Kiss of the Spider Woman–The Musical Chicago Theatre Does musical theater inevitably trivialize matters of great social and political import (to use Janis Joplin’s phrase)? Some people think so. Even as they praise the beauty of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s score for West Side Story, for example, they complain that it turned topics like […]
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 33
Issue of May. 25 – 31, 1995
Posted inArts & Culture
Scott McCaughey
Scott McCaughey–onetime Young Fresh Fellow, solo artist, and friendly icon of an almost forgotten, pregrunge Seattle–is taking advantage of a night off from the R.E.M. tour, for which he’s serving as second guitarist, to drop in at Lounge Ax. With the Fellows on hiatus, McCaughey pursues his off-kilter but dependably pop-based muse into all sorts […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The House of Bernarda Alba
Fourth Wall Productions, at Wright College. Most Chicago theater artists don’t study their own traditions, much less anyone else’s, imagining that a bachelor’s degree from a liberal arts college or a heavy dose of “commitment” entitles them to charge admission to the wholesale butchering of great works of world theater. So it’s no surprise that […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Singled Out
Dear Editor: This letter is in response to Gery Chico’s rebuttal [Letters, May 12] to the Chicago Reader’s well-written article regarding access to public information in city government [“Public Image Limited,” May 5]. Well-respected civic and community organizations and former press secretaries criticized the Daley administration’s policy of public access to information. For some reason, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Seam/Aminiature
At first Seam’s lengthy hiatus, which began last spring with the departure of longtime bassist Lexi Mitchell, had an air of permanence. But then singer/guitarist Sooyoung Park took off for Korea and returned by summer’s end with a new bassist–William Shin, a Canadian expatriate–and the painful breakup with Mitchell as grist for his song mill. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bold Girls
Bold Girls, Eclipse Theatre Company. Lop off the last 15 minutes of Rona Munro’s Bold Girls, receiving its U.S. premiere at Eclipse Theatre, and you’d have a terrific show. Deftly acerbic and bluntly honest in her depiction of contemporary Belfast, Munro has created four vivid and distinct characters whose grim secrets and foibles rivet one’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
MiLK
Ma’at Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theatre, at Victory Gardens Studio Theater. Life is harsh for little girls in the projects: the tomboyish Brown and the studious Shadow play at smoking reefer using pencil shavings and notebook paper and skip rope to rhymes about fatherless children. By the time the girl everyone calls Baby graduates […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Spring One Plants Alone
While making In Spring One Plants Alone (1980), a kind of personal documentary about a Maori mother and her adult son in a rural New Zealand community, filmmaker Vincent Ward lived with his subjects for 18 months, and the resulting film effectively captures the lugubrious rhythms of the family’s life. The son is apparently wholly […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sandra Hall
Sandra Hall is a dusky-voiced R & B belter whose debut disc on Ichiban is an encouraging sign that sweet soul music remains a vital force in contemporary pop. Hall is no fresh-faced newcomer–she’s worked shows with the likes of B.B. King, the late Joe Tex, Jackie Wilson, and Otis Redding–but until recently her reputation […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Personal foul: can a black man go through life without once being thrown in jail?
Eric Hudson only wanted to play basketball on the playground courts across the street from his Bucktown apartment. For that he wound up in jail. Police call Hudson the victim of fate–the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong attitude. But the meaning of his May 7 arrest, Hudson […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Michael Weiss Quartet
When you go to hear pianist Michael Weiss, don’t expect him to sound strikingly different from a raft of other pianists–at least, not at first. Weiss has a strong, clean technique that serves his mastery of bebop phrasing and dynamics, and a complete command of the idiom’s conventions and idiosyncrasies (including the ability to offer […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ivy
A flashback to pop melodicism wholly removed from rock influence, the catchy simplicity and soft edges of this New York band’s debut album, Realistic, and its five-song EP Lately (both released on Seed) parallel the synth-washed pop grandeur of England’s Saint Etienne: both acts clearly revel in sunny, weightless melodies like the ones Petula Clark […]
Posted inFilm
Acting the Part
The Perez Family Rating * Has redeeming facet Directed by Mira Nair Written by Robin Swicord With Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, Chazz Palminteri, and Anjelica Huston. Almost 50 years ago, when fair-skinned Oklahoman Jennifer Jones played a Native American in Duel in the Sun, her makeup artists went overboard in their efforts to attain authenticity, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Kills Like Teen Spirit
A year ago, Kurt Cobain put a gun to his head. For all that’s been written about his suicide, the power it holds over our emotions and imaginations remains, for the most part, a mystery. It doesn’t come down to anything quite so simple as great songs, a great band, a great singer, or “the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
Is there any basis to the stereotype that some homosexuals lisp? My sister, the lesbian, says it is cultural. What is the root of this? –J.I., Oak Park, Illinois We tread on thin ice, I suppose, but if Cecil won’t tackle a question like this, who will? Not being suicidal, I made little Ed do […]