BERLIN, JERUSALEM AND THE MOON A Traveling Jewish Theatre at Wisdom Bridge Theatre There’s a distinctly haymishe, homey, quality to Berlin, Jerusalem and the Moon. Not matzo ball soup haymishe. More like City College of New York haymishe. Irving Howe and Grace Paley, Nat Hentoff and Jules Feiffer haymishe. The haymishe of the literate Jewish […]
Tag: Vol. 17 No. 34
Issue of Jun. 9 – 15, 1988
Posted inArts & Culture
The Human Radio
SHERRI’S BIRTHDAY Georg Osterman at Randolph Street Gallery June 3 and 4 Randolph Street Gallery’s director, Peter Taub, has already introduced this year many fine performance artists, and the most recent, Georg Osterman, is a consummate professional. He performed his original radio drama Sherri’s Birthday with impressive skill, clarity, and passion, bringing to life in […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Medium Cold
Competitive ice-carving: “It’s not only artistic, it has many of the elements of sport as well, it’s physically demanding, and style and performance count for a lot.”
Posted inArts & Culture
Teeth
TEETH Queen’s Guard Productions at the Theatre Building I’m not going to get too serious about this one. God knows Teeth isn’t: in Joanne Koch’s life-style comedy, a free-lance journalist sets out to eliminate rape by developing a “defensive diaphragm,” which will bite back at an attacker. Angela Boldoni, our heroine, is the journalist. She […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A Funny Family
CLOSE OF PLAY Famous Door Theatre at Victory Gardens Studio Theater Simon Gray’s biting black comedy Close of Play has a very wordy script, filled with confessional outpourings and bizarre, elegantly articulated anecdotes. But the dominant image of the work is silence–silence so impenetrable, so final, as to constitute a void of understanding. That silence […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Three Who Dared: A Play on the Movies
THREE WHO DARED: A PLAY ON THE MOVIES Theater Oobleck at Cabaret Voltaire Despite being a major university center, Chicago has never been particularly hospitable to intellectual comedy. Second City lowered its brow years ago, and few other companies have sought to revive its original high standard; troupes that have tried, most notably and recently […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Escape Artist
THE ESCAPE ARTIST Victory Gardens Today’s aspiring young playwrights were born after television became a fixture in American homes. They grew up with sitcoms, soap operas, and Saturday-morning cartoons. Sitting in front of the TV for thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of hours, they absorbed the conventions of network television–inane dialogue, one-dimensional characters, superficial […]
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Utamaro and His Five Women
Kenji Mizoguchi’s first postwar film, made under the censorship pressure of the American occupation, might be interpreted as a story about the director’s own artistic confinement as well as that of the great 18th-century wood-block printmaker Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806). (A less offensive and more accurate translation of the title would be Five Women Around Utamaro.) […]
Posted inFilm
May the Formula Be With You
WILLOW * (Has redeeming facet) Directed by Ron Howard Written by Bob Dolman and George Lucas With Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Warwick Davis, Billy Barty, Gavan O’Herlihy, Jean Marsh, Pat Roach, and Patricia Hayes. As one of those spoilsports who actively disliked Star Wars when it burst on the scene 11 years ago, enjoyed The […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Behind the Tribune’s Schools Series; Ronnie and Mikey: The Lost Tribes
Behind the Tribune’s Schools Series The Tribune first intended its series on Chicago schools to run a month to six weeks. The series would go on and on, past the point of civic exhaustion, of course, but what an imposing public document it would be! Then editors thought twice. This was public education, after all, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bull Durham
One of the more delightful things about this sharp baseball comedy is that you don’t have to be a sports fan to have lots of fun with it. Written and directed by rookie Ron Shelton, the movie evokes Howard Hawks (in spirit if not in letter) in its tight focusing on a snug, obsessive world […]
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Kuwait Until Dark; or, Bright Lights, Night Baseball
KUWAIT UNTIL DARK; OR, BRIGHT LIGHTS, NIGHT BASEBALL Second City I think comedy revues compared to straight drama have a more active rapport with their audience. Whether or not a comedian “dies” onstage depends on immediate audience response. Thumbs up, thumbs down, everyone’s a critic. But there are all kinds of critics, from curmudgeons to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Calendar Photo Caption
Photographer Francois Robert took his original photograph of a five-year-old in a lily pond and manipulated it nine different ways. They range from weaving chicken wire through it to rephotographing the photo itself under water. Robert’s “Variations of an Image” are on display through July 8 at Betsy Rosenfield Gallery, 212 W. Superior, beginning tonight […]
Posted inNews & Politics
More Tina and Rosie: Self-Righteous Claptrap
To the editors: I am appalled by the number of readers who claim to be outraged by Marion Karczmar’s affectionate and engaging portrait of her former neighbors, Tina and Rosie of Cleveland Avenue [“Tina and Rosie Don’t Live Here Anymore,” April 22]. I thought it was a wonderful piece and I find it disturbing that […]