MAMMAME **** (Masterpiece) Directed by Raul Ruiz Choreographed by Jean-Claude Gallotta With the Emile Dubois Dance Company. The more attention is paid to stylizing the screen, to make the quality of how it looks convey the meaning, the closer you get to dance, which is precisely that–the communication of meaning through the quality of movement. […]
Tag: Vol. 17 No. 3
Issue of Nov. 5 – 11, 1987
Posted inArts & Culture
Together Again
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE & RINGO Second City IN FIREWORKS LIE SECRET CODES and RUPERT’S BIRTHDAY Gare Saint Lazare Players There’s nothing very extraordinary about the material in the new Second City show, Jean-Paul Sartre & Ringo. Most of it’s based on clever but conventional juxtapositions: a boot camp for chaplains; a truck stop where hicks spout […]
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Reading: Litle Wimmin
Armistead Maupin was charming when he wrote about the madcap gay-boy life-style of yesteryear. But his “lesbian novel” is smug and condescending.
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The Mercy Ripper
THE MERCY RIPPER Cardiff Giant at CrossCurrents This is comedy on the cheap: three guys onstage jumping in and out of a variety of characters, aided by a few godawful wigs and a minimum of props. But one nice thing about comedy is that you can get a lot of mileage out of “less is […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Battle of the Budget: observations of a veteran Council watcher
The boys and girls in the Chicago City Council are at it again–haggling and bickering over minute line items in the city’s $2.7 billion budget. It’s the annual budget battle. On one side of the fray, there’s that band of administration loyalists–those aldermen who swear up and down that Mayor Washington would never, ever, even […]
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7 Second Delay
7 SECOND DELAY at Sheffield’s Radio, in its heyday of dramatic serials and farfetched adventures, offered food for the imagination in a way that television never has. Instead, the argument goes, television stunts creative growth by giving us such complete images that no room remains for personal, imaginative exploration. 7 Second Delay, an hour-long comedy […]
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Chi Lives: Eileen Deneen, still a prima donna
It’s been quite a career–if not the life of international operatic stardom she coveted–spanning, so far, more than 50 years. Chicago soprano Eileen Deneen began studying voice at 10, was singing professionally at 16, performed in everything from grand opera to supper-club and ladies’ luncheon gigs, and still possesses a clear, beautiful voice. Deneen is […]
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That Petrol Emotion
Caught between punk and pop, between their half-smiling Irish eyes and their teenage Beatle complex, between their powerhouse guitar-playing brother team (Sean and Damian O’Neill) and their slightly dorky lead singer (Feargal Sharkey), the Undertones ran the gamut from scrappy near-greatness to sticky goo. Sharkey has since become an extremely dorky ersatz soul singer, but […]
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It’s a Dog’s Life
IT’S A DOG’S LIFE at the Civic Studio Theatre A pit bull terrier that disturbs the peace–no, make that devastates the peace–is the nuisance that sets off a chain reaction of catastrophes in It’s a Dog’s Life, a new and cumulatively hilarious comedy now playing at the Civic Studio. The show is a collaboration of […]
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Three Postcards
THREE POSTCARDS Northlight Theatre The scene is nouvelle cuisine, at one of those restaurants where the waiter’s presentation verges on performance art. As you may know, there’s more to it than just sitting down and eating. It’s a complete social context that allows the diner to impersonate a gourmet, and the waiter to impersonate a […]
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The Epic That Never Was
If it had ever been completed, Josef von Sternberg’s big-budget 1937 adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius for Alexander Korda might have been his masterpiece. But a series of calamities plagued the production, and all we have left today are some tantalizing rushes–and this excellent 1968 British documentary about the doomed project hosted by Dirk […]
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23rd Chicago International Film Festival
The Chicago International Film Festival, now into its last days, will be holding repeat screenings of its prizewinning films at the Music Box Theatre (3733 N. Southport). Tickets are $6.50 ($5 for Cinema/Chicago members); they’re on sale at the theater box office and the film festival stores (1419 N. Wells, 1157 N. State). For further […]