TEN NOVEMBER Wisdom Bridge Theatre THE LOVE TALKER and F.M. Rejoice Repertory Theater Company I have to admit that I’m only vaguely familiar with Gordon Lightfoot’s popular ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which is based on the November 10, 1975, sinking of one of the Great Lakes’ most fabled transport ships. But I […]
Tag: Vol. 16 No. 50
Issue of Oct. 1 – 7, 1987
Posted inNews & Politics
Bury My Heart at Lot 23
One of the state’s most important historic and archaeological sites is about to become a “private year-round residential/vacation community.”
Posted inArts & Culture
The Colored Museum
THE COLORED MUSEUM Victory Gardens Theater I am surely just one of many people who eagerly anticipated Victory Gardens’s Chicago premiere of The Colored Museum, George C. Wolfe’s off-Broadway success. There was interest in seeing the play itself–a potentially virtuosic series of performance pieces on the theme of black American images. And there was considerable […]
Posted inFilm
20th International Tournee of Animation
There are many pleasant surprises in this collection of 18 animated shorts from ten countries, but perhaps the biggest one is that the range of influences informing animation seems to be getting wider. While the terminal cuteness of Disney and the gallows humor of Eastern Europe have tended to dominate in the past, and are […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Restaurant Tours: surpassing pierogi
In a city where the term Polish restaurant conjures up visions of oilcloth-covered tables, oversized platters piled high with meat, potatoes, and dumplings, iceberg lettuce slathered with bottled dressings, and a rough-and-ready decor in either a storefront or a barnlike enclosure, Mareva’s offers a welcome alternative. Chicago’s newest purveyor of la cuisine polonaise is a […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
It wasn’t Ted Williams hitting a home run in his last at-bat, and it wasn’t Babe Ruth hitting three homers in one of his final games, with the Boston Braves. It was, however, the most moving event of this quickly passing baseball season, perhaps the most moving event on the Chicago sports scene this year. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Candied Portraits, Potent Charms
CHICAGO CITY BALLET at the Chicago Theatre JOSEPH HOLMES DANCE THEATRE at the Auditorium Theatre Boosters rarely create great art. Moreover, their efforts usually backfire. And unfortunately the new jazz dance Chicago!, choreographed by Joel Hall for the Chicago City Ballet, does our city a disservice, largely because it tries so hard to serve it. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Moscow Virtuosi
After a prolonged absence, Soviet musicians are once again being allowed to concertize in the U.S. The impressive parade of Russian performers into Chicago began last summer with a recital by the Taneyev Quartet; it continues this week with the appearance of the Moscow Virtuosi. Founded in 1979 by violinist Vladimir Spivakov and consisting of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Chanel Hopping
Chanel opened its One Mag Mile boutique last week–in a corner of the One Mag Mall that had been Stanley Korshak–by hosting a cocktail reception. It attracted the French consul general, the appropriate local glitterati, and several hundred prospective and past customers. The downstairs is a high-gloss rectangle; at its Michigan Avenue border is the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A turf fight in the Valley: Does the medical center have too much power on the west side?
From the western edges of the Loop, the medical center complex along the Eisenhower Expressway looks awesome and foreboding. Its buildings stand as if in a separate, self-contained world of steel-and-concrete slabs, completely detached from the surrounding unvariegated urban sprawl. Even when viewed from the westbound lanes of the expressway, the complex seems remote–like an […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking
A COUPLA WHITE CHICKS SITTING AROUND TALKING Live Theatre It’s one of the oldest tricks in the theatrical book: throw together two opposites, who incongruously attract each other, show one slowly coming to resemble the other, then split them up to find out who learned or lost the most. Usually the two are the opposite […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Stage Notes: laughing at the plague
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 […]
Posted inFilm
Fear of Feminism
FATAL ATTRACTION no stars (Worthless) Directed by Adrian Lyne Written by James Dearden With Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, Anne Archer, Ellen Hamilton Latzen, and Stuart Pankin. “A profoundly uninteresting married yuppie lawyer (Michael Douglas) has a weekend affair with a profoundly uninteresting unmarried yuppie book editor (Glenn Close). The latter proves to be insane and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Rita, Sue and Bob Too
Rita (Siobhan Finneran) and Sue (Michelle Holmes), two teenagers in the north of England who are the best of friends, lose their virginity to Bob (George Costigan), a suburban husband they sometimes baby-sit for, and before long their amicable three-way relationship is scandalizing the neighbors and members of their families, including Bob’s wife Michelle (Lesley […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Homecoming
Cantonese director Yim Ho’s delicate and touching film charts the return of Coral (Josephine Koo), an attractive Hong Kong businesswoman in her thirties, to her native village in southern mainland China. Staying with her childhood friend Pearl (Si Quin Gao Wa)–now a school principal married to a farmer, with a daughter-she discovers that her urban […]