The Chicago World Music Festival was a stunning success in its inaugural year: attendance surpassed the organizers’ expectations, and the logistical difficulties of bringing in 40-some acts from around the globe to play a ten-day event with 12 different venues were largely invisible to the public. Most important, the quality and diversity of the music […]
Tag: Vol. 29 No. 52
Issue of Sep. 28 – Oct. 4, 2000
Posted inNews & Politics
Datebook
SEPTEMBER 29 FRIDAY You can learn how to make wood do what you want it to at the Chicagoland Woodworking Show this weekend. Floor demonstrations and seminars will tackle subjects like bending wood, building a cabinet, and door and drawer construction. More than 100 manufacturers will exhibit their wares and local clubs such as the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Joffrey Jumps Ship/Photo Finish/Executive Search/Royal George Sold–Sort Of
Will the Joffrey Ballet’s withdrawal from the Music and Dance Theater Chicago bring the troubled project to its knees?
Posted inMusic
Year of the Rooster
By David Whiteis In the late 60s you could still get in trouble listening to Chicago blues. “I can remember going to a club on the west side, which was a black motorcycle gang hangout,” recalls Jim O’Neal. “Morris Pejoe was playing there. And a guy walked past me; I was the only white person […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Yes, Billy! It’s Ok To Laugh At the Man in the Wheelchair!
Yes, Billy! It’s OK To Laugh At The Man In the Wheelchair!, Young Urban Comedians’ Club, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio. The hint of political incorrectness in the title was about the only comical thing in this sketch-comedy show performed by a cast whose thoroughly inept delivery of poorly scripted material was nothing less […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story Campaign 2000: Robert Salzberg of Sarasota, Florida, finished a strong second with 26 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat, despite revealing that he would soon plead not guilty by reason of insanity to a charge of beating up a police lieutenant inside a station house in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Intimate Spaces
Curious Beautiful at the Neo-Futurarium, through October 21 By Justin Hayford The plainly dressed subject of Jan Vermeer’s A Girl Asleep, painted sometime in the late 1650s, sits at a table, her head resting on her hand, her eyes cast downward. She may be sleeping, inebriated, or simply despondent: her expression is unreadable. Only one […]
Posted inMusic
East Meets Western Suburbs/Brazil Beat
East Meets Western Suburbs Aashish Khan, a master of the 25-stringed Indian instrument called the sarod, moved to Naperville last year to establish a school called the Academy of Indian Music. He’s moving rather slowly toward his goal: at the moment he has ten students who receive private lessons in a sprawling vacant house in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Patricia Barber
PATRICIA BARBER Pianist and singer Patricia Barber approaches her career with the same restless energy that roils beneath the surface of her music: whether on the piano bench or in the producer’s chair, she just can’t sit still. Barber attracted much of her considerable following with the beautifully crafted originals on her last two studio […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Women
Adapted from the celebrated play by Clare Boothe, this glossy 1939 comedy about a pampered set of Manhattan plutocrat wives hasn’t lost its satirical edge or bitchy sense of fun. Boothe, a sharp-tongued magazine editor and social climber who married Time publisher Henry Luce, knew well the psychology of women who measure their self-worth by […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Performance Arts: Joan Dickinson’s theater without walls
“Right now, it’s just so beautiful out here you can’t hardly believe it,” Joan Dickinson says about the Woodstock countryside where she lives and works and where she’ll bus the audience for her new performance art piece, Drove Road, this weekend. “Particularly at sunset, things really light up in a different way. Filmmakers call it […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Present Laughter
PRESENT LAUGHTER, Bailiwick Repertory. Noel Coward’s 1943 comedy has most of the usual ingredients of a Coward play: bitchy upper-class characters; snappy, brittle dialogue; a posh setting (in this case a popular actor’s well-appointed London flat). The only thing missing is the laughter. Oh, there are funny bits in this complicated farce about an egotistical […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Belle of Amherst
THE BELLE OF AMHERST, Laboratory Theatre, at the Chopin Theatre. “Paradise is never a journey,” declared Emily Dickinson. And according to William Luce’s celebrated one-woman portrait of the poet, Dickinson found paradise in a lifelong retreat from people. (Too shy to admit she didn’t know how to tell time, she learned only when she was […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Girls Will Be Boys
The Ballad of Little Jo Steppenwolf Theatre Company By Albert Williams The annals of American history and legend are dotted with accounts of women who posed as men in the sexually restrictive 19th and early 20th centuries. One disguised herself to become a soldier and follow the man she loved into battle. Another, whom today […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Eleven Dollar Prophet
Antonio Sacre’s lighthearted autobiographical tales about growing up in a half-Latino, half-Irish-Catholic family have made him popular on the school and library circuit. And his more challenging shows, like last year’s My Penis–In and Out of Trouble, are popular in hipper venues, like the New York International Fringe Festival (where he’s performed four years running). […]