The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party and Orphee Eclipse Theatre Company By Albert Williams In the preface to his 1921 performance piece Les maries de la Tour Eiffel, Jean Cocteau proclaims himself part of a generation of young artists inventing “a theatrical form [that] remains still an unexplored land, rich in possibilities…forms in which the fairy, […]
Tag: Vol. 27 No. 3
Issue of Oct. 23 – 29, 1997
Posted inNews & Politics
The View From Inside
Headline While Laszlo Revesz’s efforts (“An Outsider’s Insider,” October 17) to improve the outlook for America’s immigrants are commendable and worthy of our utmost respect, he appears to have misunderstood the position of our government and citizens regarding providing assistance to immigrants. Suggesting that our recent immigration laws represent a “form of hate” and then […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Feverdream Cocktail
FEVERDREAM COCKTAIL, Trap Door Theatre. I suppose the folks at Trap Door Theatre just got tired of full houses. Why else would a company with a reputation for edgy, popular dark comedies like Blood on the Cat’s Neck and The Boys of the Peggy August Club decide to produce an evening of three empty avant-garde […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Performance: Rob Robbins, death poet
The audience must have the highest piercings-per-square-inch ratio in Chicago. Festooned in all manner of zippers, fishnets, tattoos, and leather collars (in varying shades of black), crammed into Voltaire’s dank performance space, they’ve come for “Deadly Variety,” a once-a-month late-night hootenanny of gloom. Robert Robbins, aka the Death Poet, an organizer of the event, inspects […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Alive and Kicking
tanner.qxd Dear Reader, It’s always gratifying to see our friends’ names in print, especially when they make that big jump from talented unknown actor to member of an internationally famous ensemble. This was certainly the case with Justin Hayford’s profile of Michael Cates and his debut with Blue Man Group [Calendar, October 10]. Unfortunately, in […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Les Grobstein knows the score
It ain’t easy being the world’s biggest sports fan.
Posted inArts & Culture
The Skriker
THE SKRIKER, Defiant Theatre, at American Theater Company. You’d be hard-pressed to find a production with more creativity per minute than this one. Caryl Churchill’s 1994 play about an “ancient and damaged” shape-shifter trying to steal a baby from a pregnant teen offers ample opportunity for puppetry, work with masks, and stylized acting–all of which […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Merchant of Venice
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, Shakespeare Repertory. Much more traditional than Peter Sellars’s controversial, slowed-down, updated staging at Goodman Theatre three seasons ago, director Barbara Gaines’s production of Shakespeare’s 400-year-old drama is also far less probing into the play’s continually perplexing religious and cultural conflicts. Setting the story in a Great Gatsby-esque milieu, evoked by Nan […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Journalism’s Genteel Attack Dog/ Hard Targets/ Nobel Cause
By Michael Miner Richard Lindberg works Chicago letters at the margins–many of them. He’s the author of eight published books, three in the last year alone–Quotable Chicago, The White Sox Encyclopedia, and The Armchair Companion to Chicago Sports, all of the stocking-stuffer school of literature. “I’ve lost interest in sports,” he says now. Too much […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Tiff and Mom and Tales From Mom’s Crypt
TIFF AND MOM AND TALES FROM MOM’S CRYPT, Corn Productions, at the Corn Palace. Mom Tiffelmeyer and her daughter Tiffany, the dysfunctional drag creations of Robert Bouman and Todd Schaner, have put the heck back into Halloween with Tiff and Mom and Tales From Mom’s Crypt. In their newly christened theater space, the Corn Palace, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Stories An August Minneapolis Star Tribune story reported that the University of Minnesota was seeking more specialists to work on a three-year, $390,000 program to establish an “odor emissions rating system” for regulating the state’s 35,000 animal feedlots. The panel of sniffers will develop objective standards on the types of odors and their strength. […]
Posted inMusic
Indo-Pak Jazz Coalition
INDO-PAK JAZZ COALITION Jazz and Indian music have a sketchy history together–a bit surprising, when you consider how much they have in common. Like jazz, the classical traditions of the subcontinent make emphatic use of improvisation–albeit within the regimented restrictions of raga, which commands the use of certain rhythms, scales, and ornamentations in a given […]
Posted inArts & Culture
This Side of Strange
THIS SIDE OF STRANGE: FOUR SHORT PLAYS AND ONE UGLY ONE, Annex Theatre Company, at Live Bait Theater. This evening of five short plays includes its share of literary cliches. In Michael Mark Chemers’s Innocuous Remark, casual lovers make literally generic conversation (“Teasing Banter,” “Ambiguous Reply”), and his Screamer, a spoof of The Dick Van […]