History, architecture and high-culture converge at Chicago’s Civic Opera Building, a downtown sight on 20 North Wacker Drive. The building is often missed by casual tourists too eager to check out the beach, Michigan Avenue, or the Sears Tower. Overlooking the east bank of the Chicago River, the building provides a literal throne for the opera, long regarded as the culmination of all the high arts, housing the second largest opera auditorium in the country, with a 3,563 seat capacity. It joins the Merchandise Mart and the Board of Trade building as another perfect Chicago example of 1920s Art Deco style, with its high, sharp lines and rectilinear symmetry. The opera house itself is housed beneath the 12-story “seat” portion of the building; the 22-story “arms” of the chair are office annexes, and the 45-story “back” is the main office tower.
The interior of the Opera House is equally impressive, evoking the haughtiness of ancient Rome with the modernity of The Great Gatsby. Visitors will notice that the same Art Deco flair persists within – from the main lobby’s rectangular stone columns to its high vaulted ceilings crisscrossed with gold weave. Within the Ardis Krainik Theatre, the main stage’s embroidered tapestry curtain is flanked by bold-patterned paneling along the balcony walls. Polygonal crests crown the panels above each exit. Gilt-painted gold leaf patterns and fine metallic grates cover the ceiling, reflecting warm gold, muted red and light green tones onto patrons’ faces as the lights go down.
The architecture firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White completed the building in 1929 for American innovator and investor Samuel Insull, a captain of industry and co-founder of the energy companies known today as General Electric and ComEd. Insull had a personal reason for building his throne…
Insull’s wife, Gladys, was a young Broadway ingénue when they married. In 1925, Gladys returned to the Broadway stage at age 56 for a charity revival of a production called The School for Scandal, in which she gave a critically panned performance portraying an 18-year-old girl. New York Times critic Herman J. Mankiewicz called her “an aging, hopelessly incompetent amateur.” (Mankiewicz would later go on to script the most critically-acclaimed movie of all time – Citizen Kane – using Samuel and Gladys Insull as inspiration for the titular Charles Foster Kane and his opera-singer wife!) Needless to say, Insull was not pleased with the review, and so he endeavored to build his own opera building for Chicago. It was to be shaped as a throne for his wife and the largest stage in downtown Chicago. Four years later, Insull’s 45-story throne stood completed. It remains to this day facing west, with its back to New York City.
Unfortunately, although Insull’s intention was to rent the office spaces to support the opera, the stock market crashed, and both went bankrupt. The building underwent massive interior renovation in the 1990s, upon purchase by the Chicago Lyric Opera.
For opera buffs, the Lyric’s season runs from December to early May, making it a very classy destination to visit during the winter and spring months, while other popular outdoor attractions may not be open due to weather. As for the music, each season consistently offers up a generous stream of favorites, such as Verdi’s La Traviata, Bizet’s Carmen, Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and several others, with a few less-known operas included every season for good measure. The opera house also hosts numerous charity events, balls and non-opera performances each year, with recent acts ranging from Itzhak Perlman to Oklahoma! to Wilco.
Reserve a seat here for this season’s Lyric Opera and other productions: http://www.lyricopera.org/tickets/index.aspx
