Musical! The Musical, Players Workshop, at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts. It wasn’t that long ago that a troupe able to improvise for 20 minutes based on a single audience suggestion was considered a prodigy. These days everyone does that, though not always well. Those who want to stand out have to raise […]
Tag: Vol. 32 No. 25
Issue of Mar. 20 – 26, 2003
Posted inNews & Politics
Battling Fridas
Jose Gonzalez, one of the fiercest proponents of the city’s Latino art scene, is almost ready to bury the hatchet with the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. But first he has a little score to settle.
Posted inArts & Culture
Pita
Pita (aka Peter Rehberg), the Vienna-based co-owner of the influential electronic-music label Mego, is a pioneer of laptop music–he released Seven Tons for Free, with its glitches and its serene yet clipped synthetic melodies, back in 1996. Since then his music has grown darker, louder, and more violent, and his sense of scale and dynamics […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Eifman Ballet
Boris Eifman returns to Chicago for the fourth consecutive year with an evening-length ballet that’s a departure for him: the two main characters in Who’s Who are not the larger-than-life historical or literary figures so well suited to his larger-than-life choreography. Where other Eifman dances have featured Hamlet, Tchaikovsky, Don Juan, Moliere, and famous ballerina […]
Posted inArts & Culture
You Can’t Take It With You
You Can’t Take It With You, North Lakeside Players. Nostalgists lauding the so-called extended family often ignore the economic factors that require several generations to live under one roof. They’re probably visualizing instead a tribal commune like the one in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1936 classic, where a young married couple in the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Andrew Weatherall
Andrew Weatherall would be a legend in dance music even if he’d done nothing but remix an obscure Primal Scream song called “I’m Losing More Than I Ever Had” in 1990. Retitled “Loaded,” the mix was one of the best singles of the decade, a swaggering merger of funk beats, rock guitar, and soul horns […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Great Go-Goop War!
In homage and with apologies to the late Theodor Geisel
Posted inMusic
The Magnolia Electric Co. is easily the best album of Jason Molina’s career
“I didn’t want to make music where people expected it to always sound the same.”
Posted inArts & Culture
European Union Film Festival
The sixth annual European Union Film Festival continues Friday through Thursday, March 21 through 27, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Admission is $8, $4 for Film Center members. For further information call 312-846-2800. Films marked with an * are highly recommended. FRIDAY, MARCH 21 The State I Am In A moody […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Where No Gallerist Has Gone Before
Highwood, once a blue-collar enclave, adds art to the menu.
Posted inArts & Culture
Time Flies
“Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli,” an essay by Adam Gopnik in the September 30, 2002, issue of the New Yorker, was one inspiration for Flying Griffin Circus’s new show, which begins preview performances this weekend. Gopnik’s essay is a rather precious account of his three-year-old daughter’s very New York problem–an imaginary friend too busy to play […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Art People: Dearraindrop’s psychedelic swirl
Garbage day in Virginia Beach fell on Wednesday when Joe Grillo and Laura Grant were in high school. Students at a private art school, they bonded one afternoon in 1995 when, along with Laura’s younger brother, Billy, they accidentally set a neighbor’s house on fire with homemade fireworks; soon they were spending all their time […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Frodo A-Go-Go: The Rings Recycled
Frodo A-Go-Go: The Rings Recycled, Free Associates, at the Royal George Theatre Center. Like BS, the Free Associates’ improv parody of ER, this show created and directed by Robyn Okrant spoofs a popular phenom, the Lord of the Rings movies. And like all parodies, this one is funnier the better you know the original–I’d recommend […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Single File: A Solo Performance Festival
This second annual showcase of one-person performances features more than 40 pieces, ranging from stand-up comedy acts to theatrical monologues and one-person plays. The festival runs through March 22. Shows take place at the Athenaeum Theatre, third-floor studio, 2936 N. Southport, 312-902-1500; Playground Theater, 3341 N. Lincoln, 773-871-3793; and WNEP Theater, 3209 N. Halsted, 773-755-1693. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hamlet Dreams
Hamlet Dreams, Bailiwick Repertory. In director David Zak’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, only patriarchs Claudius and Polonius can hear and speak. Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, and Laertes communicate through sign language while alter egos speak their words. Zak and cast manage this unusual staging’s flow very well, and the physical interactions–between Hamlet and Ophelia (Robert Schleifer […]