Batting practice is one of baseball’s strongest allures. The name itself has a pleasant association: as almost everyone who has played or plays baseball likes to hit, what could be better than practicing it? The rhythmic pock pock of bat on ball–from both the cage and coaches hitting fungoes–creates a soothing sort of music, especially […]
Tag: Vol. 31 No. 46
Issue of Aug. 15 – 21, 2002
Posted inArts & Culture
Curious George Goes to War
Curious George Goes to War, Second City E.T.C. Call it “The Return of the First Amendment.” Continuing the screw-the-tourists dynamic that fuels Second City’s main-stage Thank Heaven It Wasn’t 7/11, this 24th E.T.C. revue abandons hip irony for a slaughter of sacred cows. Refusing to dumb down cultural references to talk-show levels, director Ron West […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Lovers: Part 1–Winners
Lovers: Part 1–Winners, Dreadnaught Theatre Company, at the Athenaeum Theatre. First performed in Dublin in 1967, Brian Friel’s Winners is meant to be the first half of a two-part evening. The second half–Losers, about an unhappily married middle-aged couple–acts as a reminder of what the two happy high school sweethearts in the first play might […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Battle Scars
Battle Scars, Fillet of Solo Festival, Live Bait Theater, through August 24. The title ties together two pieces with little in common. Lotti Pharriss’s Fear Itself is much the stronger, as Pharriss–in gas mask and apron festooned with alarming press clippings–explores the way irrational fears suddenly became rational on September 11. A convert to Catholicism […]
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
KEVIN COYNE 8/16, SCHUBAS Though there is a wholesome European looseness of line about the art of Englishman Kevin Coyne, his wonderful music is strongly rooted in old American weirdness. The painter, poet, fiction writer, occasional actor, and former drug counselor has been at it since the 60s, when he sang white-boy blues in the […]