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 […]
Tag: Vol. 22 No. 2
Issue of Oct. 22 – 28, 1992
Sam’s Liquors takes on Wal-Mart: What’s in a name?
As Fred Rosen sees it, the odds against him in his fight against Wal-Mart are the most lopsided since “David took on Goliath back in the biblical times. Just the fact that most people never heard of me but everyone’s heard of Wal-Mart proves my point. With all their money and political clout, they could […]
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 […]
What’s Up at the Loop (Part 1)/We Do Not What What Will make Us Think
Dave benson/Out of the Loop
Dead in concert: Lucinda Williams’s fatal flaw
For nearly two decades Lucinda Williams has traveled a twisted musical path. Too bluesy to be strictly folk, too folkie to be pure country, this Louisiana singer-songwriter sampled several genres before settling into an earnest hybrid of styles that garnered her a small, devoted following but was too much of a hodgepodge for broad commercial […]
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, […]
What We Did During the War/Instant Issues
What We Did During the War James Bond Stockdale didn’t have much to say during the vice-presidential debate, but he responded frankly to some pointed questions a few hours later on Good Morning America. No, said Stockdale, seven years a POW in Hanoi, he didn’t think either Al Gore or Dan Quayle had the character […]
The Mysteries & What’s So Funny?
Taking as its jumping-off point the familiar cliche, “It’s a mystery to me,” this sprawling yet strangely intimate theater/dance/music/art hybrid, written and directed by David Gordon, peeks and probes at the enigmas of the creative process in life and art. Everything from making a painting to making a baby is addressed here; the emphasis is […]
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 […]
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, […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Festival of Percussive Dance
Flamenco dancer Manolo Rivera rivets your attention to his feet. He’s a marvel of clarity and, whether he slows the speed to the soft pat of a toe or heel and the merest whisper of a sound or speeds it up to a bullet-fast ricochet of steps, each flicker of movement clearly makes an individual […]