Bloody Beautiful Salome at Lyric

Director David McVicar’s rendition of Salome now onstage at the Lyric is a visually stunning production that fully fleshes out Richard Strauss’s emotionally fraught vision of the Oscar Wilde play. It’s a great opera for newbies: you know the plot and it's less than two hours. It's got everything: tragic deaths, power plays, buckets of blood, a naked man and fantastic music.

Set in fascist Italy in the 1930’s there is a dinner party up above and a kitchen and cistern as dungeon below where much of the action occurs. There is the famous dance which travels through a series of rooms with stylized projections of Salome’s doll and the back of her dress being unzipped in a large scale graphic metaphorical depiction of some creepy intimacy between Herod and his stepdaughter. Shout out to the spare and compelling work of 59 Studio. 

Jennifer Holloway in the title role plays Salome as passionate and capricious, a spoiled child on the verge of womanhood with no filters or healthy boundaries, and a lot of hormones.  Her moment with her doll before the dance of the seven veils is heartbreaking. Her final aria with the bloody head of her obsessive crush is chilling. 

Alex Boyer’s Herod is a little too relevant with all of the powerful pedophiles leaking out of the slow drip of Epstein files. He is a character with much power and no integrity. 

Nicholas Brownlee’s doomed Jochanaan (John the Baptist) is a ragged holy man absolutely solid in his faith and utterly disgusted by the debauchery of Herod’s court. 

The opening performance had an added dimension: it was the show that was audio described by Martin Wilde, a popular describer who has made it his mission to include people with visual impairments in the magic of live performance: here he is describing the set before taking us on a Touch Tour.

  If you ever have an opportunity to take one DO!  We got to hold the little doll and her exquisite silk dress made to mirror Salome’s gown which has a luminescent design.  We also got to feel the weight of the jewels encrusted in the gown worn by Herodias (Bille Bruley as the beleaguered wife of Herod and mother of the hormonal teen Salome). Most fantastically we got to hear Lewis Kirk play Salome’s theme on the contrabassoon, a leitmotif made sinister by this unique instrument. 

It was a sensory immersion in the production before the rest of the audience arrived to take it in and it added a great deal of depth to the performance.   You can find audio described performances and touch tours here: https://chicagoplays.com/access/

While McVicar conceived of this production years ago, the story of a powerful man sexually harassing a young woman feels hot off the press and uncomfortably current. The young woman acting out in such a horrific way leaps out of its Biblical roots and asks us to contemplate the full price of trauma.  Hurt people hurt people. It is a sobering story for our difficult times and perhaps more appropriate as a bloody valentine if you want something more challenging than flowers and candy. 

Salome is playing for only 5 more performances through February 14,2026 at the Civic Opera House, 20 N Wacker (an easy commute on Metra if you don't want to drive in these blizzards): for tickets and exact show schedule go here: https://www.lyricopera.org/shows/upcoming/2025-26/salome/

 No part of this article was created using AI

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