PIZZA MAN Renegade Theatre Company at Footsteps Theatre Julie has had a bad day. She’s just lost her tenth dead-end job in eight years, and it’s Friday night and she doesn’t have a date. Her plan is to trash her troubles at home, assisted by a few dozen beers, a fifth of Jack Daniels, and […]
Tag: Vol. 21 No. 49
Issue of Sep. 17 – 23, 1992
Posted inArts & Culture
On Tidy Endings
Whose loss is it anyway? That’s the bone of contention between a gay man and a straight woman who meet to straighten up loose ends following the death of the man they both loved. Harvey Fierstein’s one-act, part of his Safe Sex trilogy, is a short, sometimes fiercely funny, and finally poignant study of how […]
Posted inArts & Culture
La Petenera (A Spanish Sephardic Tale)
LA PETENERA (A SPANISH SEPHARDIC TALE) at Sheffield’s School Street Cafe Flamenco guitarist Tomas de Utrera is a man who believes passionately in the power of his art. He has said, quoting Luis Antonio Vega, “Flamenco is the means through which man reaches God without the intervention of saints or angels.” He has likened hearing […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
The season of the Chicago White Sox, which began with such promise after the acquisition of George Bell from the Cubs, came grinding to a halt last week. It was almost as if they’d proved to themselves after the All-Star break that they were a good team, but then reality set in; they admitted they […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Gary Primich
Ten or 11 years ago a young-looking harmonica player with a bushy beard and an eager, ready-to-please grin began to sit in on the Sunday morning sets at the Maxwell Street market. Most regulars knew him as “Gary from Gary” and raved about his knack for fusing dexterous technical virtuosity with sweet-toned soulfulness. Then, just […]
Posted inMusic
People Who Died: A Bad Time on the Music Scene
Mike Jordan came to town in the 70s and quickly became a fixture of the Lincoln Avenue folk scene; later he played in the Famous Potatoes, after they left John Prine’s employ. In the mid-80s Jordan had his own group, Mike Jordan and the Rockamatics, but a severe intestinal disorder eventually put him out of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sir Shina Peters
Consistent reports from abroad have it that Sir Shina Peters has successfully gone from being the raging upstart of Nigerian juju music to reigning as its prime new star: his 1990 Ace has become the biggest-selling juju album ever, putting him securely out in front of both King Sunny Ade and Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Survivors
SURVIVORS Playwrights’ Center A blocked memory of a childhood wrong festers; the repressed pain won’t let a hurt life heal or grow. Survival is just endurance, uncluttered by hope and untouched by love. But sometimes a therapeutic breakthrough snaps the spell, the kind of purging confession that, not incidentally, makes powerful drama. The one-act Survivors, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Dorothy Donegan
True story. I’m video-grazing a couple years ago and I come across a mid-40s film clip: big production number with a jazz orchestra on an overdesigned set, and this unbelievable ladypianist in an elegant gown. The camera angle, from above, lets us see a pair of flying hands as they combine Art Tatum, Rachmaninoff, and […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Strange Days at WBEZ/Quitting Words?
Strange Days at WBEZ A remarkable ten minutes of radio transpired last Monday morning on WBEZ, when Ken Davis returned to the air just long enough to bless the enterprise he’d abandoned. Bloodletting is far too common at most Chicago media and the eviscerated honchos too anonymous for their rises and falls to matter much […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bottom of the World
THE CONQUEST OF THE SOUTH POLE Famous Door Theatre Company at Jane Addams Center Hull House On a tenement rooftop in the sinking industrial town of Herne, four unemployed workers puzzle over the concept (and the pronunciation) of ennui, a strange disease that attacks “unemployed millionaires.” “They don’t even want to work,” marvels a gentle […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Urban Scenes/Creole Dreams
In a season when the phrase “family values” has come to mean a very exclusive club indeed, it’s refreshing to find an artist whose vision of family is so inclusive it might actually unite disparate groups on the divisive issues he treats: racism, sexism, and homophobia. In Urban Scenes/Creole Dreams, the final installment in a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Power Pipes
Spiderwoman Theater consists of two groups of sisters, the Colorados and the Miguels, as well as director Muriel Miguel’s daughter Murielle Borst, and those connections are readily apparent in the fluidity and intimacy with which the ensemble’s six members relate in this 90-minute, intermissionless performance piece. But Power Pipes is also concerned with a larger […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Just What the Doctor Ordered
To the editors: [Re: “Doctors for National Health,” August 24] I am a retired paramedic and I used to work at DOCTORS’ HOSPITAL in my “hometown,” Coral Gables, Florida. The doctors and nurses and us paramedics used to talk about the AMA using their power and influence and clout to convince and persuade the senators, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sorceress Emerging
RENO ONCE REMOVED at the Goodman Studio Theatre September 10-27 A compact woman with flailing arms and a tumble of curly blondish hair is being born from the darkened space at the Goodman Studio Theatre. A spotlight illuminates first her hands, then her face, then her body, and grows until the stage is fully illuminated […]