HOLY DAYS, Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, at Footsteps Theatre. In a Rivendell production you can usually count on intelligent, sophisticated performances–and Holy Days is no exception. Eschewing the puerile excess of “Chicago style” tantrum-based theater in favor of taut, close-to-the-vest acting, the four cast members maintain an exquisite focus for 75 intermissionless minutes. This is one […]
Tag: Vol. 27 No. 4
Issue of Oct. 30 – Nov. 5, 1997
Posted inArts & Culture
Reel Life: Polish cinema wakes up to capitalism
“Under communism, filmmaking was kind of a dream,” says Christopher Kamyszew. “No matter what you did, you were successful. If you were a party favorite, you had a number of prints of your films, you had almost unlimited money for promotion, entry to international film festivals. On the other hand, if you were in the […]
Posted inMusic
Link Wray
LINK WRAY If you judge him solely on his discography Link Wray is a marginal figure, author of a few superbly sinister chord progressions and not much more. But the dirty, aggressive sound of his guitar playing–legend has it he poked a hole in his speaker to get the buzzing distortion on his 1958 classic […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Putting Censorship to Good Use/ Sun-Times’s Kick in the Face/ A Series of Errors?
Putting Censorship to Good Use Fear & Favor in the Newsroom is a nice show. Produced by independents Beth Sanders and Randy Baker of Seattle, it’s an hour long, narrated by Studs Terkel, and it makes the right points about powerful advertisers, old boys’ networks, interlocking directorates, and cozy cliques of civic pooh-bahs. We hear […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Riverdance-the Show
RIVERDANCE–THE SHOW However gigglesome its pretensions, Riverdance–The Show is a hell of a good time. Despite its glitzy lighting and smoke, overloud music, and supposed cataclysmic events (the “official programme” ludicrously describes “massed dancers and orchestra in full flight”), the show’s heart is dance, and I’m convinced that’s why people flock to see it. There’s […]
Posted inMusic
Newberry Consort
NEWBERRY CONSORT In the eyes (and ears) of the local musicians who make up the Newberry Consort, music history doesn’t begin and end with eminent composers. Mary Springfels, the viola da gambist who serves as the consort’s guiding light, likes to uncover the vox populi in the poetry and music of a particular era, and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: ah, there’s the rub
Most heterosexual love scenes in movies follow a familiar pattern. There are one or two minutes of foreplay–just enough time for the camera to focus on a few key, well-lit female body parts. The perfunctory kissing and petting are followed by a few minutes of intercourse. The woman thrashes and moans as the man thrusts […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Seascape and Sex, Death and Friday Night
SEASCAPE AND SEX, DEATH, AND FRIDAY NIGHT, Step Right Up Productions, at Chicago Dramatists Workshop. Presenting two plays in strikingly different genres, Step Right Up Productions fails to distinguish itself in either. Seascape, Edward Albee’s dated meditation on evolution and mortality, is a peculiar choice for a young company in a non-Equity scene decidedly short […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Stories In September the city of Kansas City, Kansas, joined four Indian tribes in court to protest an economic-development plan by a fifth tribe, the 3,800-member Wyandotte tribe of Oklahoma. The Wyandottes plan to build a casino on pillars above a 150-year-old tribal burial ground they own in downtown Kansas City. Said one dissident, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Hales Angel
Tim King, president of Hales Franciscan High School, wants his kids to have all the advantages he had. And that’s a lot of advantages
Posted inArts & Culture
Grand Dams
Toshio Shibata at the Museum of Contemporary Art, through January 4 By Stephen Longmire Most of the photographs Toshio Shibata has just made on a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art are of dams and other public waterworks in the arid American west, where control of water is and always will be a pressing […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Petty Crime
September 22, 4 PM, 3600 block of North Southport. Robbery. Man walked into flower shop and asked to change a dollar. Clerk opened cash register. Man grabbed wad of ten-dollar bills and fled. October 4, 1:20 AM, 6100 block of West Addison. Aggravated battery. Two men at bar asked woman to dance. She declined. One […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Fluid Measure Performance Company
Fluid Measure Performance Company Once upon a time there were three women who pooled their talents and produced their own fractured fairy tales full of the oblique ways and sayings of wise women–that is, witches. Without ever pretending to understand anything, they explored everything–madness, safety, sex, jealousy, fear–using incantatory motion, stories carefully unraveled and woven […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Greg Kotis Accepts His Fate
Greg Kotis Accepts His Fate By Jack Helbig Most temps work hard in hopes of snagging a permanent position. Not actor and playwright Greg Kotis. He takes jobs where he can work as little as possible. As soon as someone needs some typing done he starts acting crazy, lowering his eyebrows like Oscar the Grouch […]
Posted inMusic
Dave Van Ronk
DAVE VAN RONK If anyone ever asks you just what you mean by “whiskey voiced,” play them a Dave Van Ronk record–whether he’s growling out a ribald blues anthem or purring a love song, Van Ronk’s voice paints an aural portrait of the prototypical hard-traveling busker. Like a lot of folkies from the 50s and […]