Loves Light in Flight, ETA Creative Arts Foundation. Venus Stratford has an entrepreneur husband who treats her like a child. Halsted Bridges has a corporate-dragon ex-wife who treats him like a pet. Halsted’s sister and brother-in-law, Burnetta and Leonard, alternate between fighting and fornicating with the ferocity of tigers, and his best buddy, Earl, is […]
Tag: Vol. 25 No. 42
Issue of Jul. 25 – 31, 1996
Posted inNews & Politics
Mr. Mercado
Squeezed between the orange juice and a display of warm pork rinds, Congressman Luis Gutierrez meets his public
Posted inMusic
Rob Mazurek & the Chicago Underground Orchestra
ROB MAZUREK & THE CHICAGO UNDERGROUND ORCHESTRA The enthusiastic commingling of disparate ideas is one of the unspoken ideals of jazz, but all too often members of a given group display a predictable homogeneity. Not so with cornetist Rob Mazurek, guitarist Jeffrey Parker, bassist Josh Abrams, and drummer Robert Barry. Mazurek’s brash but lyrical attack […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Stories Technology to make golf less laborious: Two Fremont, California, men recently obtained a patent for a golf club. An explosive charge in the club’s head fires a ball up to 250 yards. (The club is not expected to be approved for tournament play.) Two men who broke out of jail in Rutland, Vermont, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Summer Shorts ’96
Summer shorts ’96, Neo-Futurists. Though the Neo-Futurists’ evenings of “summer shorts” are made up of six works by an impressive array of authors, neither show is sufficiently inventive or developed to command much attention. The two 80-minute “legs,” presented in rotating repertory, intersperse subversive one-acts satirizing middle-class ideals with didactic monologues from David Mamet at […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Real Life, Real Death
By Bill Mahin There’s no explanation for why this night has been like watching paint dry. According to conventional wisdom, Mount Sinai’s tiny emergency room at 15th and California should be especially busy. As one of just four trauma centers left in Chicago, ambulances regularly bring the “life-threatened” here from throughout the city to this […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Theater People: Micki Grant’s lifetime achievement
“In His Own Voice: Negro Begins to Speak for Himself on Stage,” proclaimed the headline of a 1962 New York Times think piece analyzing “an indisputable trend” in American theater. Though black life had been ripe material for dramas and musicals, the stories had usually been written by whites; but a promising pair of new […]
Posted inFilm
Once a Thief
Once a Thief In 1991, while taking a breather between his action films, John Woo churned out a stylish comedy caper starring Chow Yun-fat and Leslie Cheung as comrades in art thievery but rivals in love. Now Woo has taken the amusing premise of a bantering trio on the lam and adapted it for a […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Where the Wild Things Are
Possum in the basement? Skunk in the yard? Bill Andrews is the man to call.
Posted inArts & Culture
Life in the Trees
Life in the trees, SummerNITE Northern Illinois Theatre Ensemble, at Bailiwick Arts Center. Like George Bailey, some contemporary theater is just born old. This pleases theater conservatives, who like to think it’s still 1965 and who prefer revivals anyway, but it chases away younger audiences, who associate theater with the musty smell of old ideas. […]
Posted inMusic
Fourplay
FOURPLAY One of the best-selling bands grouped under “jazz” in the CD racks, Fourplay has turned a hefty profit by trafficking in unexceptional dance grooves and contemporary harmonic blandness. But to summarily dismiss the quartet forces you to deny the undeniable musicianship of its members–and the fact that they make this form and format more […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Importance of Being Oscar
The Importance of Being Oscar Irish actor Micheal MacLiammoir is best known to Americans as the insinuating Iago in Orson Welles’s film version of Othello, but that role merely suggests this remarkable artist’s legacy. With his life partner, the English director Hilton Edwards, MacLiammoir made an indelible imprint on modern Anglo-Irish theater; in 1928 the […]