CHARISMA Next Theatre Company Joe Butler mysteriously disappears from a party celebrating his high school graduation. His worried parents eventually discover him preaching with a fringe religious sect, and he’s rumored to have effected a bona fide miracle. Unconvinced, the boy’s mother, Maggie, takes steps to restore her son to his former self, a mission […]
Tag: Vol. 23 No. 8
Issue of Dec. 2 – 8, 1993
Posted inNews & Politics
Reading: Where Publishers Perish
Henry Regenry’s new book asks old questions: Why has literary culture failed to take root in Chicago? Why do our best writers always leave?
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s my understanding that sugar does not have an appreciable effect on human behavior, yet every teacher and parent I know believes fervently in the sugar “high” and the apparent wild effect on children. How did this nonfact get to be accepted as gospel by so many? –Michelle Murphy, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Artists on Loan/Remains Moves/Drooling at the New Yorker
Forget the turf wars and jealous fueds–Michael Lyons Wier says the art business is changing! He’s persuaded 12 other dealers to lend their artists for a show at his new gallery in River North.
Posted inArts & Culture
The Road to Mecca/Scene of Shipwreck
THE ROAD TO MECCA Shattered Globe Theatre at the Royal George Theatre Center Gallery SCENE OF SHIPWRECK Raven Theatre Athol Fugard’s Miss Helen may well be one of the most beautiful female characters in 20th-century theater. Never mind that the playwright realized only late in the game that he’d written a self-portrait, not a biography […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
Knives aren’t enough? From the Chicago-based newsletter the Rational American (November): “Real feminists–women who don’t whine about oppression, but do something about it–are active in the NRA…” Don’t lobby for kids, lobby for social change, urges Robert Halpern of the Erikson Institute on North Wabash (Erikson, Winter). “Building a reform agenda primarily on children’s issues […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Curve
Toni Halliday is a dance-floor succubus, the Morticia Addams of England’s recent crop of gossamer-voiced pop sirens. Seductive, haunting, and midnight-at-the-graveyard dark, her vocals convey terse accounts of romantic carnage (in “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus,” she announces, “We won’t be happy ’til we kill each other”). In these ominous tales love […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The ten-year war: How consumers’ groups beat Commonwealth Edison
It’s hard to feel too sorry for Commonwealth Edison, the $6 billion monopoly to which we have no choice but to pay our electricity bills each month. And yet a twinge of empathy might have materialized at the sight of Edison chairman James O’Connor and other company honchos stiffly standing at a press conference with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
British-born composer Bernard Rands started out studying in Italy with modernists Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, and Luciano Berio, then moved westward as his academic career took him to London, New York, Princeton, and San Diego. His musical disposition has also shifted over the years, from the continental avant-garde to electronic music to colorful neoexpressionism. Arguably […]
Posted inArts & Culture
F for Fake
The first of Orson Welles’s two essay films to be completed and released (the lesser-known 1979 Filming “Othello” was the second), this breezy, low-budget 1973 montage–put together from discarded documentary footage by Francois Reichenbach as well as new material filmed by Welles–forms a kind of dialectic with Welles’s never-completed It’s All True; as Welles himself […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Cult of Eternal Childhood
PETER PAN Center Theater “All children, except one, grow up,” goes the opening line of Peter and Wendy, James M. Barrie’s 1911 novelization of his 1904 play Peter Pan. The sentence has the rhythm of religious incantation, of a response to a prayer. Certainly the cult of Eternal Childhood has a long history–and it’s never […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Fluxus Manifesto
IN THE SPIRIT OF FLUXUS at the Museum of Contemporary Art, through January 16 FLUXUS: A CONCEPTUAL COUNTRY at the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, through December 5 Five years ago there was a conference commemorating the 20th anniversary of the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The original leaders were […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Pocket Opera Company
John Eaton is generally considered one of the most original composers writing opera today. Now he’s taken another bold step–setting up a small music-theater outfit that counters the pretensions and snob appeal of grand opera. With his traveling band of troubadors, the Pocket Opera Company, this University of Chicago prof hopes to reach out to […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Department of Corrections
To the editors: Many thanks for the story in today’s issue [“Chi Lives: the travels of Bob Katzman, bookseller,” November 19]. It was well written and colorful. There was one error that the public wouldn’t catch but my family would: My grandmother, 91, mentioned in the article, did not lose any brothers or sisters to […]