JOHN ACQUAVIVA “The Future Sound of Detroit” may have been the slogan of +8, the pioneering techno label cofounded by Italian-born, Ontario-based John Acquaviva, but his DJ sets have never been quite that narrowly focused. Acquaviva tends less toward hard, dark minimalism and more toward free-ranging eclecticism than his partner Richie Hawtin, emphasizing dark, funky […]
Tag: Vol. 29 No. 31
Issue of May. 4 – 10, 2000
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
PHIL LEE 5/5, FITZGERALD’S North Carolina native Phil Lee moved to New York to play music in the early 70s, then went to California, where he worked with Jack Nitzsche on movie sound tracks and drove a truck for Neil Young. This he parlayed into a full-time trucking career–until about a decade later, when he […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Southern Exposures
The Last Night of Ballyhoo at the Mercury Theater Now Dig This…The Terry Southern Show! Prop Theatre Group at the Garage at Steppenwolf By Albert Williams Alfred Uhry isn’t exactly a prolific playwright. A decade passed between the 1987 off-Broadway smash Driving Miss Daisy and his next stage effort, The Last Night of Ballyhoo. But […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Damn Bad Play
Mary [Shen Barnidge], Taking the cue from your positive review for The Love Talker [March 24], the two of us spent $30 of our hard-earned dough on that godawful play. Were you high on dust when you went to see it? After two minutes, it was clear that it wasn’t just a bad play, it […]
Posted inArts & Culture
All’s Well That Ends Well
All’s Well That Ends Well, Chicago Shakespeare Theater. It’s easy to dislike this alleged comedy. The title (originally “Love’s Labors Won”) should be “The End Justifies the Means.” The end is for the sadly smitten but plucky Helena to make the attractive but worthless Bertram love her. The means is to stalk this spoiled snob, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Tartuffe
Tartuffe, Stage Left Theatre. The power of the clergy, the state, and the family patriarch aren’t what they used to be. And therein lies the difficulty in updating Moliere’s 17th-century satire to present-day America. The wealthy citizen who bankrupts himself to help a Bible-thumping shyster, the wife with no power to prevent this folly, the […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Campagnola’s Clean Cuisine
Michael Altenberg of Evanston’s Campagnola has a straightforward ingredient-driven approach to fine cooking: seek out the best, mess with it the least, and create a masterpiece. When he and partner Steve Schwartz opened their rustic Italian restaurant in 1996, they launched themselves on a fanatical quest for the best possible ingredients nationwide. The 37-year-old chef […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Cure for Ignorance?
Dear editor: I am appalled at the ignorance and prejudice of Cecil Adams regarding homeopathy [March 24]. As one of the Cincinnati-area study-group leaders for the National Center for Homeopathy, I would like the chance to present the facts about the effectiveness and safety of homeopathy. Regarding Mr. Adams’s disparaging remarks about infinitesimal doses, there […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Andrea Marcovicci
ANDREA MARCOVICCI Andrea Marcovicci and Ute Lemper are the most prominent female cabaret-style singers under 60 working the concert circuit. Both specialize in songs of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, but where Lemper subjects her mostly European repertoire to deconstructionist reinterpretations and theatrical pyrotechnics, Marcovicci takes a simpler and more straightforward approach to classic American […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Careful What You Ask For
With swelling ranks and a unifying cause to rally around, why did the leaders of an Uptown block club cut and run?
Posted inArts & Culture
Committed
This romantic comedy turns stereotypes inside out as the main character, whose sense of commitment is represented by a tattoo on her finger instead of a wedding ring, follows her estranged husband to El Paso. Her odyssey, audaciously devised by writer-director Lisa Krueger, combines a gently surreal reverence for Americana with a serious examination of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Friendly Reminder From WNUR
[Re: Post No Bills, April 14] Dear Mr. Margasak, WBEZ doesn’t play Cecil Taylor or Milford Graves. B-96 doesn’t play Roni Size or Luke Vibert. Q101 doesn’t play the Sea and Cake or Belle and Sebastian. WXRT doesn’t play Ryoji Ikeda or Labradford. And there’s no Santa Claus. WNUR (89.3 FM or www.wnur.org) plays the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bach Week Festival
BACH WEEK FESTIVAL Now in its 27th season, the Bach Week Festival is the best such celebration outside of Leipzig, Germany, where Bach served for nearly three decades as director of music at Thomaskirche. From the start it’s been held at Saint Luke’s in Evanston, and due to the modest size of the church’s hall […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Wire
WIRE Rock ‘n’ roll is not like a mountainside in which layers of history accumulate and fossilize, waiting for sunburned grad students to dig them up and make notes on each old bone chip. It’s more like a big vat of stew simmering on the stove, constantly being turned and churned, the stuff that’s settled […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cotingle
Cotingle, TeenStreet Theater, at Pulaski Park. Surreally and fluidly melding speech, sound, and movement, this provocative show claims to cater to a voyeuristic audience seeking to view pain. The script, developed by the TeenStreet cast, revolves around a boy (played by the physically elastic, endlessly versatile Tramaine Montell Ford) who takes on other people’s painful […]