Tickets for the Krannert Center’s 2018 – 2019 season are now on sale. This amazing resource is on our Illinois English/CW bucket list for good reason.
Student tickets are $10. Sometimes they’re less, but never more. That’s for every performance, including international headlining performers like Tig Notaro, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (even if you live in Chicago, you will never see them this cheaply), Savion Glover, Itzak Perlman, and the Russian National Ballet Theater.
There’s lots coming up for the literary-at-heart! The multimedia No Blue Memories — the Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (created with the help of our own Rare Book and Manuscript Library), Virago Man-Dem (Prof. Cynthia Oliver’s exploration of African-American and Caribbean masculinities), and Strange Window: The Turn of the Screw (recounting Henry James’s classic novella through “a sophisticated collage of performance, media, sound, and architecture”). Also, a terrific lineup from Illinois Theatre (did you know that the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a play?).
Our advice? Look over the schedule (if you’re in CU, you can pick up a hard copy in the Krannert lobby), pick out two or three performances you want to commit to, get your tickets online this summer, and mark the events in your calendar NOW, with a reminder a couple of days in advance of the show. You can easily exchange the tickets for credit towards a different event if your schedule fills up with unavoidable conflicts between now and then. See details on refunds and other ticketing matters here.
Overwhelmed by choice? We suggest a variation of our approach to signing up for clubs on Quad Day. Pick one thing from each category:
- building on your interests. If you’re a “three-chords and-truth” guitar player, check out the virtuosity of Brazilian guitarist Marcus Tardelli, Hamilton fanatic? Consider Sinfonia Da Camera’s semi-staged performance of Pirates of Penzance (Gilbert and Sullivan were the Lin-Manuel Miranda of the 19th century). Concerned about issues of sexual violence? Give your advocacy historical breadth with The Rape of Lucretia, a 1946 chamber opera set in ancient Rome. Have you lived in or traveled to Mexico? Enjoy the celebration of the breadth and depth of Mexican culture with the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico.
- expanding your experience. Never been to an opera? Puccini’s La Boheme! Trying to cultivate an ear for jazz? Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Ensemble! Wish you knew more about classical music? Air-A Baroque Journey with Daniel Hope and Friends! Heard of the Stonewall Riots, but don’t know the history? Hit the Wall!
- trying something unfamiliar. Virtuoso accordion playing? State of the art tap-dancing and electronic music? Puppetry? Classical music written in the past year? A multimedia production that requires viewers to remove their shoes?
Get your tickets now, and then, when the semester is underway and you’re settled into the stressful ebb and flow of college life, you’ll have something to shake you out of your routines and give your brain a break. You will think, “Oh, I can’t possibly…why did I do this…no…I have so much to do…” but then you will go, and you will be glad you did.


