There’s a war raging in Europe. A brutal clash that includes an entrenched repressive autocracy and ordinary civilians determined to fight for their freedom. Tyrannical power is vested in one […]
Author Archives: Deanna Isaacs
Posted inOn Culture
‘Are we calling this an invasion? It’s really a war.’
There were two crowds in front of Saints Volodymyr and Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church in Ukrainian Village on a frigid afternoon last week. One was the medieval crowd that’s always […]
Posted inOn Culture
Offense intended
A couple of couches and a video player have been set up in the little balcony lobby outside the fourth floor exhibition hall at the Chicago Cultural Center. If you […]
Posted inOn Culture
A survivor’s tour of Auschwitz
She didn’t want to talk about it. Fritzie Fritzshall survived Auschwitz, came to Chicago, and built what most of us are lucky enough to think of as a normal life, […]
Posted inOn Culture
Arts folk: what would you do with $20 million?
How bad is COVID-19 damage to the arts sector? Arts Alliance Illinois says it’s been researching that question and will be releasing the results any day now. I didn’t have […]
Posted inOn Culture
Thompson Center survival is glad tidings
Everybody knows, especially at this season of the year, it’s a bad idea to look a gift horse in the mouth. But what if he opens it? What if he […]
Posted inOn Culture
The verdict on Chicago’s endangered Thompson Center is imminent
Trudging east on Randolph toward the Siskel Center on a gloomy, COVID-depopulated early evening last week, I heard something that stopped me in my tracks: “Mom, mom, what’s that building?” […]
Posted inOn Culture
‘Misinformation in listicle format’
I was spending a day in bed with a laptop when I got an e-mail from a reader linking to an article titled “20 Essential Studies that Raise Grave Doubts […]
Posted inOn Culture
‘Undying Love’: the Opera
Composer and tenor Steve Wallace says the first time he heard the Nas song “Undying Love,” the final track on the rapper’s 1999 album I Am . . ., “I […]
Posted inArts & Culture
What a concept!
Barrie Kosky’s magic take on Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which has been circling the globe for nearly a decade and seen by 700,000 people, landed on the Lyric Opera Stage […]
Posted inOn Culture
‘The narrative was the key’
Reader cofounder and original editor Bob Roth had some radical ideas about editors. He didn’t want them to prescribe what went into the paper, or to solicit it. He wanted […]
Posted inOn Culture
No assignments, no deadlines, no promises, no job
It’s 1980, and I am unemployed. After giving up a staff writer job at the esteemed St. Petersburg Times to return to Chicago, I have found myself, as the saying […]
Posted inOn Culture
A more local Chicago Architecture Biennial
The Chicago Architecture Biennial focuses on a “deeper engagement with the local community” in “The Available City.”
Posted inPerforming Arts Review
Good medicine
This take on Gaetano Donizetti’s 1832 comic opera, L’elisir d’amore, is a two-act antidote for our COVID-plagued reality. Cleverly directed by Daniel Slater and beautifully designed by Robert Innes Hopkins, […]
Posted inPerforming Arts Review
Risking all for opera
A Verdi classic, a twist on Bizet, and a doubleheader of new work kick off the opera season in Chicago.