This Week: Indian
Tag: Vol. 32 No. 5
Issue of Oct. 31 – Nov. 6, 2002
Posted inArts & Culture
James and the Giant Peach
James and the Giant Peach, Inequity Theatrical Collaboration, at the Cornservatory. Richard R. George’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book for this late-night, adult-oriented show dumbs down the original’s wicked humor into silly sexually tinged camp. Thrown in are a few songs by Joseph Stearns. In George’s version, directed by Lewis Lain Jr., a group […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Scoring Points
In the contest for audiences, sports have the clear advantage over theater. Speakers at a League of Chicago Theatres conference debated whether journalists can help level the playing field.
Posted inNews & Politics
Land of Dreams
It’s a cherished American truism that humble beginnings don’t limit a person’s ability to succeed. But a local economist has good evidence that, in fact, they do and our society is nowhere near as mobile as we thought.
Posted inArts & Culture
Calendar
Friday 11/1 – Thursday 11/7 NOVEMBER 1 FRIDAY Bahman Farmanara’s career was clipping along nicely until the Iranian filmmaker’s work was banned in 1978 by postrevolutionary censors. His next ten scripts were rejected by the Iranian film board, but he came back from artistic exile in 2000 with Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine. An […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Strangers in the Night
After we got a few things straight, we got along fine.
Posted inArts & Culture
Dance Chicago 2002
If it was good enough for Jane Austen, it’s good enough for me. In an 1813 letter to her sister Cassandra about Pride and Prejudice, which had just been published, Austen said that “the work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling.” One might say the same of the monthlong Dance Chicago festival–the “Opening […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Monsters, Inc.
Scaring the pants off people once a year is a year-round business.
Posted inArts & Culture
Ensemble Espanol Spanish Dance Theater
It’s been around for 26 years, but under the direction of Dame Libby Komaiko, Ensemble Espanol Spanish Dance Theater is still making a joyful noise. I thought my heart would fly out of my chest when the six dancers in Ritmos del Flamenco began beating on the cajones–the hollow boxes or “drawers” on which flamenco […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends (A Final Evening With the Illuminati)
Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends (A Final Evening With the Illuminati), Wing & Groove Theatre. Larry Larson and Levi Lee’s dark comedy–about the half-mad Reverend Eddie and Brother Lawrence, living in a bombed-out church sanctuary in the aftermath of some horrible war–seems much less paranoid than it did the last […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Daughter of the Flames
This week Facets Cinematheque and the Chicago Humanities Festival present a retrospective of films by Korean director Im Kwon-taek, who will lecture on Saturday, November 9, as part of the festival. Like Japanese masters Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa, Im has set his films in both the feudal past (Chihwaseon, his latest release) and the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
By Any Means Necessary
State senator William Shaw faces a tough challenger in Reverend James Meeks, who was handpicked by Jesse Jackson Jr. to oust him, but the south-side warrior and his brother Robert are old hands at getting and holding on to power.
Posted inArts & Culture
Here and Now
This survey of work by 22 mostly young Chicagoans, a collaboration between four different curators, includes the good, the bad, and the silly–sometimes in a single piece. Christopher Vasell’s video Clenched Jaw/Sunken Cheeks (Tom Cruise) (2000) intercuts a handful of hypnotically repeating images of Cruise; Vasell wanted to show the limited range of the actor’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
T-Model Ford
In recent years, the Fat Possum label has made a cottage industry of “discovering” southern blues musicians, recording them at their rawest and promoting them as exemplars of an unsullied tradition. In the process they’ve tended to sensationalize their charges’ lives: any man with knife scars or a prison record finds his travails paraded as […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Accessibility Issues
Dear editor: It always seems to me that the reason one reads a review is to get some sense of what happened at a performance one couldn’t attend. When I read Kelly Kleiman’s review of the Trisha Brown Dance Company (“Glimpse of Perfection,” October 11), I had the opposite response. I couldn’t comprehend how she […]