Tag: TRG Datebook Sidebar

In January 1999 author Barry Singer published an appreciative essay about composer Vernon Duke in the New York Times. Duke, a Russian emigre who lived in Paris in the 1920s and New York after that, was a classical composer who also wrote some of America’s most unforgettable popular music–pieces like “April in Paris” and “Autumn […]

Cheri and Don Hood got their first look at Grannia, a musical-theater version of the life of 16th-century pirate queen Grace O’Malley, when their daughter played the lead in a college production in the mid-1990s. They loved the story of the fierce Irishwoman who raided Queen Elizabeth’s ships and regularly beat the English in battle, […]

Neil LaBute’s Bash: Latter-Day Plays, opening this week at Circle Theatre, is a trio of one-act monologues by characters whose normalcy masks the occasional nasty surprise–a little dose of bloody vengeance or murder. But that’s typical of LaBute. The playwright and screenwriter has been attracting and alarming audiences since his 1997 Sundance Film Festival breakthrough […]

The Unitarian Church of Evanston isn’t exactly Yasgur’s farm, but this weekend the 500-seat stone-and-glass sanctuary will host the first-ever–and perhaps first annual–Evanstock music festival. Five to seven acts will appear each day of the three-day fest, including singer-songwriter Bill Quateman, jazz pianist Fred Simon, funk band Urban Crisis, gospel, rap, and blues artists–even a […]

Among the 80 works on display in “Engaging With the Present: The Contribution of the American Jewish Artists Club to Modern Art in Chicago, 1928-2004,” which just came down at the Spertus Museum, were two by Louise Dunn Yochim: a stained-glass window design she did in 1980 and a 1948 oil, Mother and Child. In […]

The Chicago Human Rhythm Project continues its annual festival this weekend with JUBA! Masters of Tap and Percussive Dance, three different programs featuring an international array of tappers. On Friday the lineup is all women, including the first lady of American tap, Dianne “Lady Di” Walker, and 87-year-old, Chicago-born Jeni LeGon, who began tapping professionally […]

Ann Grube lived two blocks down the street from her current Hinsdale home for seven years, in a house whose garden faced north. It wasn’t a happy situation, she says: “In this climate, north doesn’t work.” Casing the neighborhood for southern exposures, she came upon a big English garden behind a 1926 Tudor home designed […]

Any play suggesting that a woman needs a workshop to help her find her clitoris strikes me as insulting, but Eve Ensler’s collection of humorous and, um . . . touching vignettes, The Vagina Monologues, has become a showbiz phenomenon. Now Metropolis Performing Arts Centre, in its first opening since Arlington Heights decided last month […]

The lobby of the College of DuPage’s McAninch Arts Center was mobbed for the season finale of the New Philharmonic in early May. Fans had turned out in force for the orchestra’s tribute to its founder, Harold Bauer, who more or less single-handedly brought professional classical music to Du Page County. Bauer had already retired […]

At 26, with a year to go on his MFA at the School of the Art Institute, Rashid Johnson is a bit young for a retrospective, but his solo show at the Noyes Cultural Center–a sampling of photography and sculpture from the past few years–explains the buzz about him. Johnson has said his work is […]

Male lions in zoos typically sport impressive manes, but the two that in 1898 killed and ate 140 construction workers at East Africa’s Tsavo River were maneless–as are many dominant males in the wild, says Field Museum zoologist Bruce Patterson. After terrorizing the populace for nine months and earning a reputation as evil incarnate, the […]

Paul McComas, a writer, performance artist, and musician, recruited the students in his advanced fiction-writing workshop from a noncredit beginning course he teaches at Northwestern University’s student union. The group of nine includes NU students and writers from Chicago and the northern suburbs who range in age from their 20s to their 40s. Last year […]

When Victor Herbert’s popular 1913 operetta Sweethearts became the subject of a 1938 movie, none other than Dorothy Parker was called in to help write the script. Herbert, a major American composer for the stage, a pioneer in film scoring, and a crusader for copyright, was a household name in the early 20th century in […]

The Evanston and Vicinity Biennial exhibit at the Evanston Art Center is the descendant of the Art Institute’s fondly remembered Chicago and vicinity exhibits. Alan Leder, the center’s executive director, says the older show went by the wayside when the Art Institute decided “it wasn’t so interested in promoting local artists.” This year, in its […]

Martha Dunham Matyas Schingoethe was born in Aurora on February 27, 1919, a dozen years after her father, Thomas Dunham, founded the Equipto company, which made steel shelving and other industrial storage products. After graduating from Wheaton College, she joined the family business, where she continued to work for more than 60 years, eventually becoming […]