Tenor sax player Eric Alexander generated a fair amount of hoopla when he came out of nowhere (i.e., Chicago before the current jazz revival) to place second in the 1991 Thelonious Monk competition. Since then he’s clearly outstripped the winner, the facile but generally underwhelming Joshua Redman, but I get the feeling that the jazz […]
Tag: Vol. 33 No. 33
Issue of May. 13 – 19, 2004
Posted inArts & Culture
Things That Go Missing
THINGS THAT GO MISSING, Curious Theatre Branch. Beau O’Reilly’s scripts tend to feature type A personalities running circles around a character who’s slightly out of step with the world: a henpecked introvert, a coolly rational observer, an easily agitated misanthrope. In this evening of three short plays, reportedly each written with a particular actor in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Things You Shouldn’t Say Past Midnight: A Comedy in Three Beds
THINGS YOU SHOULDN’T SAY PAST MIDNIGHT: A COMEDY IN THREE BEDS, Chemically Imbalanced Comedy, at the Viaduct Theater. There’s no denying the implausibility of the characters, the familiarity of the half-baked ideas, or the toothlessly risque flavor of Peter Ackerman’s lightweight sex comedy. But audiences haven’t been too put off by the sitcom echoes: the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Rjd2
Rjd2 gets compared to DJ Shadow a bunch, but that’s mostly because Shadow’s the only really famous artist doing anything similar. Both create dreamy, instrumental hip-hop-flavored soundscapes out of odds and ends, but while DJ Shadow blows on his dandelion head and lets the seeds scatter where they may, Rjd2 keeps a well-tended garden. Though […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bodily Functions–the Musical; The Grand Scheme
BODILY FUNCTIONS–THE MUSICAL, Corn Productions, and THE GRAND SCHEME, at the Cornservatory. Robert Bouwman and Todd Schaner’s new musical is like a Farrelly brothers movie–but not quite as funny. The good-hearted story is punctuated by gross-out humor and underscored by a trite message: individuality is good, conformity is bad. The oddball Bodily family–who spend their […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Indie Film Masters: George Romero & Jack Hill
Directors Jack Hill and George Romero will appear at this weekend tribute, presented by Movieside Film Festival. Screenings are Friday through Sunday, May 14 through 16, at the Biograph. All shows will include live music. Tickets are $10 on Friday, $12 on Saturday and Sunday; passes, good for all screenings, are $25. For more information […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Johanna Billing
At first I disliked Johanna Billing’s music video You Don’t Love Me Yet, which shows a group of Swedish amateurs performing a sappy version of Roky Erickson’s 80s song. Following music-video convention, she intercuts group shots with solo views and intersperses high and low angles. But she also edits with real subtlety, avoiding predictability by […]
Posted inColumns & Opinion
Savage Love
You had to know letters would pour in from women pissed off at your blatantly fat-phobic, sexist response to Butter With Your Rolls, the man who thought “girl love handles” created by low-rise jeans were “revolting.” You agreed with him “100 percent” and said that women “should get the obesity epidemic under control” if we […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The Great Go-Goop War, Part II
In continuing homage, and with further apologies, to the late Theodor Geisel.
Posted inArts & Culture
The Pajama Game
THE PAJAMA GAME, Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire. This irresistible 1954 Broadway classic harks back to a time when you could pin a plot on a threatened strike, here by workers at a pajama factory in Cedar Rapids. (Solidarity, alas, isn’t forever.) Complete with plenty of novelty numbers (including the Bob Fosse signature items “Hernando’s Hideaway” […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Pray for Us All; Beavers Plays With Fire
Though most of the aldermen were alive and even grown up in 1954, none apparently remember that “under God” was added to the pledge that year because religious leaders persuaded Congress that we should distinguish ourselves from our enemy, the Soviet Unio
Posted inArts & Culture
The Seldoms
I want to go live in Preston Bradley Hall. Once the reading room of the former Chicago Public Library, now the Chicago Cultural Center, it’s topped by a Tiffany dome (one of the largest in the world) and decorated with sumptuous mosaics; grand arches lead to its distant reaches. Here, one imagines, people could read […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Born Heller
When I first heard Josephine Foster sing, with local duo the Children’s Hour a year and a half ago, I couldn’t believe she hadn’t already been adopted by the burgeoning “new weird America” scene: plenty of so-called acid-folk singers sound like rock vocalists trying to backtrack into a purer, more idiosyncratic style, but Foster has […]
Posted inFilm
Let’s Go With Pancho Villa!
Despite its commercial failure, this 1935 feature, the last installment of Fernando de Fuentes’s trilogy on the Mexican revolution, remained his favorite film. The country’s first big-budget epic, it was funded by a state company sponsoring images of Mexico’s progressive populism, but de Fuentes had witnessed both the revolution and its aftermath, and at midlife […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hot Club of Cowtown
Since 1996 this Austin trio has been staking out a middle ground between Django Reinhardt’s Gypsy jazz and Bob Wills’s western swing. They usually emphasize the latter, in part because guitarist Whit Smith is no Reinhardt–though he effectively evokes the master’s characteristic dusky mood, he can’t hope to match him rhythmically. But the more important […]