Illegitimate Players, at the Bailiwick Arts Center. What The Naked Gun did for–or rather to–detective films, this seasonal send-up does for the family classics of Charles Dickens: it stretches the contrivances permeating his work to ridiculous lengths. In Doug Armstrong, Keith Cooper, and Maureen Morley’s script, skinflint Scrooge turns out to be the uncle of […]
Tag: Vol. 25 No. 9
Issue of Dec. 7 – 13, 1995
Posted inArts & Culture
Ghost of Christmas Past
Everyman Steppenwolf Theatre Company Theaters in Chicago go a little nuts at Christmas, trying to figure out what audiences want. While a few mount shows that spoof or sneer at the holiday (Reckless, A Christmas Twist, The Eight: Reindeer Monologues), most gamely swim along in the wake of Goodman Theatre’s Christmas Carol, looking for material […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Louisa May Alcott in Little Women
When Chicagoans Beth Lynch and Scott Lynch-Giddings cast Louisa May Alcott as a character in her own novel, they found an intriguing solution to a sticky problem: the sweetness and untrammeled celebration of family ties in Little Women, the coming-of-age story of a tomboy and her sisters during the Civil War, might be a little […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story In November in Tampa, Florida, Paul Covani, 18, filed a lawsuit against his father, retired military physician Ricardo Covani, alleging years of abuse and humiliation. According to the lawsuit, his father not only verbally abused him but until recently systematically measured his body parts, took nude photographs of him to chronicle his growth, […]
Posted inMusic
Downgrading an Old School
AACM 30th Anniversary Festival Getz Theater, December 1-3 Not all the music at the 30th anniversary celebration of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians was–to quote its motto–“great black music.” A lot of it was simply so-so. The three-night festival featured sets by 12 groups and aimed to provide an opportunity both to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Coming Out Shooting
Faggot With a Gun Bailiwick Repertory I Was a Teenage Judy Garland Fan at the Heartland Studio Theater In recent years the quantity of semiautobiographical coming-out/coming-of-age stories on Chicago stages has rivaled the number of stars in the Milky Way. If you’ve seen even a quarter of them, you may be convinced that gay men […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Work Related
Room 41, at Cafe Voltaire. Of course huge, dehumanizing corporate environments breed eccentric habits, but playwright Brett Neveu isn’t interested in stereotypes or self-centered, complaining harangues. Instead, in these 11 short monologues–average length is three minutes–he offers fragmented portraits of lonely individuals struggling for a foothold in an impersonal environment. Tim’s foothold is the splendid […]
Posted inNews & Politics
West Side Stories
by Mary Jo Clark as told to Jack Clark In 1926 our downstairs neighbor told us that the man he worked for had a piano to sell. The man had bought the piano for his daughter, but she’d died, and he wanted to find somebody who would really use it. So my mother and my […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Makropulos Affair
The two major strands in Leos Janacek’s operas, enchanting fantasy and gritty psychological naturalism, weave into a compelling, mordant melodrama in The Makropulos Affair. It has a rather far-fetched story line–a 300-something diva tries to retrieve the formula for an elixir of youth concocted by an alchemist named Makropulos while fending off the amorous advances […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
Originally seen in Nashville as an up-and-coming songwriter, 26-year-old Gillian Welch has recently gotten just as much praise for her performances with partner/guitarist David Rawlings as she has for her impressive compositions. Trisha Yearwood and Emmylou Harris have already recorded songs by her–“Orphan Girl” on Harris’s terrific new album Wrecking Ball is hers–and other heavies […]
Posted inArts & Culture
XSight! Performance Group
I saw Cycles of Unveiling in rehearsal, without costumes or set. When you see it, tattered cheesecloth will hang from the ceiling between the audience and the dancers. Five of them will be nude except for lengths of cheesecloth wrapped around their hips or chests. A sixth clothed dancer is “a voyeur–a representative of the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Untamed Heart
Mourning elephants. Bison at play. Spiders in Love? Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy want us to believe that animals have feelings too.
Posted inMusic
How to Succeed in Scalping Without Really Trying
“I do things honestly,” the scalper was saying. “Not like this.” “This” was the situation at the Wabash Avenue Tower Records early in the morning on a Saturday a few weeks ago. At 8 AM tickets for Bruce Springsteen’s acoustic performance at the Rosemont Theatre were to go on sale. The scalper, like a lot […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
How on earth can the Chinese and Japanese use computers, given that their writing uses thousands of different characters? The keyboard must look like something off a Wurlitzer pipe organ. –Nora Krashoc, Knoxville, Tennessee Nah, it looks pretty much like any keyboard, and using it is a piece of cake. All you have to do […]