The Doctor In Spite of Himself and Sganarelle, or The Imaginary Cuckold, Stage Two Theatre Company, at Estonian House, Deerfield. For this fifth annual homage to Moliere, Timothy Mooney has adapted two works into “American English” and takes on the title roles, which the French writer himself played. Mooney’s witty wordplay and richly rolling rhythms […]
Tag: Vol. 30 No. 45
Issue of Aug. 9 – 15, 2001
Posted inNews & Politics
Beware the Agents of Viacom
To the editor, You managed to miss a lot of the crucial issues in your article on the protests against The Real World [August 3]. Although you touched upon resistance to media conglomerates, you failed to mention that residents are extremely angry that the Chicago Police Department has chosen to protect Viacom, a multinational corporation, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Festival Seating: a dark star of the underground film scene
There’s a young Chicago filmmaker who’s attracted plenty of attention lately. He was featured in a cover story for Cinemad magazine. He was profiled in Filmmaker magazine this past spring and in New York Press last November. Cis Bierinckx, film and video curator of Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, which named him “Artist of the Year […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Rokia Traore
ROKIA TRAORE Rokia Traore has always sounded incredibly diminutive alongside most of her fellow Malians, whether Ali Farka Toure with his bluesy circular grooves or Salif Keita with his sophisticated polyrhythmic pop. At her Chicago debut last year she was a study in restraint: as her mostly acoustic band simmered quietly, her gentle warble was […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Faat-Kine
Ousman Sembene, the greatest of all African filmmakers (and one of the finest fiction writers on the continent as well), directed this upbeat 2000 comedy from Senegal, about a sassy, self-made woman who manages a filling station. Faat-Kine supports two illegitimate children by different fathers, along with her mother, and she’s not about to take […]
Posted inArts & Culture
ComedySportz Intra-National Tournament 2001
With teams in 20 cities, ComedySportz may be improv’s most recognizable franchise; the number of teams nationwide has more than doubled in the past decade, and demand only grows stronger. This weekend the funny folks at ComedySportz Chicago will be taking a break from duking it out among themselves to battle 14 teams from around […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Wine Seller
THE WINE SELLER, Baum House, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Chicago playwright Jason Sheldon seems to have forgotten nothing about his years as a dishwasher, server, and manager at a pointlessly trendy restaurant in rural Ohio, re-creating the doomed establishment and its personnel with nostalgic zeal. The alcoholic owner gets mired in gambling debts to a […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Savage Love
You recently called a person who wants to wait to have sex “some sort of saving-yourself-for-something-or-other sociopath.” Come on, Dan. Do you really think saving yourself for the right person is stupid? I’m a 25-year-old hetero male who made the choice to wait until I got married. Sound stupid? I don’t think so. Do you […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Singles Going Steady
Fillet of Solo Festival Live Bait Theater, through August 25 By Justin Hayford Solo performance sometimes seems the bastard child of “real” theater. Solo artists typically wind up with late-night or off-night gigs, often on someone else’s set under someone else’s lights. Chicago monologuists have learned that if they want to do their work in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Ken & Jim Show
THE KEN & JIM SHOW Bassist Ken Haebich and saxist Jim Gailloreto, both veterans of several musical demimondes–mainstream Chicago jazz, classical chamber composition, and of course the wedding circuit–have come up with a flexible format for this concert series, capitalizing on the variety of their experience without drawing directly on any of it. For a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Zeni Geva
ZENI GEVA Before Japanese rock was fashionable, before metal was respectable, Zeni Geva combined math, metal, and psychedelia with such ferocious abandon and deadly precision that they commanded a devoted following in the Chicago underground–Steve Albini collaborated with them on All Right, You Little Bastards (1995) and Jim O’Rourke recorded with founding member KK Null […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Fillet of Solo Festival
Live Bait Theater’s showcase of one-person shows features new work by a slew of familiar fringe faces, among them Stephanie Shaw, Mark Gagne, Quincy Wong, and David Kodeski. The event allows Live Bait the opportunity to launch its second performance space, the Bucket, designed specifically for solo work; shows also take place on the theater’s […]
Posted inNews & Politics
When Undercover Was King/More Bleeding at the Sun-Times
When Undercover Was King Investigative reporter William Gaines, who just retired from the Tribune, won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1976. By 1988, when he won his second, the rules had changed. “The first one was an undercover job,” Gaines remembers. “I was a janitor in the surgery room of the Von Solbrig Hospital at […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Valentina Lisitsa and Alexei Kuznetsoff
VALENTINA LISITSA AND ALEXEI KUZNETSOFF It’s a compliment to any piano duo to say they play like a married couple. And Ukrainian-born pianists Valentina Lisitsa and Alexei Kuznetsoff, who’ve been performing together for close to 20 years, have actually been a married couple for more than a decade–though it’s tempting to see their romantic relationship […]
Posted inArts & Culture
As You Like It
As You Like It, First Folio Shakespeare Festival, at the Peabody Estate at Mayslake. The Forest of Arden has never felt more authentic than in First Folio’s outdoor staging, accompanied by the tunes of cicadas and crickets. In Shakespeare’s delightful comedy, Rosalind (Ann Noble Massey) is exiled to the forest after she falls in love […]