NUNSENSE II, THE SECOND COMING Candlelight Dinner Playhouse I guess you can’t keep a good nun, let alone an entire stagestruck convent, down. The fictitious Little Sisters of Hoboken (or “Little Hobos”) first showcased their irrepressible talents in the variety show Nunsense, created by Dan Goggin. The occasion for their wildly successful “benefit” was a […]
Tag: Vol. 23 No. 10
Issue of Dec. 16 – 22, 1993
Posted inMusic
Into the Buzz Bin With Veruca Salt/Schmitsville
Veruca Salt/Their reputation precedes them
Posted inArts & Culture
Il trovatore
The mass appeal of Verdi’s middle-period opera Il trovatore can be attributed to its overabundance of hummable tunes. But those same arias and duets also pack a dramatic wallop when set against the machinations of the melodramatic plot, which takes place amid civil war in 15th-century Spain. Manrico and Count Di Luna are twin brothers […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Joanie Pallatto
Joanie Pallatto offers an armload of stylistic contradictions, then matches them up in unexpected and often successful ways. She’ll produce a honeyed, almost cloying vocal timbre, which wouldn’t seem to have anything to do with the ecstatic, barely controlled rhythms of her scat-singing; the clash sometimes sets off sparklers. She has a trained and versatile […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Warren Goes to Washington/Trib’s New Sports Boss/Between the Lines
Warren Goes to Washington We have seen respected journalists at daily newspapers become editors everyone despised. Their aggression made them unfit to handle power. Or possibly it was the power they didn’t have; what were they now but cat’s-paws of senior editors, themselves the anxious satraps of some bullying Mr. Big? We have seen respected […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Critical Condition
THE VIEW FROM THE BED: A PERSONAL LOOK AT ILLNESS AND DISABILITY at the International Museum of Surgical Science, through January 14 Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a diagnostic tool useful in a variety of situations–but while MRI generates high-resolution pictures of the insides of our bodies, it also unnerves patients, who must enter a claustrophobic […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Currents: The Myth of Election Reform
Would the system be improved if the money were removed? A surprising number of informed voters doubt it.
Posted inArts & Culture
Jit
A pleasantly unpretentious low-budget musical from Zimbabwe (1990), written and directed by Michael Raeburn, author of a well-known nonfiction book about Zimbabwe, We Are Everywhere. The plot concerns a sort of working-class rural Candide called UK (Dominic Makuvachuma), who is knocked unconscious when he falls out of a taxicab and then falls in love with […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story In October in Bogota rowdy students jeered the president of Colombia’s prestigious National University, Antanas Mokus, as he was delivering a speech. Finally, Mokus stepped to center stage, turned around, lowered his trousers and underwear, and bent over. He subsequently apologized and resigned. Schemes Della Dobbs, 31, the woman police called “the snow […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Camp Comedy
SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS–THE MUSICAL Factory Theater SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN Metraform at Annoyance Theatre Jill and Faith Soloway’s The Real Live Brady Bunch made it seem way too easy. All you had to do was take some easily recognized cultural artifact–an annoyingly shallow hit TV series, say, or an endlessly recycled […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The World of Lois Mailou Jones
THE WORLD OF LOIS MAILOU JONES at the Terra Museum of American Art, through January 9 What is most surprising about the art of Lois Mailou Jones, an 88-year-old African American whose seven decades of work are surveyed in a show at the Terra Museum of American Art, is how many different styles she worked […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Stage: spontaneous Shakespeare
The crowd gathers quickly: an angry, weary mob still wearing their shabby work clothes, their dirty shirts and scuffed shoes. Dog tired but mad as hell, they mill around the door. Then, following some unseen cue, they begin to chant, “Jack Cade! Jack Cade! Jack Cade!”–the name of the leader of a peasant rebellion that […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Kast and Company/Paula Frasz and Kathleen Maltese
KAST AND COMPANY at the Harold Washington Library, December 3 and 4 PAULA FRASZ AND KATHLEEN MALTESE at N.A.M.E., December 11 and 12 I first saw Maggie Kast in a ballet class–she was hard to miss. Her age (50-something) and full head of white hair set her immediately apart from the teens and young adults […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Calendar Photo Caption
Curators Don Baum and Bruce Linn have put together a wide-ranging exhibit of work portraying figures whose lives–and in many cases deaths–have contributed to public awareness of social issues. Besides numerous tributes to John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Abraham Lincoln, Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars: Death, Reverence, and the Struggle for Equality […]