Greetings! Victory Gardens Theater Over the last decade or so theater has begun to look more and more like TV. The most blatant productions literally transplant shows like The Brady Bunch, This Week in Joe’s Basement, and Bewitched onto the stage, while a number of “legitimate” productions have simply had more in common with sitcoms […]
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 8
Issue of Dec. 1 – 7, 1994
Posted inNews & Politics
Ms. Miller’s Midterm
To the Editors: While I agree with Bryan Miller’s attack on the conceptual sophomority of Peter Sellars’s productions (“Mangling the Classics,” October 21, 1994), in bemoaning the fact that “lots of people expect to walk into the theater and have a fabulous, enriching experience when they haven’t even read the libretto or play,” Ms. Miller […]
Posted inArts & Culture
7 Stories
7 STORIES, A Red Orchid Theatre. A man dressed in the uniform of a corporate drone stands on a window ledge seven floors above a busy street: Will he jump? The people who pop in and out of the windows do little to discourage him–illicit lovers whose sex play involves simulated murder, a burnt-out psychiatrist […]
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
TERRY EVANS 12/2, FITZGERALD’S, 12/3, BUDDY GUY’S Alongside Bobby King, irrepressible session vocalist Terry Evans has added rich dollops of soul to Ry Cooder albums for years. He’s also worked with John Fogerty, John Lee Hooker, and Maria Muldaur; and after making a pair of records with King, he recently released his solo debut, Blues […]
Posted inMusic
Posture After Posture
R.E.M./An air of contrivance; Pearl Jam/Conscientious but self-conscious
Posted inNews & Politics
Minimal Theater
To Jack Helbig, Imbibing in those wacky hallucinogenic mushrooms again, eh Jack? I’m referring, of course, to your gaga review of Goat Island’s It’s Shifting, Hank [October 14]. Now, I’m not about to slam a group of individuals who are sincerely engaged in what they consider art; they obviously sold you, and everyone is entitled […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Shudder to Think
While grungy guitar bombast is currently all the rage, this D.C. quartet wallows in pop music’s most unfashionable idiom: art rock. Their tunes feature the saw-toothed dissonance of artists like Captain Beefheart, Slovenly, and mid-period King Crimson. Even stranger than the music is the fact that the band has recorded three records for the Dischord […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story On October 17 the federal government announced that it would reduce funding for food banks and other programs that feed poverty-stricken Americans by $55 million and that it was making $47 million in new funds available for make-work jobs and job training for the reviled Haitian police force. Undignified Deaths After an evening […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Star System/No Stars Here/News Bites
Star System As critical tools go, none’s clumsier than the star-based rating system, exactly the one newspaper editors find irresistible. In 1986 Jude Wanniski, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and supply-side apostle, launched MediaGuide, thereby advancing journalism’s self-infatuation to a level where it was now giving stars to itself. Two years ago Forbes Inc. […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Keep ‘Em Separated
Dear Reader, Just a short note to Jill Blardinelli regarding the opening sentence to her review of the Offspring show at the Vic [Rock Etc., November 11]. Where on earth does anyone get off calling the Offspring the Fugazi of the 90s, or comparing the utterly pathetic Green Day to the Replacements?!!! As anyone with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Senseless Beating
Stomp at the Shubert Theatre, November 22-27 When is a clever trick just clever shtick? When you take a trick to virtuoso levels, is it still just a trick? Paraphrasing Mao, can revelation grow out of the barrel of a trick? I can’t quite say that these were the questions going through my mind when […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Whipping Boy
The Whipping Boy, Griffin Theatre Company. Sid Fleischer’s Newbery Award-winning 1986 novel, a lightweight variation on Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, has been turned into an unpretentious hour-long kids’ show by playwright William Massolia and director Richard Barletta, who’ve resisted the temptation to pad the slim story and created a brisk little play […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Restaurant Tours: Jane’s vegetarian decadence
Near North is so full of pricey steak houses these days that it’s become a home on the range for conventioneers, Gold Coast fat cats, and other aging carnivores. But head west and you’ll find plenty of people on a very different diet. It isn’t just a matter of finances: the older set may have […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Hook, Line, Sinker II
Dear Mr. Henderson: How dare you even mildly claim that overall the scattered site program by the federal government is a success [“Scattered Successes,” October 14]! The federal government has been doing this program to us in Humboldt Park for years and all we have to show for it is old abandoned CHA housing attracting […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reading: Flying Saucers From Inner Space
Stories about alien abductions tell us more about ourselves than they do about anything out there.