Talking Trash, Scrap Mettle Soul, at Margate Park Community Center. “I’m a G-man,” declares Tomas from Streets and San. “I pick up your garbage. But you have to clean up your own messes.” This sets the tone for Talking Trash, a musical revue by Jules Corriere and composer Lloyd Brodnax King created in support of […]
Tag: Vol. 32 No. 31
Issue of May. 1 – 7, 2003
Posted inArts & Culture
Concerto Chicago
Concerto Chicago, Victory Gardens Theater. Chicago playwright Lonnie Carter treats words like skyrockets, jump ropes, weather balloons, and boomerangs. If one won’t serve, he’ll find a new one, and he discovers rhymes in places most balladeers would be too proud to look. His latest “cerebration” is true to the free-associative spirit of his The Sovereign […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Runaway Train
Gem of the Ocean Goodman Theatre In every generation one must see oneself as though having personally come forth from Egypt. –Passover Haggadah One is amazed. Here’s August Wilson after nine plays and 20 years, so near the end of his epic attempt to chronicle African-American life in each decade of the 20th century; here […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Little Big Man
Christine Craig knows that her father, DeFord Bailey, is one of the most important figures in Grand Ole Opry history. But the Country Music Hall of Fame isn’t singing the same tune.
Posted inArts & Culture
Bach Week Festival
Now in its 30th season, Evanston’s Bach Week Festival has made quite a dent in J.S. Bach’s vast output. To keep the program lively, music director-founder Richard Webster often includes music from some of Bach’s near contemporaries as well: one highlight of this year’s edition is the chorale “Lobe den Herren” by Johann Kuhnau, a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
True Crimes
True Crimes, Boxer Rebellion Theater. Playwright Romulus Linney packs a host of sins into this short amorality play, set in the Appalachian Mountains during the Depression. Illustrating the biblical message that evil begets evil, greed and lust give way here to thieving, incest, and murder as ambitious parents urge their son to court the unhappily […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Philanderer
The Philanderer, ShawChicago, at Chicago Cultural Center. For this refreshingly personal 1893 curiosity George Bernard Shaw drew as much on his diary as on his intellectual insights into the war between the sexes. Leonard Charteris, the title character, finds himself trapped between two adorers who both pretend to model themselves on Ibsen’s “new woman.” One […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Skeleton Crew
Academics may object, but these intrepid fossil hunters have found fertile ground for their thriving business.
Posted inArts & Culture
Message in the Mess
Jerome Gastaldi: Bridges to Freedom at James Tigerman, through May 16 When I visited Valerie Hegarty’s installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art with a friend from Paris, he immediately dismissed it as “trash art.” But I thought that her crumbling bathroom, with its gentle colors and elegant “tiles” of painted paper, was rather beautiful–and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Give ‘Em Some Incentives/Miscellany
Illinois has been bombing with big-time moviemakers; incoming film czar Brenda Sexton hops to fix that with help from her political pals.
Posted inArts & Culture
Pirate Bones
Pirate Bones, Lincoln Square Theatre, at Berry Memorial United Methodist Church. Kristin M. Schramm has overwritten every scene of this world premiere. Throw in a tendency to telegraph stiff transitions, a fairly transparent mystery plot, and some pretty implausible twists, and you’ve got a recipe for what Clint Eastwood might call “a good, long night […]
Posted inNews & Politics
City File
Lest we forget. University of Illinois entomologist Gilbert Waldbauer in his new book, What Good Are Bugs? Insects in the Web of Life: “If all the insects, or even just some critically important ones, were to disappear from the earth–if there were none to pollinate plants, serve as food for other animals, dispose of dead […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Films by Ernie Gehr
Though each of these five silent films by Ernie Gehr focuses on a specific subject–cars on a highway, an apartment still life–his real theme is the paradoxes of the film-viewing process. In the black-and-white Field (1970, 10 min.) diagonal lines continually rush by, the result of the camera rapidly panning across a field. While the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cut Flowers
Chicago Theatre Company’s staging of Gavin Lawrence’s workplace ensemble piece has been transplanted from its south-side home to the main stage of the Noble Fool Theater downtown–and under Douglas Alan-Mann’s direction, the production has lost nothing in the move. The action takes place over a single day in the back room of a flower shop […]