through as a city, a country, a world, and then what happens to the larger “voice” of the community because of that shared experience? Which singers need to be there? What should they be singing? How are the numbers, and then the flow of the evening, shaped, so that the art form can do all the things that we know that it can? How will it let us have a conversation about the ravages around us, teach us new things about others (and ourselves), and still hold us up, give us the hope that we so desperately need to keep our heads down, PTSD and all, and step out of the house and into the “new normal” that is so exhausting to hear about? And while Lyric is doing this, how do they continue their mission to invite their audiences to the “musical theatre” table by saying something new about the form from their unique perspective, something this audience won’t find at our fantastic suburban palace of musicals, The Marriot Theatre in Lincolnshire?

And who do you ask to sit at the head of that production table and help you take on such a monumental task, and then turn it intimate and personal for an audience that is watching it in the living room, or listening from the kitchen, or doing their best to catch the show while herding hordes of children who have been in the house for far too long for far too many days?

When producers are mentally thumbing through a list of the type of Broadway artist who would lead such an enterprise as this concert, Chase’s name is going to jump off the page. Chase’s ability to contribute to any musical enterprise, whether it be on the Broadway boards or on television’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel highlights that what he brings to any project is an unusual conflagration of talents, and (very importantly), a different doorway into the room. As a composer, lyricist, arranger music director/supervisor, conductor, and musician, there is a spot for Chase on every such team. Lyric’s audiences know Chase well from his involvement as the conductor of Lyric’s productions of My Fair Lady (2016/17), The King and I (2015/16), and Carousel (2014/15), and this event, which continues to be available online, will give them even more delightful information.

Placing Chase front-and-center of this event is a no-brainer, and it’s not just his mind-numbing list of talents and abilities, but remember what I said about his having a unique doorway into the form? While others begin by thinking about a song or an arc or an evening, it is common to think about what they want it to be at the end of the day, what that final project, that song, that grouping, the taste, smell, and feel after the stage lights go out should be, Chase begins with an examination, not of the big picture, but of the very smallest piece of the tiniest moment, and searches for its absolute essence, searches out what must be there in order for that piece of art to continue to exist as that particular entity, and once he has boiled it down to the artistic atom, then he begins to explore what can be done with it.

“I have a degree in biology,” Chase shocked me by saying, “and what does biology have to do with music and the quick answer to me is that it’s all about classifications and understanding what makes something unique and specific, and then you can have a look at how it relates to what came before and what’s around it. How you identify those unique characteristics whether it’s of an organism or of a style of music or an approach to music, and how is that expressed in the world in the way that an orgasm inhabits its own place in a biome, it’s similar to how a song has its essential DNA, its essential structure, and that you can express it in many ways and be true to the song and true to the story, and as an arranger I can manipulate it and I can turn it on its side and I can take a melody and do things with it, change the color, but it still has the constant DNA at its core that makes it that piece of music.”

Guided by the precept of honing a song (and an evening) from the perspective of the essence that cannot be removed or that tiny, absolute truth turns into something else altogether, you can enjoy Gavin Creel, Nikki Renée Daniels, Norm Lewis, along with Chase at the piano and some members of the company’s orchestra, glowing with a cabaret-style ethos that feels just like that of any such venue, only with an unsurpassable history. Other artists stop by for special performances from the various places in the world where they are currently thriving, continuing to make art despite seemingly impossible odds, as is Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Serving as music director and general “Figaro” of the evening with charming narrative interludes that keep us in track in terms of the shape of the evening, Chase gently encouraging the piano in the quieter moments of the event, and thundering when the music calls for profundity, the strength that sweeps down from his shoulders through his arms, then his hands and fingers calling to the instrument’s soundboard to support the larger emotion on display, and always in the moment with the singers, which is why we no longer call this type of artist an “accompanist,” but rather a “collaborative pianist.” It is edifying to see and hear the other instrumentalists in the concert, Lyric’s own concertmaster Robert Hanford, Calum Cook (principal cello), Ian Hallas (principal bass), Susan Warner (co-principal & co-assistant principal clarinet), and Eric Millstein (percussion) collaborating with the singers, because there is no doubt that they are singing right alongside them. It is with no small amount of pride that Lyric’s audiences tout the company’s orchestra and chorus, for they are always there on the stage and in the pit, while all the other performers come and go, and are the true backbone of the company. And wow, they do sing!

And then there are the singers themselves. Gavin Creel starts out the evening with “What More Do I Need?” from a virtually unknown Stephen Sondheim musical (Is that even possible?) called Saturday Night, and the song and Creel hit exactly the right note. This ode to learning to love the city of New York, a place so devastated by COVID-19, still has a bounce to it that speaks to positivity, but in Creel’s interpretation there is a quiet wisdom that colors the text. Everything in New York isn’t alright, and we have no idea when it will be “alright,” and what that will look like. What will Broadway be, next year, five years from now, in our lifetimes? But we do know that it will still be New York City, and Broadway will still, with our famous American pigheadedness, continue to churn out new and interesting work that informs, enlightens, and entertains, and this is the right song, sung by the right singer, because “What More Do I Need?” is almost rhetorical right now, isn’t it? Creel’s own experience as a survivor of COVID-19 has to be a piece of the skeletal interpretation of this song, but this Tony Award winner doesn’t beat us about the head with it, it’s just sort of there, a specter in the background, an acknowledgement, surrounded by buckets of hope.

Next, Norm Lewis offers, “Stars” from Les Misérables, with a heartbreaking longing for something better, purer. Still within the confines of the character of the antagonist that lives to bring the protagonist to his personal concept of enlightenment, even as he is the one who is schooled and forever changed in the process, there is something fresh here, and isn’t simply Lewis’ velvety vocals. There is a reach for something universal here, quiet but insistent, a call to remember that we’re all under the same universal blanket, and can only survive if we find each other, and listen and learn, and if we haven’t learned that lesson throughout this ridiculous period of history, we will repeat it, in one form another, and that isn’t acceptable.

If you missed Nikki Renée Daniels performance as Angelica Schuyler in Hamilton right here in Chicago, this concert is a chance to find out what you missed so you can go to a quiet place and kick your own behind. Daniels continues the evening with, “The Heather on the Hill” from Brigadoon, and once again here we have an interpretation that doesn’t shout, “I’M DOING SOMETHING DIFFERENT WITH THIS SONG, LISTEN UP,” but instead comes from a quiet place of knowing that the world we see and hear and feel around us can go up in smoke in an instant, can disappear at the stroke of midnight, and only miracles can bring pieces (never all of it, never again), back to us. There’s a melancholy that comes from inside Daniels during this number that is an undertone. It isn’t what she’s “playing,” it is something known at the soul-level of the character, and we cannot help but relate. We’ll still hum the song later, but it will never taste the same in our mouths again.

The evening just continues to unspool, and now it has taken on a life of its own. Each number has something to say, every artist has a singular approach as informed by their heart and mind, and it is officially, “a show,” with something to say, a hand reaching out to the audience, an offering to join up and take the journey. As Chase says, “What performers are doing, they’re manipulating your emotions, not in a bad way, but they’re saying, hey, I have had an experience and you the listener and may not have had my exact experience, but you can have had something that is a parallel experience and I’ll help guide you through your experience.” Now we have a dialogue, and that is just plain good “theatre,” no matter what type of house it is in, that is what art is about, what it is for in the first place, to answer the human need to seek out the clarity born of a shared experience.

For something that lightens the mood a bit, Jenn Gambatese, well-known to Lyric audiences for her performances as Maria in The Sound of Music and Carrie Pipperidge in, Carousel, tears up, “Gimme Gimme” from Thoroughly Modern Millie from somewhere else in the world, as this crazy virtual world now has “gifted” us. This is a master class in what-happens-during-the-rests, those moments when the singer isn’t making beautiful and/or interesting sounds, those stops in the singing when the performer has to get from one moment, one thought or feeling, to the next, and Gambatese doesn’t leave a single silent beat empty. Something is always going on here, she has us by the hand, and she is dragging us to the understanding it is imperative she reach, the heretofore elusive missing piece that her character truly wants, actually needs, and if you are a student of musical theatre you need to watch this fifty-seven times in a row, at least twenty of them with the sound turned off so you can really watch what she is doing, and then send her a big, fat check.

Daniels comes back with “How Could I Know?” from The Secret Garden, and that is just plain one ballsy thing to do. The originator of Lily, the first soprano to perform this song on Broadway, the voice for which this was written, was the very recently lost to us so ridiculously early, just last December, Rebecca Luker, one of the performers who kept proving that classically trained sopranos still had a right to their spot on the Broadway stage when it seemed that the audience had outgrown that sound in some inexplicable way. Covering a song written by a specific singer requires a couple of essentials: You have to have the pipes, there can be no question that you can sing the song, with all the notes intact, not chopped off short (without a truly believable reason, so we don’t think you just can’t get through that phrase), and you have to have something personal to say that we want to hear, because we are still hearing Becca, or Barbara singing, “Ice Cream” or Julie singing, “I Could Have Danced All Night.” The originator of this role (who was, by the way, as beautiful inside as she was outside, as kind as she was talented), would have adored Daniels’ rendition of this song that sounds like a sweet little tune while in reality it requires a vocal technique so solid that the performer can absolutely forget about it and be in the moment, because if they have to think about getting through it, this wraithlike moment is lost to them, and to us. I saw and heard a confusion of sorts in Daniels’ delivery that was absolutely fresh and deeply wounding and bringing that understanding to the number made it uniquely hers, and therefore, ours.

In this type of concert, gender can easily be tossed to the window (And can we please just do that anyway?), allowing performers to put form numbers sung by a character that they are unlikely to play on the stage anytime soon. Heath Saunders, who Lyric audiences heard as Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar gives us one of the most unique, breathtaking experiences with “Something Wonderful” from The King and I that I have enjoyed, and I was glad he was breathing because I could not. This is a beautiful song and can be delivered in so many different ways. I have heard it sung as an edict, a law, a fact pounded into tradition. I have heard it sung as a calming moment, a ballad created to take the action (and the high tenor of leading lady Anna) down a notch, in order to gain equilibrium (for the scene and for the arc of the show), and I have heard it sung as an expression of a special type of love that, like it or not, does exist between two people of unfairly unequal agencies. What I haven’t heard is the song delivered as a desperate need to explain the private story that created the public song, invested with an imperativeness that shows what an artist does when I are living in a moment where they know what they must do, what they (and others) need, and exactly what they are willing to do to get it, and that is high art, and the audience can’t wiggle out of that one, because all the facts are before them, laid bare, and unless they’re going to flee to the bathroom, they are about to get schooled and will walk away changed. You cannot miss this performance, and you have no excuse, flip the switch on your computer and see it on YouTube or the Lyric Opera website.

Amanda Castro and Jo Lampert also appear on the program and will leave you astonished with their formidable performances. (Did you honestly think I was going to tell you everything, to leave you no surprises? Yes, you did. Didn’t happen.)

As Chase shared with me, “I love puzzles. What fits, how do you find the way ….the fun of putting together an evening is you’re got all sorts of possibilities of you can go here and you can go there and how do you balance it and what leads to this and at the same time make you sure you have a totality and an arc.

Any theatrical experience or artistic experience is a journey and as artists we try to be mindful that we’re starting you here and we’re going to end up here you can’t end in the same place you started because then it’s not a journey it’s not theatre, it’s not drama. The audience has to change by the end of the journey, otherwise…well that’s art, that’s what art does.”

That’s what this piece does, and if you miss it, you have cheated no one but yourself, and you owe yourself an apology the size of Cleveland.

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Aaron Hunt

Streamed on June 10, 2021 on Lyric Opera of Chicago’s YouTube station and Facebook page

This is an ongoing, free performance on these stations

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.