Some of the best performances at this time of the year often take place at the dinner table, with a recounting of the story of the delivery of the Jews from slavery in Egypt.
But throughout the month, there also are plenty of theater, music, and dance performances on the city's stages that have been created and/or performed by Jewish artists. Here is a sample of what's coming up on the calendar.
Joshua Harmon's 'Prayer for the French Republic'
The Skokie-based Northlight Theatre began its current season this past September with The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, a play with music that captured the winning relationship between the stellar modern artist Marc Chagall and his wife Bella. Now, in the next-to-last production of the season, Northlight-in conjunction with Theater Wit-is staging Prayer for the French Republic, a three-hour/three act play by Joshua Harmon that debuted in New York in 2022.
Set primarily in 2016, Prayer captures the history of five generations of a Jewish family who had been largely rooted in France and even granted full citizenship rights in the 1800s. But many Jews in that country were now facing a struggle with their identity, and were thinking about a possible move to Israel due to an unsettling feeling of rising antisemitism. As director Jeremy Wechsler noted in a recent chat, the October 7 attacks have hovered over his rehearsal of the play.
"The situation shifted so quickly," said Wechsler. "And it is now a matter of history versus a contemporary audience, with things changing from week to week."
Prayer for the French Republic runs April 10-May 11 at Northlight Theatre in Skokie. For tickets, visit northlight.org or phone 847-673-6300.
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World-premiere choreography
On April 10, 11 and 13, The Joffrey Ballet, backed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will perform four pieces, one of which is a world premiere choreographed by Nicolas Blanc set to Darius Milhaud's "Le Boeuf sur le Toit" ("The Ox on the Roof"), described as "a rollicking Brazilian postcard."
As it happens, Milhaud (1892 - 1974), who was born and raised in a long-established Jewish family in the Provence region of France, had to move to the U.S. in 1940 to escape the Nazi invasion of that country. Here, he taught many young future Jewish musicians, including Burt Bacharach and Philip Glass.
For tickets to these Joffrey performances at Symphony Center, visit cso.org or call 312-294-3000.
More music of note
* Itzhak Perlman plays and tells stories
Born in Tel Aviv in 1945--the son of parents who had emigrated there from Poland--Itzhak Perlman is one of the world's foremost (and most widely traveled) violinists. On April 21, he will make a one-night-only stop at the Chicago Theatre for a program titled An Evening with Itzhak Perlman.
The program is described as "a multimedia documentary that interweaves storytelling by Perlman alongside personal photos, clips pulled from Itzhak's Grammy-nominated documents, and music-making with Rohan de Silva, Perlman's pianist and friend of 25 years."
(No list of what will be performed was announced as this was written.)
Renowned as "the reigning virtuoso of the violin who notably conveys the joy of music," Perlman contracted polio at the age of four. He has used crutches for decades, but now uses an electric scooter, and plays the violin while seated. Throughout most of his life, he has made New York his primary home.
For tickets, visit Ticketmaster.com or call 312-462-6300.
* Emanuel Ax at Symphony Center
Mark your calendar for another solo concert. This one, by pianist Emanuel Ax, will be at Symphony Center on April 27 at 3 p.m. The program will feature Franz Schubert's "Four Impromptus," Samuel Barber's "Excursions, Op. 20"; and two works by Robert Schumann, "Arabeske, in C Major, Op.18" and "Fantasie in G Major, Op. 17."
Ax was born in 1949 to Polish-Jewish Nazi concentration camp survivors in Lviv, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. He began to study piano at the age of 6, with his father as his first teacher. The family moved to Poland, then to Canada, and then - in 1961, when he was 12- to New York City. In 1974, he won the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition.
For tickets, visit cso.org or phone 312-294-3000.
* And then there are two different Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts featuring works by Gustav Mahler who was born Jewish but, under duress, converted to Catholicism to become the director of the Vienna Court Opera. His "Symphony No. 7" will be conducted by Jaap van Sweden on April 17, 18 and 19, and his monumental "Symphony No. 3" will be led by Klaus Makela on April 24, 25 and 26.
For tickets contact cso.org or call (312) 294-3000.
*Catch them next time
A brief note of applause for two remarkable, and very different, Jewish musicians who gave stunning solo performances on Chicago stages earlier this season and are sure to return to the city.
At a matinee at Symphony Center on Feb. 2, Alexandre Kantorow, 28--the French-born pianist from a family of Russian-Jewish roots--gave a stunning solo performance of works by Brahms, Liszt and Rachmaninov, and topped it all off with a bravura rendering of Bach's "Chaconne in D Minor," arranged by Brahms and played entirely with the left hand. Remarkable.
Then, on the evening of Feb. 13, in the cabaret theater of Epiphany Center, the multi-talented Ian Maksin - the Russian-born son of a Jewish father and Ukrainian mother - cast a spell over his audience with a wide range of music. A bravura cellist and guitarist, he also can sing in more than a dozen languages. And while he continually travels the world to perform, he makes his home in Chicago, and will be back to perform at Epiphany later this year.
Hedy Weiss, a longtime Chicago arts critic, was the Theater and Dance Critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1984 to 2018, and currently writes for WTTW-TV's website and contributes to the Chicago Tonight program.
