A Walk in Chicago, Fourth of July, 2014

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A Holiday Tradition: Bad Video of Lighting Chicago's Christmas Tree

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Amazingly, it took about 75 years after the city's incorporation for Chicago to have its first official Christmas tree, a 35-foot-tall Douglas Spruce placed in Grant Park.  Starting in 1956, the tree became an amalgamation of  smaller trees.   In 1966, the tree started saddling up next to the Picasso at Daley Plaza, and since 2009, the city has gone back to using a single tree.  This year, it's a 64-foot-high, 6-ton Colorado Spruce, uprooted from the yard of the Theiszman family in Prospect Heights.  It's thought to have lived about 63 to 65 years before the big sacrifice.
Below are some photos from Tuesday evening's official lighting ceremony, with Chicago Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Michelle T. Boone, members of Goodman Theater's production of A Christmas Carol, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Dean Richards and Angelica Antondo.

 

 

 

 

As you can see at the end of the video, there's also a a new Christmas-colored rooftop joining the Chicago skyline. . .

The dome at the top of the Intercontinental Hotel now joins the Wrigley Building, the Hancock Center, 900 North Michigan among others in having special lighting for the holiday.  It actually sparkles.

Christmas 2011 in a Square Mile of Chicago

with the worst audio track on YouTube!

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Can Mary Zimmerman solve the Candide Problem?

Despite an artistic pedigree that included composer Leonard Bernstein, playwright Lillian Hellman, poet Richard Wilbur, director Tyrone Guthrie, singer/actress Barbara Cook, and dabbling by the likes of Dorothy Parker and James Agee, the musical Candide was considered a flop when it premiered on Broadway in 1956, closing after just 73 performances.

It's a testimony to the brilliance of Bernstein's music that Candide became the musical that refused to die.  In 1974, legendary director Harold Prince created a stripped-down,  boisterous restaging, with a new book by Hugh Wheeler, additional music by Bernstein, and new and revised lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, that was such a smash Off-Broadway that it transferred to the Great White Way and ran 741 performances.  Prince also staged a 1994 production at Chicago's Lyric Opera production that featured Elizabeth Futral  as Cunegonde.

The downside of the success was that subsequent productions have veered increasingly into the realm of burlesque, culminating in a 2004 semi-staged version with the New York Philharmonic where such brilliant performers as Thomas Allen and Kristen Chenoweth were reduced to acting in an "aren't we being funny" manner so arch that it made you want to throw up. 

Now, Chicago director Mary Zimmerman has thrown out everything and written a new book for her production of Candide at the Goodman, which has been in previews and opens, I think, tonight.
I'm scheduled to see it on Thursday, and I expect to be writing a lot more about it after that, but for now, here's some links to excellent stories by the Sun-Times' Heidi Weiss and New City's Dennis Polkow.  You can also access the Goodman's own program for the new production, which provides a very fine overview of Candide's history, and an interview with Zimmerman on her approach to this classic yet troubled work of American theatre, which is scheduled to run at the Goodman through October 31.