Top Gun: Maverick with the Score Played Live at the Auditorium

The film runs complete and uncut on a screen above the stage while the orchestra plays every note of the score underneath it. Dialogue and sound effects stay on the house system; only the music is stripped out and replaced. The conductor works to a click track and a streamer running on a monitor only she can see, which is why the cues land inside a few frames. Hans Zimmer, Harold Faltermeyer and Lady Gaga share the writing credits on this one.

Adler and Sullivan finished the Auditorium in 1889, and the same arched ceiling that carries an unamplified singer also holds up under a seventy-piece orchestra without turning muddy. Flight sequences that read as noise in a multiplex separate into individual brass and string lines here, because the room was built before amplification existed. The screen hangs high enough that the players stay visible throughout.

Downbeat is 7:30 PM at 50 East Ida B. Wells Drive, one block from the Harold Washington Library stop. Sitting too close puts you under the screen and behind the brass, so the front of the dress circle beats the first ten rows of the main floor for this format. Grant Park garages run cheaper than the Michigan Avenue lots. The film is over two hours, with no intermission.