Mere mention of the name Milton Friedman tends to conjure up not the actual image of the man—diminutive, bespectacled, slightly disheveled, enormously energetic—but the intellectual boogeyman-cum-punching bag for the left as the godfather of neoliberalism. In 2017, In These Times republished Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s 2009 speech critiquing the ideas Friedman trumpeted from his perch […]
Category: Arts & Culture
Posted inTheater Review
Love, Chaos, & Dinner is back with more spectacular acts
Teatro ZinZanni Presents: Love, Chaos, & Dinner has been a reliably entertaining fantasia of top-tier circus hijinks since it debuted here way back in the before times of 2019. (For a few months post-pandemic, Cabaret ZaZou, using the same dinner-and-a-circus concept and some of the same artists as ZinZanni, played in the mirrored spiegeltent on […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In ‘Emerald City,’ Dorothy is queen
In Marina Ross’s exhibition “Emerald City,” she conjures a sense of longing, dreaming, and the desire to transcend the gritty limitations of reality. Touching upon themes from her last solo exhibition, 2022’s “Everything Was Forever” at Baby Blue Gallery, the Chicago painter dives deeper into the world of Oz, revisiting the beloved and tragic icon […]
Posted inTheater Preview
Fillet of Solo offers choice storytelling cuts
There is something about the coldest months that invites storytelling—people gathering together, exchanging tales, and keeping warm. Hence, Fillet of Solo, Lifeline Theatre’s annual festival of solo performers and storytellers. Every January, the folks at Lifeline kick off the new year with a two-week-long gathering of the community—solo artists, live lit folks, storytelling collectives, and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Rethinking our relationship to water
Julie Carpenter and Jane Norling’s Plastics S.O.S. (Save Our Shores) beckons to visitors before they’ve even reached 6018North. Installed on the iron fence surrounding the house, the sculpture spells out “SOS” in bright plastic children’s beach toys, mostly collected from litter left behind at neighborhood beaches. The piece is a fitting introduction to the gallery’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Be like Mike
Mike Nussbaum died just a few days short of 100 on December 23, 2023. BJ Jones, artistic director of Northlight Theatre and longtime friend and colleague of the legendary Chicago actor, remembers what made Nussbaum one of a kind. A version of this tribute also appears online at americantheatre.org. Mike Nussbaum was my artistic father. […]
Posted inTheater
The COVID generation speaks out at the 37th Annual Young Playwrights Festival
A young woman painter during the Renaissance hides away her passion for both her (forbidden) art and the man she loves. A nebbishy friendless accountant dies and finds himself in an unusual contest with a grim reaper (not the grim reaper—turns out there are several of them) to examine his past life. Two high school […]
Posted inTheater Review
Shrek: The Musical falls short by going too long
The whole time I was watching Shrek: The Musical, I hoped I was witnessing a pre-Broadway tryout—something susceptible to fixing. But I should have known better—it is a final product of playwright-lyricist David Lindsay-Abaire and composer Jeanine Tesori, who themselves should have known better than to create a stage musical for children lasting two hours […]
Posted inDance
Sugar Hill brings The Nutcracker to Harlem
When the holidays roll around for another year, many Chicago families’ traditions include classics like lunch at the Walnut Room, a stroll through Lincoln Park’s ZooLights, and attending a performance of the beloved Christmas ballet, The Nutcracker. When it comes to The Nutcracker, there are boundless adaptations to choose from each year, from the classical […]
Posted inGhost Light
Will Second City instructors go on strike in 2024?
In mid-February 2021, two things happened at Second City: private equity firm ZMC announced that they were buying the comedy behemoth, and the instructors at the Second City Training Center (and other educational offshoots of the company) announced that they had formed a new union—the Association of International Comedy Educators (AICE). Now nearly three years […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Small wonders
Artists often use their eyes to absorb the surrounding world before recreating it. Doctors use their eyes to identify symptoms, provide diagnoses, or perform surgeries. With approximately 125 million photoreceptors in each human eye, these small organs hold magnificent power—no wonder we call our eyes the “windows to our soul.” “Vitreous bodies”Through 2/25: Mon-Fri 9:30 […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Remember the orca wars
If there was one moment in visual culture this year that cannot be forgotten, it’s when social media flooded with celebrations of orcas attacking boats, an animal uprising against humanity’s environmental destruction. Know Your Meme reports the jokes started in May after a family of killer whales sank a German yacht in the Strait of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
2023 books worth revisiting
Try as we might, it’s impossible for us to cover every Chicago-centric book that comes out in a given year. So here is a small effort to make amends for that before we look ahead to the buzzworthy books of 2024. In no particular order, here are five books from 2023 by authors with local […]
Posted inDance
‘A doing done by practice’
On November 29 at the Logan Center for the Arts, five dancers begin by improvising to recordings of their voices sharing details—birthdays, favorite colors, friends—in Body Language (created by dancer Meredith Dincolo in collaboration with historian Tara Zahra through a fellowship at the Gray Center). In the postperformance discussion, Zahra says: Before we worked together, […]
Posted inTheater
In 2023, Chicago theaters faced the music and kept on singing
The world is fraught with wars and violence and famine across multiple nations. Our democracy is in peril. And COVID-19 hasn’t gone away. In light of all that, sometimes writing about theater feels a little inadequate to the global moment. I’m not talking about creating theater, mind you: the world needs art more than ever. […]