75 stories by "Deanna Isaacs"
It's safe to assume that any Haymarket Opera Company performance will transport you from the blare of contemporary life to the more genteel soundscape of the baroque. Last weekend's producti…
Gioachino Rossini's rambunctious 200-year-old score for his comic opera, La Cenerentola, gets very serious attention in Lyric Opera's current revival of a 55-year-old production. Original di…
When Michael Fanone, the former Trump supporter and D.C. cop who nearly died at the hands of the January 6 mob at the U.S. Capitol, comes to the Chicago Humanities […]
The post From domest…
Move over, Grandpa. You think ageism is your cause? Last week, Created Equal, an Ohio-based organization opposed to ending unwanted pregnancies came to town, making stops at the city's large…
Lyric Opera introduced Chicago audiences to director Barrie Kosky last year, when it brought his production of The Magic Flute"created for Komische Oper Berlin, where he's been music directo…
It's impossible to summarize everything that's happening onstage this season. (It's also hard to tell you exactly what COVID-19 precautions are required at venues now; we suggest checking ah…
Starting Sunday, for three consecutive nights, WTTW will air a new six-hour Ken Burns documentary series, The U.S. and the Holocaust. Burns and his filmmaking partners, Lynn Novick and Sarah…
Thanks to CNN, this weekend I went right from Lyric Opera's season-opening production of Ernani"featuring Charles V of Spain"to the pomp and circumstance surrounding the launch of Charles II…
Last Sunday, stuffed with antibiotics, numbed by painkillers, and facing a date with an oral surgeon the next morning, I made my way to the International Museum of Surgical Science […]
The…
When Anne Ford interviewed Adam Selzer for the Reader in 2014, it was all about his job as a ghost tour leader. You didn't have to read between the lines to sense that it wasn't the perfect …
So, a bicyclist walks up to a beach on the North Shore. It's hot, he's been riding, he just wants to put his feet in the cool Lake Michigan water that he can see sparkling behind a booth and…
Nothing was said about it on the July 4 television interviews I saw, but among the security experts interviewed during coverage of the Highland Park parade shooting, one face and name had re…
There's a whole lot of story in history. And so much depends on the perspective of the storyteller.  What, for example, will the future think it knows of our fraught time? What will b…
Summer is officially here, in case the sweat and lightning bugs weren't enough of a clue. In addition to the shows and artists we profiled in our summer arts preview issue this week, we've g…
They were there. No fuss, no ballyhoo, but queer artists have been a significant part of Bronzeville's South Side Community Art Center since its founding in 1940. You might or might not see …
Last week, amid the usual tsunami of grim news about inflation, mass shootings, pandemic, and war, came word that the New York Court of Appeals is considering whether the Bronx Zoo is violat…
Regarding the recently revealed U.S. Supreme Court draft ruling on Roe v. Wade: WTF? Because, it's the F we're talking about, right? That little itch we're biologically programmed to scratch…
"Helmut Jahn: Life + Architecture" at CAC offers big pictures and tiny buildings.
It's sad but true that we're never so much appreciated as when we're newly dead…
In "Roots, Branches: Ancestor(s) Stones," Monica Brown traces ancestral legacies.
Memory is an abstraction. It holds our entire history, but how much of that is …
Dr. Charles Smith and other artists find a new home at the Art Preserve.
Before Black Lives Matter was a movement, Black lives mattered in the work of Dr. Charle…
The "musician-governed" Chicago Philharmonic looks to innovative programming for the future.
Last week the Chicago Philharmonic Society announced the appointment…
North Park Village Nature Center provides an ideal setting for Lyric's Hansel and Gretel.
There's no more perfect setting for Lyric Opera's Hansel and Gretel in …
The Pritzker Museum highlights Bill Mauldin's 50-year fight with injustice.
Editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose bedraggled "Willie and Joe" characters famou…
Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Joffrey Ballet announce in-person 2021-2022 seasons.
At a joint press conference today on the stage of the opera house, Lyric Oper…
Can we save his most important Chicago building?
We didn't need the death of architect Helmut Jahn to bring the plight of the James R. Thompson Center to our att…
