TED FISHMAN

1 week ago | newcitystage.com | TED FISHMAN

RECOMMENDEDThis production of Brian Friel’s celebrated, poignant and cerebral play brings forth all the magic that a great playwright, a smart director—Writers Theatre artistic director Braden Abraham—and a masterful cast can wring out of a stationary set, a few props and a whirlpool of ideas that grows ever deeper with each line of dialogue. It’s a stunning production that should be seen at least once, though I, for one, wish I could see it a dozen times or more.

3 weeks ago | newcitystage.com | TED FISHMAN

RECOMMENDED“The Listeners” is a new opera. It’s an orchestral masterwork composed by American Missy Mazzoli, who from 2018 to 2021 was the Chicago Symphony’s composer-in-residence. Mazzoli has created a bright and terrifyingly complex, often startling, soundscape. Her music demands all from the Lyric’s always superb orchestra under conductor Enrique Mazzola, and gets it.

1 month ago | newcitystage.com | TED FISHMAN

Once I am in my seat at a theater, I generally measure a performance by what it means for us in the audience. At any other time, I do care about what shows mean for performers, creators and others in the business of theater. David Grene (1913-2002), the great translator of Greek drama and himself an actor, taught “Hamlet” at the University of Chicago extension for a few years.

1 month ago | design.newcity.com | TED FISHMAN

Félix Candela, the exiled Spaniard whose long, innovative career building improbably curvy, thin-shelled concrete buildings in Mexico and elsewhere put him in the pantheon of the twentieth century’s most influential architects, lived, worked and taught in Chicago from 1971 to 1978. It’s a period of his otherwise often-dissected and celebrated life that until recently was all but forgotten.

Jan 22, 2025 | chicagomag.com | TED FISHMAN

A few days before Eileen O’Neill Burke would be elected the new Cook County state’s attorney, the top prosecutor in a jurisdiction of 5.1 million people, she tells me a story about her great-grandparents. We’re sitting in her campaign office on North Dearborn Street, where O’Neill Burke has laid out 15 old family photos on an otherwise bare table.