The members of CUBE have good reason to smile these days. First, the spunky new-music collective is turning 15, a milestone for any chamber group operating on a microbudget. Second, its artistic directors, oboist Patricia Morehead and flutist Janice Misurell-Mitchell, were named among the “Chicagoans of the Year in the Arts” by the Tribune, a […]
Tag: Vol. 32 No. 23
Issue of Mar. 6 – 12, 2003
Posted inNews & Politics
Love of Labor/Double Duty
Love of Labor Nobody who knows the Chicago Tribune only by its reputation will be shocked to learn that the Tribune’s labor reporting was recently judged antiunion. According to a new study out of the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Tribune’s “anti-working class bias hampers the newspaper’s reporters and editors’ efforts to more accurately […]
Posted inArts & Culture
World Set Free
World Set Free, Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Given the current winds of war, Bryn Magnus’s play for Steppenwolf’s Arts Exchange program is presciently timed. It depicts the secret effort by University of Chicago scientists in the spring of 1942 to produce the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction–the embryo of the atom bomb. World Set Free underscores […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mia Doi Todd
On her first three albums, LA’s Mia Doi Todd captured my attention with just voice and guitar, and her cryptic lyrics and mannered singing cast a spell on me even when I wasn’t quite sure what she was singing about. On her recent major-label debut, The Golden State (Columbia), producer Mitchell Froom adds a bunch […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
Happy Birthday, Wanda June, Theo Ubique Theatre Company, at the Heartland Studio Theater. Written immediately after Kurt Vonnegut finished what many consider his finest work, the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, this play has at its center the same contradictory feelings. On the one hand, Vonnegut is a hard-bitten nihilist, certain that life is absurd, war is pointless, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
War: What It’s Good For
In the endless debate over war in Iraq, we seem to have forgotten something: Saddam Hussein is killing and torturing his own people.
Posted inArts & Culture
By the Music of the Spheres
By the Music of the Spheres, Goodman Theatre. Carson Grace Becker and David Barr III’s new play isn’t a complete mess, like Becker’s Book of Mercy (presented last fall by Chicago Dramatists). But it’s far from ready for prime time. Two deaf half siblings confined in a Massachusetts insane asylum during reconstruction–Katherine, the daughter of […]
Posted inNews & Politics
TRG Music Listings
Rock, Pop, Etc. Concerts ANCIENT GREEKS Free in-store performance. Thu 3/13, 6 PM, Reckless Records, 1532 N. Milwaukee. 773-235-3727. CORA BALDWIN Free concert. Mon 3/10, noon, Chicago Music Mart, DePaul Center, 333 S. State. 312-362-6700. JELLO BIAFRA Benefit for the Chicago Green Candidates Fund (see www.14thDistrict.org for more information). Thu 3/13, 8:30 PM, Skyscraper Auditorium, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Marisol
Marisol, Greasy Joan & Company, at the Viaduct Theater. Jose Rivera isn’t the first playwright to portray New York City as the distillation of everything evil in capitalism. But Marisol goes a step further, blaming our dysfunction on the overthrow of an enfeebled God by rebel angels, which ushers in the new millennium. Bereft of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mexican Revolution
Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and 20th-Century Mexican Art at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, through April 27 Before globalism, there was internationalism. Modernism was inseparable from that movement. In the first half of the 20th century, artists and writers traveled throughout Europe and the Americas exchanging ideas and images, hoping to create a new […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Tom Rush
Tom Rush began his career in the early 60s as a folk-blues revivalist on the Boston coffeehouse circuit, but by ’65 he was already working in the studio with rockers like bassist Felix Pappalardi and guitarist Al Kooper. His 1968 album The Circle Game (Elektra) featured definitive versions of two Joni Mitchell songs (“Urge for […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Festival of New Plays
About Face Theatre and the Museum of Contemporary Art team up for a showcase of new gay- and lesbian-themed works in various stages of development. Offerings range from workshop productions to readings and discussions, as shown in the schedule below. The festival runs through March 16 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Kind of a Drag
Justin Hayford reviews Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife and Alexandra Billings’s Before I Disappear.
Posted inArts & Culture
Big Daddy Kane, Killah Priest
Brooklyn’s Antonio Hardy, aka Big Daddy Kane, would be remembered as one of hip-hop’s greatest lyricists even if he’d never opened his mouth: he cowrote a number of classic hits in the 80s for artists such as Biz Markie (“Make the Music With Your Mouth, Biz”) and Roxanne Shante (“Roxanne’s Revenge”). But he also turned […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Train of Thought: Premiere One-Acts by Chicago Playwrights
Train of Thought: Premiere One-Acts by Chicago Playwrights, Stage Left Theatre. Neither of the works on this program is terribly optimistic, but Mia McCullough’s Suicide at least finds some humor in its dark subject. In her entertaining play, a crooked politician turns to a delusional homeless woman and “crazy Jesus prophet guy” for help during […]