AS YOU LIKE IT Folio Theatre Company For me, half the fun of Shakespeare is the period costumes–men in tights, women in gowns, women in tights disguised as men. I’ve seen too many companies update the look and setting of his plays with no other intent than to show off their own cleverness. But recently […]
Tag: Vol. 22 No. 36
Issue of Jun. 17 – 23, 1993
Posted inArts & Culture
Grant Park Symphony Orchestra
In the 50s and 60s Roberta Peters reigned as the all-American belle at the Met, specializing in soubrette roles that suited her pert, pretty looks and light, charming voice. She was never a great diva. But what she lacked in natural talents she made up in the acting department. Her Ariadne (in the Richard Strauss […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In So Many Words, Part One: The Most of Shave
IN SO MANY WORDS, PART ONE: THE MOST OF SHAVE Doorika Unfortunately for those of us who endured the 70s they seem to be back–with a vengeance–in everything from fashion to the movies. There was a sort of amoral “anything goes” atmosphere for a time, a rancid smoke from the disillusionment of the 1960s. In […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Sports Section
Charles Barkley called it “the greatest basketball game I ever played in.” Let it reflect on Barkley that it was an awkward, ugly, scrapping battle, the sort that routinely results when two teams are not given adequate time to travel long distances between games in the National Basketball Association finals–the sort, also, it should be […]
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Restaurant Tours: can this address be saved?
It’s a little scary when a terrific new place opens up in what’s consistently been a restaurant burial ground. In the case of the Marc, one can only hope that it will break the jinx on its address. It certainly deserves to. Its River North location, on Superior east of Orleans, would seem to be […]
Posted inFilm
Missing the Target
Who is correct? Are we becoming better off or worse off? Where are we heading? It depends on whom you mean by “we.” –Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations “Men never get this movie,” a woman says to her friend in Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle, referring to Leo McCarey’s 1957 An Affair to […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Fight the towers: south-siders protest Com Ed transmission lines
When Commonwealth Edison installed a transmission tower along the old railroad yards just southeast of Garfield Boulevard (55th Street) and the Dan Ryan, it wasn’t cause for alarm. That was in March, long before people in the neighborhood knew much about electric and magnetic fields or the damage they might cause inside the body. Now […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story New York governor Mario Cuomo demanded in early May that Oklahoma return Thomas Grasso to New York so that he can serve a 20-year-to-life sentence for a 1991 murder. Grasso is on death row in Oklahoma for a 1990 murder and has waived all appeals so that he can speed up his date […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen has been largely an oddity for the last 15 years; starting in 1977, with the rather ridiculously conceived (Phil Spector produced it) Death of a Ladies’ Man, he’s evolved into something close to a novelty act: a beat stand-up comic dabbling in music. On a typical album he bandies about portentous buzzwords (referring […]
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Political Projections
OYVIND FAHLSTROM at Feigen Incorporated, through July 3 Among my favorite works in the Oyvind Fahlstrom show at Feigen are four prints called Column. Each is a dense jumble of brightly colored curved and rectangular shapes. Each contains a hand-printed text, most contain small comic-book-like figures, and some have charts or graphs. The content of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Animals
It’s Western man’s misfortune to regard being an animal as a problem–to wish to shed his appetites and instincts so as to be no longer a monster in the great Chain of Being, half animal and half angel. Dancer and performance artist Ann Carlson dares to affirm the animal. She’s not afraid to take the […]
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Go Girls!
GO GIRLS! Victoria Goodwin Baker and Neon Weiss at Randolph Street Gallery, June 4 and 5 What is sexually forbidden to lesbians? For ages it was lesbianism itself. First society tried to deny its very existence. Then it tried to suppress it. But in the last generation or so, with the advent of feminism and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Q Two/Hollywood
Q TWO Puszh Company at Puszh Studios HOLLYWOOD Razor’s Edge at Puszh Studios Q Two, which stands for “Queer Stories II,” is about as diverse an evening as the theater has to offer. Comprised of about two dozen short pieces–stories, dances, poems, and songs–ranging in length from 30 seconds to 10 minutes, this two-hour, two- […]
Posted inArts & Culture
An Odd Couple
WINIFRED HAUN & DANCERS AND PAULA FRASZ at the Dance Center of Columbia College, June 11 and 12 Paula Frasz and Winifred Haun seem an odd combination of choreographers at first. Frasz’s dances often make wry observations on the battle of the sexes; but beneath their madcap surface lies a bedrock of fatalism, an unflinching […]