Author Archives: Hugh Boulware

“If you’re an angel and you’re coming to earth, and you want to pick a body to be in, why not put a little flair into it? You know? Why go out and be some doof?” says Kevin Kling of one of the characters in his play Lloyd’s Prayer. “I wouldn’t. I’d pick somebody that’s […]

November

British playwright Peter Barnes set Red Noses in the worst of times, period: his darkly comic social satire, which opens next week at the Goodman Theatre, takes place in the midst of the Black Plague. By 1348, the time of the play, Europe had lost a third of its population to the disease. Goodman dramaturge […]

It’s a muggy July afternoon, and for this all-day show the other musicians are still plugging in their electric guitars when “Fast” Frank Raven begins tooting on his tenor sax. The tooting turns to honks, then resolves into an earsplitting scream as the rest of the Slammin’ Watusis crash into the first song of the […]

“England’s in pieces. England’s an old twat in the sea. England’s cruel. My town’s scuffed out. My people’s pale. I’m going to lie out now and burn for all I’m worth.” So shouts a character from Road, Jim Cartwright’s remarkable play about economically depressed northern England. The show, with ex-Sex Pistol Edward Tudor-Pole and later […]

Al Jourgensen is not known for being a do-gooder. Leader of dance club favorite Ministry, he’s burned more than a few bridges with music business execs and sidemen, who view him as an arrogant malcontent. But the release this week of Animal Liberation on Wax Trax Records casts Jourgensen in a different light, since he […]

Last fall, Barbara Lazarus Metz put out a call for mail art. The response has filled the window of Chicago Book Works with an array of postcards, foldouts, altered envelopes, rubber-stamped messages, and other objects having one thing in common: they were sent through the mail. Metz, founder and director of Artists Book Works, says, […]