Saint Sebastian Players, at Saint Bonaventure Church. The premise of this late-night show–Elvis, brought back from the dead, turns out to be a vampire–might, in the hands of a troupe of brilliant comedians, be passably amusing. But as performed by this ensemble of “not ready for non-Equity” players, Jonathan Hagloch’s Elvicula is a long evening […]
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 48
Issue of Sep. 7 – 13, 1995
Posted inArts & Culture
Liberty
“I really don’t know if this is a good idea,” Mathew Wilson confessed to me a few weeks ago: he and Eduardo Martinez-Almaral were gearing up for their second seven-day, 24-hour-a-day performance collaboration at the Blue Rider. Last year, armed only with two hours of prepared material and a few simple props (including an electric […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Filed & Street
The reason we look forward to changes of season in Chicago is that the weather in each season is so awful that any change sounds like an improvement. I find myself looking forward to hearing about wind-chill indexes rather than heat indexes. Out in the forest preserves the leaves on all the trees are looking […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Car Martyr–Alaska
Car Martyr–Alaska, at Red Bones Theatre. If poets, not comedians, attempted the improvisational exercise called the Harold, the results might resemble Sean Farrell’s Car Martyr–Alaska. The plot is Beckett-bare: a young woman sitting on a bench by the beach is joined by a young man who progressively refuses then threatens to leave her. Farrell’s script […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Light Stuff
Eleanor: An American Love Story Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre Someday American musical theater will make it into the 90s–probably in the 21st century. We old folks will hobble out of our suburban town houses to catch A Place Called Hope: The Bill Clinton Story or Limbaugh: The Rise of an American Legend. Whatever, it will surely […]
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Dance Notes: capturing the invisible moment
It doesn’t look like the kind of place where magic would be done: a dusty, dark, cavernous space barely furnished, except with oddments–a Ping-Pong table so covered with papers it couldn’t possibly be used, a lone punching bag. Photographer William Frederking used to share this floor of an old manufacturing building on South Michigan with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bill McFarland & the Chicago Horns
You almost can’t go wrong with a lineup like Bill McFarland’s: a potent, hard-driving outfit that matches his throaty trombone with a beef-stew saxophonist (in this case Hank Ford) and a fluent, octave-stretching trumpet ace (Kenny Anderson). This kind of three-horn sextet first appeared in the 1940s, as a bebop miniaturization of the big bands […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Chris Gaffney
Southern California roots rocker Chris Gaffney has been bumming around country music and its fringes for decades, backing up people like Ferlin Huskey and Webb Pierce and pursuing his own ragtag solo career. But on his last few records, especially the superb new Loser’s Paradise (Hightone), he’s truly come into his own. The perfect candidate […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The tax tapes: community groups sue for assessment data
On one point all sides agree: over 15 months ago a coalition of northwest- and southwest-side activists asked Cook County officials for computer tapes on which are recorded the tax assessments on every piece of property in the county. Since then the activists, representing a group called the Institute for Community Empowerment, have called, cajoled, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Opera Factory
To celebrate its tenth anniversary the Opera Factory is venturing out of its well-respected niche of reviving the zarzuela, Spain’s national folk-operetta genre, and offering a welcome Manuel de Falla double bill. Arguably the most inventive Spanish composer of this century, Falla did dabble in the zarzuela in his youth, but it was the 1905 […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reader to Reader
We’re in the first inning of a little league play-off game, near the end of a long, hot, humid season. Nerves on edge, no one’s happy. One side says the other side has batted out of order, and though it’s just a minor error an argument grows to include several parents. The coaches are yelling. […]