ORGASMO ADULTO ESCAPES FROM THE ZOO, at the Theatre Building. There’s something inescapably slipshod about this production of Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s vicious feminist commedia, written in 1977. Actually, there are many things: the random assemblage of set pieces, the broad washes of unfocused light, the clunky scene changes, the overall lack of visual […]
Tag: Vol. 28 No. 48
Issue of Sep. 2 – 8, 1999
Posted inFilm
A Breakthrough And A Throwback
Mr. Zhao Rating *** A must see Directed by Lu Yue Written by Shu Ping With Shi Jingming, Zhang Zhihua, Chen Yinan, and Jiang Wenli. All The Little Animals Rating *** A must see Directed by Jeremy Thomas Written by Eski Thomas With John Hurt, Christian Bale, Daniel Benzali, James Faulkner, and John O’Toole. By […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Site Seeing: tales from the crypts
In the days after the bloody confrontation between labor and police at Haymarket Square in 1886, John V. Farwell and his brother Charles B. were reminded of their return home from a hunting trip out west during a railroad strike nine years earlier. They were traveling on a troop train bringing federal soldiers from Fort […]
Posted inArts & Culture
True Books
The Sexual Male: Problems and Solutions, by Richard Milsten, MD, and Julian Slowinski, PsyD (W.W. Norton, $25.95). Synopsis: The multitude of sexual dysfunctions, crises, and dilemmas facing men are discussed in detail. Don’t break your penis! Representative quote: “Despite the fact he was near the height of foreplay, he went to the window and using […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Do the Rite Thing
We’d only been dads for a few months but already we couldn’t agree on anything.
Posted inNews & Politics
Without a Paddle
Bill Pinkney conquered the seas in a boat. Finding sponsors to fund his sailing isn’t going quite as well.
Posted inArts & Culture
Getting Bigger All the Time/Good-bye Toulouse? Not Yet./Another Country Is Heard From/Where’s Elton?
Getting Bigger All the Time Since it was introduced nearly 30 years ago, the Imax wide-screen format has been the cinematic equivalent of an amusement park ride, documenting roller coasters, auto racing, and hang gliding. But two young Chicagoans, Don and Steve Kempf, hope to expand the Imax market to include sports films, and they’re […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Paul Wertico Trio
PAUL WERTICO TRIO Hyperkinetic drummer Paul Wertico established this trio in 1994, and since then it’s grown into his primary expressive outlet. It’s unusual for Wertico to concentrate on one project like this: in the past, whenever he came off the road from his regular gig with the Pat Metheny Group, within days he’d have […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Muffs
MUFFS Kim Shattuck plays guitar like Johnny Ramone and yowls like there’s coarse twine wrapped round her larynx. But over the course of four albums by her band the Muffs, her songwriting contributions have sounded increasingly more inspired by AM radio than by her LA punk roots (she played bass in the all-female garage-punk combo […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Perfect Love!
Murder can be both literal and metaphorical, as writer-director Catherine Breillat demonstrates in this cynical, honest 1996 love story. In shots that resemble interviews, a young woman admits hating her mother, then starts to tell us how her mother met the man who killed her. As if in flashback, the mother’s relationship with this younger […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Presenting Clarence Darrow
PRESENTING CLARENCE DARROW, Greenbar Professional Productions, at Stage Left Theatre. In an age of great public speakers, Clarence Darrow was a giant, riveting juries with his passionate arguments. This was the man, after all, who made a monkey of another giant of public speaking, William Jennings Bryan, at the Scopes trial. But you’d never know […]
Posted inNews & Politics
West Side Stories
Did I tell you about when President Harding died? I was nine. August 1923. We lived on Flournoy Street. And the train with his body was going by on the freight line that ran north-south about Washtenaw Avenue. Anyways, we were all going down to see it pass. But my father said, “I’ll go down […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Long Goodbye and Lord Byron’s Love Letter
The Long Goodbye and Lord Byron’s Love Letter, Raven Theatre. In recent seasons Tennessee Williams has enjoyed a belated popularity: revivals of his lesser-known works have figured prominently on the storefront circuit. Now Raven Theatre continues the exhumation with two sketches rarely seen outside the classroom. The Long Goodbye pays homage to Raymond Chandler, one […]
Posted inMusic
Can Rubberoom Bounce Back?
Can Rubberoom Bounce Back? Though hip-hop has existed now for two decades, exerting greater and greater influence on popular music, Chicago has yet to produce a consistent hip-hop label–and as the trickle of local independent releases grows into a steady stream, this hole in the scene becomes all the more gaping. Earlier this decade Rubberoom–along […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jazz Notes: Asia by the way of Ellington
Anthony Brown was an army grunt stationed in Germany when he first heard Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s 1966 composition The Far East Suite. Ellington and Strayhorn penned the suite after a State Department-sponsored goodwill tour of the Middle East and Asia in 1963 and a trip to Japan the following year. Their musical portraits […]