Writers’ Theater Chicago continues to hack out the terms of its move from the back room of Books on Vernon, down the street, and around the corner to the Women’s Library Club of Glencoe. The troupe’s waiting for the club to approve a contract that’ll give them a lease on a larger performance space. It’s […]
Tag: Vol. 31 No. 19
Issue of Feb. 7 – 13, 2002
Posted inNews & Politics
Man of the People
To the editor: Everyone who read your story “Out of Their League,” January 18, about the Cambodians of Uptown who lost their garden property in a tax sale must lament the tragic flow of events that brought about this occurrence. One aspect of your story was not clear, however. Attorney Camillo F. Volini was called […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Voices on the Verge
Few musical formats can inspire dread like songwriters-in-the-round, and the four songwriters who constitute Voices on the Verge–Jess Klein, Erin McKeown, Beth Amsel, and former Chicagoan Rose Polenzani–knew that all too well when they were first booked together that way in November 1998. So they tweaked the formula: they each sang some of their own […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cinderella, Cinderella
Cinderella, Cinderella, Comedy-Sportz. Bucking the trend of imbuing fairy tales, especially this one, with allusions to mythic journeys and feminist psychology, this interactive matinee gets back to basics: girl mistreated, evil steps, good fairy godmother, prince, slipper–you know the drill. The improv-derived script moves the story along while allowing the performers to take some amusing […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Featuring Loretta
Featuring Loretta, Cenacle Theater Company, at the Pilsen Theatre. This is my least favorite of George F. Walker’s six plays set in an anonymous suburban motel, lacking the comic buoyancy of Criminal Genius and the dramatic power of Problem Child and Adult Entertainment. Loretta is an attractive woman seeking to make money quickly. Her husband […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Imagined Lives
Willem Diepraam at Stephen Daiter, through February 23 Tom Denlinger at TBA Exhibition Space, through March 2 My least favorite of Willem Diepraam’s 26 photographs at Stephen Daiter is a portrait of a sad-eyed woman with a deeply lined dark face and white hair. True, the elegant textures in Suriname, Paramaribo, 1975 ennoble the subject, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Canceled Stamps/Take Your Poems and Scram!
Why did the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum back out of an exhibit by postal provacateurs Michael Thompson and Michael Hernandez de Luna
Posted inArts & Culture
Rosa Lublin
Rosa Lublin, Piven Theatre. Sometimes the very quality in a writer that attracts an adapter can prove an obstacle. Here Robin Chaplik adapts and directs two Cynthia Ozick short stories about the titular Holocaust survivor. And it’s easy to see why Chaplik loves Ozick’s prose: she renders even the most horrifying details in memorably acute […]
Posted inNews & Politics
TRG Datebook Sidebar
Writers’ Theater Chicago continues to hack out the terms of its move from the back room of Books on Vernon, down the street, and around the corner to the Women’s Library Club of Glencoe. The troupe’s waiting for the club to approve a contract that’ll give them a lease on a larger performance space. It’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Photo File: Lauren Deutsch tries to see the music
Over the two decades Lauren Deutsch has been photographing jazz musicians, she’s found that often her best pictures aren’t necessarily the sharpest or the most rigorously composed. She likes the ones that evoke the spirit of the music–sometimes through the demeanor of the musician and sometimes through the texture of the image. Deutsch, who’s executive […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Performance: giving audiences sweaty psalms
Michael Maher, a Catholic lay minister, was touring museums in Florence two years ago when his week of Renaissance art–which included a visit to Michelangelo’s David–brought on an epiphany. “Why,” he wondered, “did they decide that all these biblical characters should be nude?” Word Made Flesh, which opens this weekend at Bailiwick Arts Center, is […]
Posted inNews & Politics
City File
Let’s see–they have fundamentalists, but they need rubble. Roosevelt University political science professor Paul Green, reflecting on the difficulties of selling regional governance in the Chicago suburbs, at a meeting of the Campaign for Sensible Growth on December 7: “It’s a mini-Afghanistan out there, with tribal leaders.” Ye shall know the truth, and the truth […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Down From the Mountain
The bluegrass-heavy sound track from the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? topped Billboard’s country chart for 26 weeks, selling more than four million copies. As a result, veteran bluegrass and old-timey performers like Ralph Stanley are achieving new recognition from a broader audience, as are upstarts like Gillian Welch, and mainstream country stars […]
Posted inFilm
Voice Mail from Hell
The Mothman Prophecies *** (A must-see) Directed by Mark Pellington Written by Richard Hatem With Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Will Patton, Debra Messing, Lucinda Jenney, and Alan Bates. The sublimely weird montage of electromagnetic motifs that opens Mark Pellington’s supernatural thriller The Mothman Prophecies reminded me of the first line from William Gibson’s Neuromancer: “The […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Straight Dope
I’ve decided to install a water-filtration system in my house. As background, the EPA’s attempt to reduce the nation’s polluted air by introducing an additive into our gasoline supply has had the unintended effect of polluting the groundwater in the wells and reservoirs of 49 states. The culprit is methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), a […]