Tony Award-winning Broadway star Kelli O’Hara performed a bravura solo concert Thursday accompanied by that ever dazzling “band,” the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The production not only ideally captures the mix of the comical, satirical, fantastical and romantic aspects of Miguel de Cervantes’ story, but with its beautiful sets, costumes, projections, puppets and aerial tricks it also is an ideal showcase for the Joffrey.

Michelle Renee Bester’s 90-minute show is a quasi-autobiographical story that pays homage to her late grandmother. It spins an intriguing psychological family drama that homes in on the particular fears, frustrations and needs of each of that woman’s four rather different and troubled grandchildren. 

“Ain’t Too Proud — The Life and Times of The Temptations” is an exhilarating, at times heartbreaking, and superbly executed musical now in an all too brief run at the Cadillac Palace Theatre in Chicago.

Each year, the Tony Awards give special recognition to only one local theater in the U.S. Court Theater has just become the sixth theater in Chicago to win the Tony Award for Best Regional Theater. 

Arts critic Hedy Weiss gives us her recommendations.

“Two Trains Running” is one of the finest plays in August Wilson’s renowned 10-play “Century Cycle” that captures elements of Black life in each decade of the 20th century. And Court Theatre’s latest revival of this seminal work is not to be missed.

Guest conductor Karina Canellakis led the CSO in “Brio” (by Augusta Read Thomas); Robert Schumann’s lushly beautiful “Piano Concerto in A Minor” (featuring pianist Kirill Gerstein); and finally “Ein Heldenlaben (A Heroic Life),” Richard Strauss’ sweeping, fiercely emotional tone poem.

The current touring production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” playing Chicago for only one week, is an ideal example of how “a classic” can have a whole new resonance at this very moment.

The first half of Evgeny Kissin’s program was devoted to the triumvirate of the masters — Bach, Mozart and Beethoven — and he mastered them all. But it was the second half of the program, devoted entirely to Chopin that clearly held the audience in thrall.

The company’s 15 sensational dancers performed “Decadance/Chicago,” a superbly mixed-and-matched compilation of segments from nine of Naharin’s works. They were created between the years 1993 to 2011, during his long tenure as Artistic Director of Israel’s fabled Batsheva Dance Company.

The absolutely brilliant (and at moments terrifying) production of “Lookingglass Alice,” the namesake show of Lookingglass Theatre, first arrived on a Chicago stage in 1988. It has now been thrillingly revised and remounted on the company’s uniquely rigged stage. 

Throughout this play, Lynn Nottage explores the notion of intimacy in a multitude of ways, suggesting how different social classes, different ethnicities, and different sexes can connect, confide in, and also betray each other. Overall, “Intimate Apparel” is as meticulously crafted as its main character’s creations.

Pianist Yefim Bronfman performed galvanic renderings of Beethoven and an immensely challenging modernist work at his Sunday afternoon Orchestra Hall performance. 

The world may be in a terrible state of upheaval at the moment, but two different concerts performed during the past week — played brilliantly by the musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra — were a potent reminder that music is an astonishingly powerful emotional balm.

Arriving at the very moment the Supreme Court appear to be poised to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision of a half-century ago, this haunting musical is infused with an intensity and a cry for help in the very midst of a retroactive movement.