Hirsch Perlman at Donald Young, through March 16 Exposure: Recent Chinese Photography From the Smart Museum Collection at David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, through March 24 Abstract and narrative film- and video makers alike have long tried to synchronize music and image, as in Disney’s Fantasia or Oskar Fischinger’s abstract films. But such […]
Tag: Vol. 31 No. 23
Issue of Mar. 7 – 13, 2002
Posted inArts & Culture
Curious Position/It Just Ain’t Natural/All the Schmooze You Can Eat
It looks like Beau O’Reilly and the Curious Theatre Branch will have to find a new place to play–but will the money they’ll be needing change their unique approach?
Posted inArts & Culture
An Evening of One Acts
An Evening of One Acts, Beyond That, at Frankie J’s MethaDome Theatre. The one-act play is a young and hungry theater artist’s best friend, an opportunity for experimentation with a built-in system of checks and balances: brisk pacing can smooth over gaffes, and even missteps serve a learning purpose. A whole evening of one-acts is […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Execution of Justice
Execution of Justice, HyperWorld Theatre, at the Chicago Cultural Center. When Emily Mann’s docudrama premiered in 1984, the events it recounted were recent: the 1978 assassinations of liberal San Francisco mayor George Moscone and gay activist Harvey Milk by their conservative rival Dan White, White’s murder trial and conviction on the lesser charge of manslaughter, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Death Watch
Time is running out for a group determined to keep the Jane Addams Center from falling into the wrong hands.
Posted inArts & Culture
Peripheral Produce North American Film Tour
In the last few years 29-year-old Matt McCormick of Portland, Oregon, has emerged as one of our strongest independent filmmakers, doing work that’s both ingenuous and humorously absurd. His latest, Going to the Ocean (2001), is as simple as a haiku: it begins with a long take of ships gliding through an urban waterway at […]
Posted inMusic
Jim Lauderdale
Five years ago Jim Lauderdale–one of the most singular melodic minds in country music–signed with RCA, no doubt hoping that his fifth label in seven years might open some doors. He’d already achieved a different sort of success, as a top Nashville songwriter who’d penned material for the likes of George Strait, Patty Loveless, and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Who’s That Doctor?
Who’s That Doctor?, Hi-Volt Theatre Company, at Stage Left Theatre. Half-assed production values, story lines, and special effects are so central to BBC sci-fi that a parody of such programs does bloody well to play the fool at every turn. This send-up of cult favorite Dr. Who, staged by Harry Bauer, has the buffoonery down, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Sympathy for the Devil
To the editor: Is there truly such a shortage of stories heralding the crusades of unsung social heroes that a Reader cover story [March 1] was devoted to the misdirected efforts of attorney Mark Weinberg to further degrade the quality of life in Chicago by decriminalizing panhandling? I’ve lived in Chicago all my life, and […]
Posted inMusic
Tongue in Chic
Electroclash: New York City Compilation (Mogul Electro) Watching pretty people act bored isn’t usually my idea of a good time, but when it’s set to hot music, it can be a blast. Last fall, I went to the first annual Electroclash festival in New York, where the A list of international performers included DJ Assault, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Beautiful Mind Game
A woman has come up from the audience in the back room at Pops Highwood and is standing on the stage with Ross “He Knows What You’re Thinking” Johnson. The woman, apparently chosen at random, is silent, concentrating. Johnson, who says he’s been “voted the top psychic entertainer in the world” by his peers, has […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Theo Ubique Theatre Company, at the Athenaeum Theatre. The epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos is salacious, fun, and profoundly wise about sexual politics, as three victims are systematically duped by two aristocrats who measure love in terms of pain. It’s easy to imagine tumbrels carting off bloodless seducer Vicomte de […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Guilt Trip
The headline on the front page of the Tribune read: “Police arrest 2 in Roscetti Case.” New men had been charged with the October 1986 rape and murder of 23-year-old Lori Roscetti. The four men previously convicted and imprisoned for the crime had been exonerated in December, but not before spending over a decade in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Group Efforts: designing the ultimate wastebasket
In her 14 years at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, editor Linda Rothstein has published many expert opinions on how to dispose of plutonium. The conventional wisdom–bury the stuff–bored Rothstein and didn’t keep the issue out in the open where she thought it should be. “We had really grown weary about the lack of […]