Pope Joan Bailiwick Repertory Let me state up front that Pope Joan, Christopher Moore’s new musical, is vastly superior to his previous collaboration with Bailiwick Repertory, the 1993 Son of Fire. Not because Moore has improved as a musical dramatist–he hasn’t–but because the new work’s source material suits the author’s strengths and weaknesses. Son of […]
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 25
Issue of Mar. 30 – Apr. 5, 1995
Posted inArts & Culture
Held Captive By Daydreams
TeenStreet, at Free Street Theater. The predominant motif of TeenStreet’s highly impressionistic theater piece is that of a young boy being held out the window of a housing project by his ankles and dropped to the ground below. The image serves as a handy metaphor for the young cast’s view of adolescence in Chicago, where […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Despot Measures
The Coronation of Poppea Music of the Baroque at Grace Lutheran Church, River Forest, March 27; repeats at United Church of Hyde Park April 2 and at Saint Pauls Church April 4 Claudio Monteverdi didn’t invent opera any more than Paul invented Christianity, but like the apostle he shaped an infant movement, setting it on […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Fear of Failing
Jan Erkert & Dancers at the Dance Center of Columbia College, March 23-25 Jan Erkert says that her Whole Fragments is about healing, and that it’s drawn from her experience of being hospitalized for two months with a spinal infection. The dance is filled with images of helpless bodies and nurturing caretakers, but its bedrock […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Exhibit: pictures from the edge
“As shafts of sunlight broke across a huge rock some fifty by twenty feet, I rounded an outcropping to find four monks carving and hacking apart the body of a brother monk who had died two days before,” writes Chris Rainier in his book Keepers of the Spirit: Stories of Nature and Humankind (Beyond Words […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Chicago Latino Film Festival
The 11th annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival, produced by Chicago Latino Cinema and Columbia College, continues from Friday, March 31, through Monday, April 3. Film and video screenings will be at the Three Penny, 2424 N. Lincoln; at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; at Kino-Eye Cinema at Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Haywire Act
Harvestide Shattered Globe Theatre Playwright Stephen Serpas has a pulp fiction writer’s gift for creating twisted, vivid characters: politically committed sex goddesses, polymorphous perverse FBI agents, cracked old coots with strange urban tales to tell. True, many of them are just a gesture or two away from dreadful cliches. The New England-accented narrator of Dogtown, […]
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Multimedia Circus
Ritual Clowns ImprovOlympic, through April 27 The Lazarus-Go-Round Kinetic Delta Cor at the Neo-Futurarium, March 23 and 24 As a teacher and codirector of the ImprovOlympic, Del Close has been a major behind-the-scenes influence on Chicago’s current crop of fertile long-form improvisers, among them the folks at Annoyance, the ImprovOlympic, and post-Lois Kaz Second City. […]
Posted inMusic
No Alternative
Oasis Vic, March 19 Weezer Metro, March 21 I’ve been hearing Q101 lately: little bursts around town in friends’ cars and a couple of extended bouts while attempting to drown out the horrific sound of a dentist’s drill on recent visits. During these past few weeks of sudden immersion in the sounds of commercially sanctioned […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chi Lives: Sanford Roth and the art of living
Students of Sanford Roth trek to his studio, apartment 2A in a loft building on the near west side, to learn how to paint and draw. Roth’s bent is to start his followers on exercises. In teaching abstract painting, he may have his students put down a color wash first, later encouraging them to add […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reader to Reader
A teenage couple, both wearing Bulls jackets, were five minutes early for a Sunday matinee at the Logan Theatre. There were a dozen or so people in the audience, most of them alone. The couple walked down the aisle and stopped at the sixth row from the screen. They nodded at each other and moved […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Repressed Memories, Ruptured Families/News Bites
Repressed Memories, Ruptured Families The unholy trinity of the American soul is the adult, the child, and the child within. The adult and child largely fend for themselves. But the child within the adult demands to be served; its appetites are exhausting and its gratitude rare. “Kate,” whom you can meet Tuesday night on Frontline, […]