Springing ahead, and back

Stoppard’s final play Leopoldstadt will be staged at Writers Theatre in Glencoe in June and July.

Let’s start by singing “June is Bustin’ Out All Over,” the famous song from Carousel, the classic musical that opened on Broadway in April 1945 with a wonderful score by composer Richard Rodgers (the Brooklyn-born son of Jewish parents) and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II (born in Harlem, the son of a Jewish father).

And now, it’s on to several notes of the theater and music productions that are coming in June to stages in both Chicago and the suburbs.

Leopoldstadt comes to Writers Theatre

Tom Stoppard, who died last year, was a prolific, richly gifted playwright and screenwriter. He was born into a Jewish family, but did not learn about his Jewish heritage until he was in his 50s. Nor did he know growing up that all four of his Jewish grandparents died in the Holocaust. Leopoldstadt—his final play, which premiered in London in 2020, when he was 82 years old— frames the narrative of a prosperous Jewish family in Vienna. The play unrolls in five acts, and moves over the course of 50 years and four generations—from 1899 to 1900, 1924, 1938, and 1955.

This show, staged everywhere from Broadway to Boston to Washington, D.C. to Tel Aviv, features a large cast. Considered a grand-scale masterpiece, it is now being produced by Writers Theatre, with Carey Perloff, a friend of Stoppard’s for three decades, as its director. (Note: Delve into a rich exploration of Stoppard’s work with Perloff’s book, Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View.)

Stoppard’s family made its first move away from Nazi-era danger by heading to Singapore, but soon fled to British-held India in 1941, and then finally moved back to post-war England. There, he became what he described as “an English schoolboy.” He went on to work as a journalist (rather than assuming a university education), and as a drama critic. He began writing radio plays in the 1950s, and penned his first stage play in 1968.

Early on, Stoppard gained great acclaim for his Tony Award-winning play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It was only in the early 1990s that Stoppard learned that all four of his Jewish grandparents had died in Terezin, Auschwitz, and other Nazi camps.

Leopoldstadt will run June 4-July 19 at Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, in Glencoe. Learn more at writerstheatre.org or 847-242-6000.

Celebrating famous Jewish-American composers

Throughout the month of June, there will be a formidable series of three concerts at the Chicago Symphony Center featuring works by many famous Jewish American composers; two of the series’ three conductors—Marin Alsop and Joshua Weilerstein—are also Jewish.

On June 4 and 6 at 7:30 p.m., and on June 5 at 1:30 p.m., Alsop will conduct a program including Aaron Copland’s suite from Appalachian Spring, a piece created for a ballet choreographed by Martha Graham and later arranged as an orchestral work. Copland won the Pulitzer Prize for Music during the work’s 1945 U.S. tour.

On June 11 and 13 at 7:30 p.m., and on June 12 at 1:30 p.m., conductor James Gaffigan will lead the work of three masterful Jewish composers. The major work will be Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 (The Age of Anxiety), which includes a lavish piano section. Opening the concert will be two orchestral highlights—George Gershwin’s Overture to Girl Crazy, and the Symphonic Nocturne from Kurt Weill’s Lady in the Dark, a landmark 1941 musical—with a book by Moss Hart and lyrics by George’s brother, Ira Gershwin.

On June 18 and 20 at 7:30 pm, and June 21 at 3 pm, conductor Joshua Weilerstein will lead a concert celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, featuring five different works including Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, a tribute to that great president. It should be noted that Weilerstein grew up in a richly musical Jewish family in Cleveland, with a violinist father, a pianist mother, and his star cellist sister, Alisa Weilerstein.

Symphony Center is at 220 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago. Visit cso.org or call 312-294-3000.

Of, by, and for the People

YI Love Jewish and Arts Judaica will present the Chicago premiere of A People. The play is described as “a theatrical mosaic that is an exploration of 5,000 years of Jewish heritage captured through a collage of old and new world voices that explore how all individuals wrestle with, deny, or embrace their lives.”

Written by L. M. Feldman and directed by Avi Hoffman, the show tells the story of the Jewish people and its history through monologues, music, and vignettes.

A People runs June 18- July 5 at Theater Wit,1229 W. Belmont in Chicago. Learn more at theaterwit.org.

Hedy Weiss, a longtime Chicago arts critic, was the Theater and Dance Critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1984 to 2018. She currently writes for WTTW-TV’s website and contributes to its Chicago Tonight program.