THE TRANSFIGURATION OF BENNO BLIMPIE, Firstborn Productions. According to Gregory Gerhard, artistic director of Firstborn Productions, the company name comes from the notion that “the theater event is a sacrificial offering for an audience, for the good of those who witness it.” This production of Albert Innaurato’s The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie takes itself just […]
Tag: Vol. 26 No. 45
Issue of Aug. 14 – 20, 1997
Posted inNews & Politics
Trib Columnist Loses Credit
By Michael Miner Terry Ruffolo succeeded as a publicist beyond a publicist’s wildest dreams. He’s marketing director of the Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Greater Chicago, certainly not a name on many lips. But thanks to Ruffolo, CCCS began showing up weekly in a Chicago Tribune column. The columnist doted on Ruffolo’s boss, quoting her […]
Posted inFilm
The Way We Are
In the Company of Men Rating **** Masterpiece Directed and written by Neil LaBute With Aaron Eckhart, Stacy Edwards, Matt Malloy, Michael Martin, Mark Rector, Chris Hayes, Jason Dixie, and Emily Cline. By Jonathan Rosenbaum In the weeks leading up to this year’s Cannes film festival it wasn’t clear whether the Iranian government would allow […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Circus Minimus
The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus and Autonomadic Bookmobile at Charybdis, August 3 By Jack Helbig As circuses have become more popular again–thanks to Cirque du Soleil, the Big Apple Circus, and a handful of smaller troupes–sideshows have also begun attracting more notice. But sideshows–with their tattooed ladies, people with flipperlike hands, “leopard” skin, excessive facial hair–have […]
Posted inMusic
Bobby McFerrin Conducts the Best of Porgy and Bess
BOBBY MCFERRIN CONDUCTS THE BEST OF PORGY AND BESS In the 60-odd years since the premiere of Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin’s opera has steadily increased in stature and popularity, seducing new generations of performers with its gorgeous melodies and, for the more adventurous, its inventive and meticulous construction. (In fact, a new album by […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Straight Dope
Just what does “colitis” mean? In the song “Hotel California” by the Eagles the first lines are, “On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, warm smell of colitis rising up through the air.” I remember I tried looking it up at a university library years ago and couldn’t find the answer. I […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Friends of Bill
In the popular imagination William S. Burroughs was to have died with a syringe hanging out of his arm, sprawled in the nearly windowless apartment in New York’s Bowery that he’d nicknamed the Bunker. He spent his last two decades exploiting the grim, gray junkie persona of his best-known novel, Naked Lunch, and enjoying his […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Moon is Brighter-An Obituary
THE MOON IS BRIGHTER–an obituary, Van Chester Productions, at Urbus Orbis. AIDS has popularized memories of the dear departed as a topic for drama, but what separates art from therapy is the amount of interest such quasi-biographical eulogies hold for audiences outside the immediate circle of bereaved mourners. Its subtitle suggests that The Moon is […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Days of the Week
Friday 8/15 – Thursday 8/21 AUGUST By Cara Jepsen 15 FRIDAY Bonsai trees originally grew on high, rough terrain over 1,000 years ago in the Far East, stunted by a lack of soil and the strong winds that gave them their trademark twisting trunks and sparse foliage. Over several centuries gardeners perfected the art of […]
Posted inFilm
Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day
COLOR OF A BRISK AND LEAPING DAY This boldly atmospheric and mystically beautiful 1996 movie reflects the preservationist and pioneer spirits of its writer-director-editor, Christopher Munch (The Hours and Times), and lead character, John Lee (Peter Alexander), as Lee attempts to resurrect the Yosemite Valley Railroad. The fictional story, set in the 1940s, was inspired […]
Posted inNews & Politics
That Train Doesn’t Stop Here
Why are Chris Cohen’s most proposals to improve Metra and RTA service being sidetracked?
Posted inMusic
Michael Hurley
MICHAEL HURLEY There’s a certain untraversable distance between many American folk musicians and the music they play: they’re modern, urban, middle-class people presenting studied interpretations of music made by poor, rural people in an earlier era. That’s why, even if you think “authenticity” is a negligible factor in music making, it’s hard not to be […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Nasty Business
Neil LaBue’s no leper int he film industry. The former off-Loop playwright’s new movie opens Friday.
Posted inFilm
The Organizer
The Organizer Marcello Mastroianni in one of his best roles, as a late-19th-century labor leader orchestrating a strike at a Turin textile plant. Directed by Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street) with an exquisite handling of period, this powerful film had a sizable impact when it came out in 1963, though it’s been curiously […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Stories A Washington Post report in March on prison corruption in Mexico revealed that imprisoned drug traffickers supposedly under maximum security actually have “spacious rooms, cooks and maids, cellular phones, a gymnasium, a sauna, and manicured gardens where they host barbecues,” among other things. And in May the New York Times revealed that a […]