Posted inMusic

Buddy Guy–The Very Best of Buddy Guy/The Complete Chess Studio Recordings/My Time After Awhile

THE VERY BEST OF BUDDY GUY Rhino 70280 BUDDY GUY–THE COMPLETE CHESS STUDIO RECORDINGS Chess/MCA 9337 BUDDY GUY–MY TIME AFTER AWHILE Vanguard 141/42 It never fails: a legendary bluesman, after years of scuffling that brought little financial success but made him well-known among black listeners and later a legend among white aficionados, finally wins mainstream […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Eddie Palmieri

It’s not hard to see why Eddie Palmieri was once dubbed salsa’s answer to Duke Ellington; to borrow a favorite Ellington encomium, Palmieri’s music often is indeed “beyond category.” Like Ellington, Palmieri is a pianist, composer, and bandleader, and like Ellington he generates a remarkable and unquestionably artistic excitement: it stems not from synthetic pseudo-Latin […]

Posted inArts & Culture

The Royal Hunt of the Sun

THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN Interplay Most recent dramatic treatments of the colonization of the New World dwell on the political ramifications. Writing in 1964, however, Peter Shaffer saw the Spanish conquest of the Peruvian empire as a conflict in theologies–the same conflict that he argues in Equus and secularizes in The Private Ear, […]

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Miss Saigon

MISS SAIGON Auditorium Theatre Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schonberg, and Cameron Mackintosh sure have canny timing. Their previous collaboration, Les Miserables, epitomized the phony populism of the Reagan-Thatcher era: a lavish entertainment that preached sympathy for the poor, and a hypocritical celebration of the revolutionary impulse that actually drove home a counterrevolutionary message (the student rebellion […]

Posted inNews & Politics

Another Reader Racist

To the editors: I am writing in reference to your article titled “Superchurch” that appeared in the August 7 issue of the Reader. On page 16 I found the end of the first paragraph quite disturbing. You wrote, and I quote, “They’re a slice of middle-class suburbia: husbands and wives with small children and toddlers, […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Off the Wallem

OFF THE WALLEM at the Bop Shop We live in an age that takes itself far too seriously, when everyone from the most puffed-up CEO to the most sullen wage slave desperately needs to lighten up. We even take our entertainment too seriously, which is why musical theater has become a temple for such brooding, […]

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A Company of Wayward Saints

A COMPANY OF WAYWARD SAINTS KKT Productions at Red Bones Theatre The best thing about A Company of Wayward Saints, George Herman’s stalwart 1966 comedy, is its happy, if accidental, resemblance to Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach. Like that exquisite film, it offers a passionate tribute to the resilience of actors and to the truths […]

Posted inMusic

Lindsay String Quartet

Close collaboration between composers and performers is a distinguished tradition that got its start back in the Renaissance. In modern times, the tight-knit partnership between Benjamin Britten and tenor Peter Pears readily comes tomind. Among the less celebrated (and frequent) but no less fruitful is another British pair: Michael Tippett and the Lindsay Quartet. In […]

Posted inNews & Politics

True Yahoo

To the editors: As a docent at the Harold Washington Library Center, I was happy to see your recent article about the library’s Chicago Authors Room–until I actually read the article [Cityscape, September 25]. Krohe’s idea of memorializing Chicago writers by carving their names in a frieze seems outdated for the year 1900, much less […]