Spring in our steps

Chicago stages bloom with a colorful array of performances.

By IRENE HSIAO, DEANNA ISAACS, AND KERRY REID

Winter might have been more mild than usual this year, but spring is coming in hot with live performances to light up the season. From remounts of favorites to world premieres, Chicago stages offer an intriguing seasonal bouquet in dance, opera, theater, comedy, and more. Here are 20 shows to consider in the days and months ahead.

DANCE (Irene Hsiao)

San Pareil

The Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project returns to the Logan Center for the Arts for San Pareil , a program featuring all ten members of its current cohort of Chicago dance companies—veteran CBDLP members Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center and Hiplet Ballerinas, Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, Forward Momentum Chicago, Joel Hall Dancers & Center, Najwa Dance Corps, and Muntu Dance Theatre, and new members M.A.D.D. Rhythms, Move Me Soul, Praize Productions, and The Era Footwork Crew. Celebrating forms including African dance, modern dance, jazz, tap, and footwork, the program promises a glimpse of the range of Black dance in Chicago and o ers the opportunity to witness history in the making as these companies come together to share the stage for the first time—as well as resources, practices, and perspectives over the course of the next two years. Sat 3/25 7 PM, Sun 3/ 26 2 PM (youth performance) and 6 PM, Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., chicagoblackdancelegacy.org, $25 general admission, $10 students/seniors (62+)

Elements

World premieres by Thang Dao and Hope Boykin headline two weeks of mostly new works danced by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in their spring program Elements at the MCA’s Edlis Neeson Theater. Program A includes Kyle Abraham’s dynamic and flirtatious 2018 solo Show Pony and the company premiere of Lar

Lubovitch’s 2010 Coltrane’s Favorite Things

Program B features Spenser Theberge’s tenderly sensual 2010 duet Ne Me Quitte Pas, first danced by HSDC in 2022, as well as Osnel Delgado’s The Windless Hold, created in 2019 for HSDC during an exchange with Cuba’s Malpaso Dance Company. Both programs are anchored by Aszure Barton’s showstopping BUSK , created in 2009, first seen at the Auditorium with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater right before the pandemic, remounted by Hubbard Street in 2021, and now in its third Chicago outing. Barton recently became only the third artist-in-residence in the company’s 45 years, after Twyla Tharp and Alejandro Cerrudo. 3/23-4/2, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Edlis Neeson Theater, 220 E. Chicago, 312-397-4010, hubbardstreetdance.com, $15-$95

OPERA (Deanna Isaacs)

Chicago Currents: Celebrating Chicago’s Waterways

Chicago Fringe Opera has put together something unique and uniquely Chicago: a staged art song concert celebrating the city’s waterways. Five singers, accompanied by piano and violin, navigate a musical history that includes Indigenous people, the arrival of Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the rise of the industrial city, and the Great Migration—culminating with contemporary work that summons us to reconnect with our river-meets-lake landscape and to conserve it. The American Indian Center and Friends of the Chicago River are among the sponsors; performers include soprano Kirsten C. Kunkle, a citizen of the Mvskoke Nation, singing new pieces she wrote based on the work of her uncle, Indigenous poet Alexander Posey. Among the large roster of other composers: Florence Price and Harry T. Burleigh along with current Chicagoans Stacy Garrop and Eric Malmquist. Fri 3/24 7:30 PM, Sat 3/25

3 PM, The Edge Theater, 5451 N. Broadway, chicagofringeopera.com, $28-$45

The Cook-O Vanguard Opera, Chicago Opera Theater’s residency program for contemporary composers new to opera, presents a concert version premiere of a one-act by Grammy-nominated composer and Wheaton College professor of music composition and theory Shawn E. Okpebholo, with a libretto by veteran opera scripter Mark Campbell. Commissioned by the Vanguard Initiative, The Cook-Off follows three competitors on a television cooking show—Kenny Kincaid’s America Loves Food as they aim to outdo each other by creating the most luscious version of the national comfort food, mac and cheese. Okpebholo’s “Lord How Come Me Here,” featuring Ryan Opera Center alumni J’Nai Bridges and Will Liverman, was a contender in the 2023 Grammies. Thu 5/11 7:30 PM, Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture, 2936 N. Southport, chicagooperatheater .org, $50 or $150 with after-party

THEATER (Kerry Reid)

Dying for It

On the heels of Steppenwolf’s production of Describe the Night , set in part in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, Artistic Home presents Moira Bu ni’s “free adaptation” of Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide—a piece banned by Uncle Joe before it ever hit the stage. Semyon, an unemployed young man with an obsession about ending his own life, crosses paths with a rogues’ gallery of fellow citizens (including an intellectual, a priest, a writer, a postman, and a “boisterous romantic”) who are all determined to somehow profit from Semyon’s pain. The dark satire is directed by Monica Payne. Through 4/23, Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, 773-697-3830, theartistichome .org, $15-$35

The Cherry Orchard

Robert Falls stepped down in 2022 as artistic director of the Goodman after a 35-year tenure, but he’s not retired. A cast of Chicago heavy hitters take the stage under Falls’s direction in a revival of Anton Chekhov’s last play, written in 1904 before his untimely death from tuberculosis and tracing the fading fortunes of a once-aristocratic Russian family. Kate Fry stars as Lyubov Ranevskaya, returned from Paris and in denial about just how bad the family finances have become. She’s joined by Janet Ulrich Brooks, Will Allan, Kareem Bandealy, Matt DeCaro, Steppenwolf ensemble member Francis Guinan, and many other excellent talents. The production marks a swan song of sorts for Falls with Chekhov’s major works, too; he previously directed Three Sisters (1995), The Seagull (2010), and Uncle Vanya (2017, in a version adapted by Annie Baker). 4/1-4/30, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre. org, $25-$80

A Soldier’s Play

Charles Fuller’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the murder of a Black sergeant on a Louisiana army base in 1944 received a Tony Award-winning revival in 2020 with Roundabout Theatre under the direction of the legendary Kenny Leon. (The play was also turned into a 1984 film starring Howard E. Rollins Jr., Adolph Caesar, and a young Denzel Washington.) Leon’s production, starring Broadway veteran Norm Lewis as Captain Richard Davenport, who is sent to investigate the murder and uncovers a tangled dark web of personal grudges entwined with racial oppression, comes to town for a short touring presentation with Broadway in Chicago. 4/4-4/16, CIBC Theatre, 18 W. Monroe, broadwayinchicago. com, $35-$105

Galileo’s Daughter

Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, now under the artistic leadership of Marti Lyons, has mostly focused on contemporary classics during its 27-year history. But with Jessica Dickey’s Galileo’s Daughter , the company presents its third world premiere (and the first production directed by Lyons since she took the reins in 2021). Dickey’s historical drama imagines the life of Maria Celeste, daughter of the famous Renaissance astronomer, as she is caught up in the religious controversies surrounding her dad (i.e., the Inquisition’s threat of torture for his “blasphemous” notion that the Earth moves around the sun). Moving back and forth in time as a contemporary playwright studies the letters between the father and daughter, Dickey’s play serves as “a personal examination of faith, forgiveness, and the cost of heeding one’s truth.” 4/5-5/14, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, remybumppo.org, $10-$40

Is God Is

Aleshea Harris’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down got two blistering productions last year with Congo Square Theatre (the second time in association with Lookingglass Theatre). Now A Red Orchid Theatre presents the Chicago premiere of Harris’s 2018 Obie Award-winning drama, Is God Is , under the