The artistic graveyards of Chicago are filled with promising start-up companies that didn’t make it. Evanston’s Light Opera Works has survived by being crowd pleasers, performing a wide range of operettas, from Gilbert and Sullivan to Johann Strauss. Operettas are generally romantic comedies, with hummable music and fluffy plot lines that dont invite much pondering […]
Tag: Vol. 18 No. 32
Issue of May. 25 – 31, 1989
Posted inArts & Culture
Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
The only full-time professional chamber orchestra in the United States returns to Chicago for a special Orchestra Hall concert. One of the world’s most sensitive and accomplished chamber ensembles, its 24 players have an unsurpassed sense of color and line–and flexibility in performing music of all periods. The group’s present appearance is particularly significant because […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Property tax enforcement: Isn’t there a better way?
The west-side slumlord doesn’t want to pay property taxes on his shabby old tenement. So after five years, he owes Cook County about $150,000 in back taxes. County officials post the building at a scavenger sale for tax-delinquent properties, just as the law requires. That’s fine with the slumlord; he has his partner buy the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News Story
Within the inner sanctum of Area Four Violent Crimes, the City News reporter slouched at a battered desk. The office was experiencing the gloomy lull that is characteristic of the third watch, a lull that was disrupted only by muffled blows and stifled yells from within interrogation room F: the sound of an offender being […]
Posted inFilm
French Provincial
POULET AU VINAIGRE *** (A must-see) Directed by Claude Chabrol Written by Dominique Roulet and Chabrol With Jean Poiret, Stephane Audran, Michel Bouquet, Jean Topart, Lucas Belvaux, Pauline Lafont, Jean-Claude Bouillaud, and Caroline Cellier. In 1985, after seeing Claude Chabrol’s Poulet au vinaigre at the Toronto Festival of Festivals, I remember thinking: At last! The […]
Posted inArts & Culture
2 Legs and a Cane
2 LEGS AND A CANE Third Rail Comedy Ensemble at the Roxy Derailed? Well, not exactly. More like distracted. Even with a clear concept and a solid method to help keep it on track, the Third Rail Comedy Ensemble show 2 Legs and a Cane gets lost somewhere along the line–one of those phantom trains […]
Posted inNews & Politics
School Revolt
Cynicism and skepticism have obscured the astonishing intent of of the school-reform law: It is nothing less than a blueprint for revolution. On paper, at least, the citizens have seized control and thrown the bums out.
Posted inNews & Politics
How to Pick Up Aliens
In 1992 NASA will begin scanning the skies for evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. What will we do if they find it?
Posted inArts & Culture
A Tudge Romance
A TUDGE ROMANCE Playwrights’ Center You can put your brain on automatic when you watch this one. The only thing unfamiliar about A Tudge Romance, Elise Formichella’s vaguely likable life-style comedy, is the word “tudge.” I gather it means a lowbrow along the lines of Stanley Kowalski. A line from Steel Magnolias captures my sense […]
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Ballet in a Gritty City
BALLET CHICAGO at the Civic Center for Performing Arts May 17-20 Chicago is a pretty gritty town–an incubator for the blues, not the ballet. But under the artistic direction of Daniel Duell, Ballet Chicago has just presented its third season in eight months, and that alone is a significant accomplishment. Duell hasn’t succeeded in creating […]
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Lynda Barry’s Vision of Childhood
THE GOOD TIMES ARE KILLING ME City Lit Theater Company When we’re very young, of course, we live like animals–simply accepting the world on its own terms. By adolescence, we become so preoccupied with ourselves that we can only see the world as it relates to us. But in between, we pass through a blissful […]
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Chicago Fun Times: the hippest show on earth
“I’ve only been with this company for four months,” says Balthazar, the clown whose animalistic antics highlight the Cirque du Soleil. “But I’ve been part of its spirit since the beginning.” The Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil proclaims itself a “hip, new wave theatrical circus” dedicated to reinventing the ancient form. Founded in 1984 to help […]
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Traveler in the Dark
TRAVELER IN THE DARK Wisdom Bridge Theatre at the Coronet Playhouse Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer Prize winning play ‘Night, Mother posed a rather thorough defense of suicide. Go ahead and kill yourself, the play seemed to suggest, as long as you’ve thought it all through. Now, in Traveler in the Dark, Norman examines the hopeful flip […]
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Bellissima
Perhaps the most unjustly neglected of Luchino Visconti’s early films is this hilarious comedy, tailored to the talents of Anna Magnani, about a working-class woman who is determined to get her plain seven-year-old daughter into movies. A wonderful send-up of the Italian film industry and the illusions that it fosters, delineated in near-epic proportions with […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Young Artists
All day long, a puffy white sky threatened to wash out Alex Sanchez’s handiwork, but the Sullivan High School junior kept at it. Standing on a milk crate, he stretched above the other kids working on the Keith Haring mural in Grant Park, a thin paintbrush in his hand making little green crosses. “Oh, please […]