HELEN LEVITT at the Art Institute, through May 2 Helen Levitt’s photographs are gentle, delicate, subtle. Seen a few at a time, or reproduced in books, they may seem only documents of diverse street people–the elderly, the middle-aged, and especially children–caught in positions perfectly expressive of their uniqueness. This in itself is not an inconsiderable […]
Tag: Vol. 22 No. 25
Issue of Apr. 1 – 7, 1993
Posted inNews & Politics
City Colleges Showdown
The faculty contract expires in June. The battle lines are drawn and the opening shots have been fired. Caught in the middle are the students who can’t get the courses they need.
Posted inArts & Culture
The Love of the Nightingale
First, I’ve just got to mention that a good part of the audience at The Love of the Nightingale left during intermission. That’s funny, I thought, because I kinda liked this play. It’s such a good story–all about love, lust, rape, and honor, a modern twist on Greek tragedy written by one of England’s leading […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Candlelight’s Bust: Moe Money Less Than Expected/Steppenwolf’s Broadway Scramble/Eliza Doolittle Meets Dr. Kildare/Gross Competence
Bill Pullinsi of Candlelight Dinner Playhouse: Critic’s said “Go” to Five Guys Named Moe, but business is slow.
Posted inNews & Politics
Talking trash: City Hall’s spat with Uptown Recycling
For the last four years an uneasy alliance has existed between Uptown Recycling and the Daley administration. During that time the city paid Uptown an average of $50,000 a year to send vans from house to house on the north side, collecting bottles, cans, and newspapers to be recycled. But Uptown’s operators never shied from […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A Man of Inaction
THE END OF THE ROAD Roadworks Productions at the Synergy Center There is a peculiar problem in adapting John Barth’s novel The End of the Road for the stage. The central character and narrator, a man named Jacob Horner, is almost utterly passive. He suffers from a debilitating psychological condition that renders him, as he […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Restaurant Tours: food without a country
Ursula Davids, matriarch of the family that runs Pastiche restaurant, likes to call its food “cuisine without borders.” You might have inferred something like that from the name, just as the name of Stewart Parsons’s restaurant, Gypsy, suggests the chef’s culinary meanderings across national and cultural frontiers. Both of these relatively new spots are heavily […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Freefall
FREEFALL Victory Gardens Theater You’ve got these two brothers: one’s an ex-con trying to keep clean, the other’s a cop who’s given up his beat to work a cushy desk job. The cop has tried to distance himself from the brother he once threw in jail for being a dope fiend and a thief, while […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Charles Earland
Nobody carries the organ-combo torch like Charles Earland, and he runs the gamut with it–from ass-kicking hard-bop lines to sloppily sentimental ballads to shuffle beats that trade on the urgent undercurrent of black pop music from the 70s and 80s. The organ combo is a stripped-down format that traditionally comprises drums, guitar and/or saxophone, and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Performance 93
Ancestor to the TV newsmagazine and the topical revue, the living newspaper was born in a jazz-age cabaret in Germany. Consisting of sketches, satirical songs, and dramatic reenactments based on stories clipped from the paper, the living newspaper had a didactic intent. In Weimar Germany, politically active artists used living newspapers to bring radical opinions […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mississippi Heat
Mississippi Heat could easily have been a dreary revivalist outfit, the blues equivalent of those ersatz “Dixieland” bands that tootle for the yahoos in overpriced bistros along Bourbon Street during convention season. But guitarist Billy Flynn is a fiery, emotional player for whom the old blues sounds are as urgent now as they were for […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Eye of the Tagger
THE GRAFFITI SHOW at Randolph Street Gallery, through April 10 Randolph Street Gallery’s “The Graffiti Show: A Hip Hop Phenomenon,” showcases the work of artists whose primary medium is spray paint. It’s an exhibition by artists who work on walls, not canvas, and whose pictures are more frequently regarded as criminal acts than artistic expressions. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Rose Tattoo
THE ROSE TATTOO Bailiwick Repertory “Madonna santa!” exclaims the widowed Serafina Delle Rose, gazing upon the young man who will become her lover. “The beautiful body of my husband–with the head of a clown!” And that, says Tennessee Williams, is the face and form of true love. Though rightly called one of the author’s “most […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Corrections
To the editors: In my story “Honda Discord” (March 26) I mistakenly credited Calvin Jones and Mitchell Caton as contributors to the mural The Wall of Respect. In addition, the original Regal Theatre was situated at 47th and South Parkway, not South Lake Park. My apologies. Grant Pick Editors’ note: In addition, we were misinformed […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Comment: The Year of the L-Rumor
It’s been wielded against Donna Shalala, Janet Reno, and now Hillary Rodham Clinton. Radical queers and right-wingers alike are eager to see a lesbian lurking behind every bush.