In on the joke: Parties abound in The Harper Review’s latest essay and letter. Brady Santoro, diagnosing failures of political parties, blames humor, jokes, laughter. Elizabeth Eck, diagnosing failures of literal parties, takes up house music as an antidote.
Emily Sun, senior editor
Strange fruit: “Thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit.” So speaks Salome, heroine of Oscar Wilde’s eponymous 1893 French-language play that retells John the Baptist’s martyrdom. Wilde never saw it performed: its first performance in 1896 coincided with his incarceration. But the play lived on, translated and adapted into a 1905 opera by German composer Richard Strauss; staged as a 2008 production set in fascist Italy by London’s Royal Ballet and Opera. . It is this mutation that the Chicago Lyric revived earlier this month. Set in a grimy underworld overseen by an aboveground banquet, the show drips of decadence and lyrical, miserable eroticism as Salome grows infatuated with her stepfather’s prisoner, the prophet Jokanaan (John the Baptist), an obsession that ends with him beheaded and her killed. There is the silvery moon, the cold flesh, the tang of blood.
Musical and textual motifs intertwine neatly in its 90-minute runtime and, though the score proves at times mawkish, the Dance of the Seven Veils—Salome’s infamous striptease for her stepfather—is spectacular. By far the most striking setpiece is the Dance’s stacking doorways which float across the stage in harsh white light, casting surrealist shadows as the background falls away. It, along with Jokanaan’s understage cistern and ascending stairway, aptly allegorize worldly injustice and otherworldly hierarchies. Yet the main set and costumes feel underwhelming compared to other productions. Salome demands decadent detail to embody its erotics. The Lyric’s is, however, memorable.
Jacqueline Oury, contributing editor
Don’t read the book: At least, not before watching “Wuthering Heights” (2026). The movie is richly aesthetic, but only entertaining if you haven’t read Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. While there is something undeniably visceral about the adaptation’s absurdity and the fine line it walks between death and sex, desire and despair, the melodrama acted up by the film’s cast (Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, among others) pushes complexity to the back burner. The voluptuous garments, intricate sets, and tense soundtrack all demonstrate undeniable technical skill and beauty. But these seem better suited for a high fashion campaign than for a bleak novel.
“Wuthering Heights”—note the quotation marks, which director Emerald Fennel insisted on for the film’s title—raises the question of what counts as adaptation, and what makes an adaptation good. Critics of book-to-cinema adaptation neglect to understand the complicated burden on directors tasked with transforming a literary work, flexible in readers’ imaginations, to concrete cinema, which must be decisive in just about everything. Adaptation should first and foremost be understood as art, not translation. Faithfulness is not necessarily fruitfulness. Unfortunately, “Wuthering Heights” is more a product of Fennel’s time than it is of Brontë’s time-transcending novel: hypervisual, hypersexual, hyperdramatic, perhaps nothing more than internet argument fodder.
Mimi Mikhailov, contributing editor
Image: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge, oil on canvas, 1892–95 (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois).