A charming and amiable Disney live-action feature, directed by newcomer Joe Johnston, about an inventor (Rick Moranis) who devises a gizmo that accidentally shrinks his two kids and their two friends (Amy O’Neill, Robert Oliveri, Jared Rushton, and Thomas Brown) to about a quarter of an inch high. While the plot abounds in improbabilities and […]
Tag: Vol. 18 No. 36
Issue of Jun. 22 – 28, 1989
Posted inArts & Culture
Oh My . . . Nuts! A Musical Tribute to the Late Great Mark Nutter
As songwriter for Friends of the Zoo, probably the most intellectually eccentric of Chicago’s improv-style comedy troupes, Mark Nutter demonstrates a singular flair for the logic of illogic. Like the work of Tom Lehrer, Stan Freberg, and Abe Burrows, Nutter’s songs derive their comic infectiousness from the refinement with which he develops their absurd or […]
Posted inNews & Politics
On TV: Secrets of Sesame Street
Its popularity is largely due to its clever use of double encoding–its ability to serve two very different audiences with the same message.
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
We return to our baseball teams unusually late in the season, to find that they have each taken drastically different paths. At the end of last weekend’s games, the Cubs were in first place, the White Sox in last. For anyone looking at the big picture, this season has been particularly excruciating for the Sox. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jeannie & Jimmy Cheatham & the Sweet Baby Blues Band
The big bands may never have died, but the jump bands–those smaller, looser, roadhouse-rockin’ groups that presaged the advent of rhythm and blues–certainly did. Except for Louis Jordan, the Savoy Sultans, and one or two others, the jump bands were obsolete by the early 50s. So the modern presence of the Cheathams’ little big band, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reading: Haunted by Ghosts of the 60s
Peter Collier and David Horowitz, the guilt-ridden radicals who wrote Destructive Generation, have smeared a whole movement with the blood on their own hands.
Posted inArts & Culture
For This We Need the Goodman?
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM Goodman Theatre With the ascension of Robert Falls as artistic director two seasons ago, Goodman Theatre instituted a solid, if unofficial, policy of ending its subscription seasons with big-budget summer musicals. The 1986-’87 season closed with Michael Maggio’s staging of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Restaurant Tours: serious stuff at the Historical Society
Though the name conjures up tinkling teacups and Nancy Reagan types meeting for lunch, Society Cafe is a serious restaurant. It offers an ambitious menu in a gracious, civilized setting. A superb sound system played Bach, on the evening we were there, at just the right volume–low enough for conversation, loud enough to take up […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Growing Together
Annals of the Frankie Machine Community Garden of West Town
Posted inArts & Culture
Somalia, Etcetera
SOMALIA, ETCETERA Theater Oobleck Somalia is that unlucky nation on the eastern coast of Africa that has been a hellhole of drought, starvation, war, disease, you name it, as long as anyone can remember. They have one doctor for about every 26,000 people. Somalia is a bad place to be born, but a likely enough […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Wrigley Field’s Stairway to Heaven; There’s Nothin’ Happenin’ Here
Wrigley Field’s Stairway to Heaven It’s a long haul up to the press box in Wrigley Field, and Bus Saidt of New Jersey’s Trenton Times felt every step. “This is pretty tough on me,” he told the Sun-Times’s Joe Goddard during one of their climbs last April. And when Saidt paused to catch his breath, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Dig, Volley, Spike!
DIG, VOLLEY, SPIKE! Footsteps Theatre Company at the Hemenway United Methodist Church Penny O’Connor’s Dig, Volley, Spike! contains elements of the “heroes lose, heroes work hard, heroes win” plot utilized in countless novels, plays, and films. A bunch of motley, sad-sack rookies/recruits/amateurs/nerds overcome great obstacles to become a smoothly functioning team of athletes/soldiers/cops/dancers; after an […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Episcopal Extremists
To the editors: I have a number of reasons for having been fascinated by Bryan Miller’s article “Is Nothing Sacred?” [June 9]. Christened into the Church of England, I joined an Episcopal parish when I moved to the United States fifteen years ago. Since then I have attended both St. Paul’s-by-the-Lake, home to many of […]
Posted inFilm
Undermining Authority
SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM *** (A must-see) Directed and written by Trinh T. Minh-ha. How many, already, have been condemned to premature deaths for having borrowed the master’s tools and thereby played into his hands? –Trinh T. Minh-ha Uncertainty is a difficult premise on which to build a documentary, although there are times when […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Gossip Was Her Business
To the editors: Ken Towers, executive editor of the Sun-Times, in a statement in his paper said that the dismissed Ann Gerber was hired as a free-lance “society columnist” [Hot Type, June 9]. Towers knew, or should have known, that Ann Gerber was a “gossip columnist.” For in every publication of her column in the […]