Turn up late and you’ll miss the superior opening act on this double bill: Cook County Social Club, whose four performers, directed by Jeff Griggs, are as brazenly committed to improv’s “affirm everything” mantra as any I’ve seen. Their dark, flamboyant comic sensibilities clearly aligned, they orchestrate black-comedy vignettes tethered to richly odd characters, such […]
Tag: Vol. 35 No. 20
Issue of Feb. 9 – 15, 2006
Posted inArts & Culture
Short Shakespeare! Macbeth
Director David H. Bell turns the Bard’s shortest tragedy into a 75-minute fever dream of irrepressible ambition and inescapable doom. Pile-driving percussionist Ethan Deppe accompanies with what sounds like the wrath of God. Decked out in leather and tattoos, the 12 young, fit cast members fully flesh out the play’s sound and fury, whether expressed […]
Posted inArts & Culture
They Also Make Great Golf Club Covers
Dennis Molawa, 54, is a stagehand and lighting technician at the House of Blues. Heather Kenny: What exactly is Crown Royal, anyway? Dennis Molawa: It’s whiskey. It’s a blend, as opposed to a bourbon. It’s aged ten years. It’s easier on my system. That’s why I like it. I put my stomach through all that […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cubs Win!
There’s a second Cubs curse in Michael Flores’s new play, not just the famous one about the team turning away the Billy Goat’s billy goat. Here the totem pole at Lake Shore Drive and Addison is the problem: instead of facing east it’s facing west, straight at Wrigley Field. Flores’s story about the beer vendors, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
John Zorn’s Masada
A dozen years ago composer and saxophonist John Zorn set out to create his own songbook–a cohesive, self-contained body of work akin to the output of great jazz writers like Thelonious Monk or Benny Golson. He went on to write 205 tunes, many of which were recorded by this excellent quartet–Zorn, trumpeter Dave Douglas, bassist […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Are We Paying This Guy to Stay Home?
He’s supposed to get his job back, but that probably won’t keep him from complaining.
Posted inArts & Culture
Dear World
Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot, the delicately whimsical 1946 comedy that inspired this 1969 Broadway musical, champions colorful eccentrics against venal venture capitalists who want to exploit Paris’s petroleum and uranium deposits. But the musicalization often feels blatantly polemical. Jerry Herman’s peppy score only reminds us of the richer work he did in Mame […]
Posted inMusic
Loneliness Loves Company
Devin Davis moved to Chicago alone, recorded an album alone, and put it out alone. Now he’s got friends he’s never even met.
Posted inArts & Culture
Letters/X, Part 3
Now in its third incarnation, this anti-Valentine’s Day show of sketches, songs, puppetry, and interpretive dances offers actual “why did you leave?” and “you suck” letters and e-mails. The evening works best when GroundUp Theatre presents both sides of a breakup–a cheating airhead’s apology is even funnier contrasted with her mate’s cold disdain. Follow-ups are […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Down to the Bone
Vera Farmiga gives a stunning performance as a working-class woman in upstate New York whose coke addiction is destroying her relationship with her two young sons. After going into rehab she meets a wise male nurse (Hugh Dillon), a former addict, and his loving support stands in stark contrast to her husband’s continuing drug use. […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A Boy and His Toys
One Happy Meal prize is garbage. But 45,000 of them is art.
Posted inArts & Culture
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
In 1822 Schubert abandoned his most famous and beloved work, the Unfinished Symphony, having completed only two movements, though he did sketches for a third. That same year he was diagnosed with syphilis, which would take his life just six years later, when he was 31. The symphony, which he never heard performed, is among […]
Posted inArts & Culture
She’s a Believer
More than 200 postcard-size paintings of hearts, most of them red or pink, hang from strings in Beth Reitmeyer’s richly colorful installation With Love, part of a show with the same title opening tonight at Zg; hearts made of pipe cleaners cover the walls. Reitmeyer, some of whose other exhibits have involved giving her work […]
Posted inArts & Culture
I Dream in Blues
Chicago blues singer Katherine Davis, with cowriter-director Tom Arvetis, tells the story of her life in this hour-long family-oriented show–well, the part when she was growing up in Cabrini-Green in the early 60s. A self-described “short, fat colored girl with no neck,” she surmounts her self-doubt to enter and win a talent contest. But much […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The New One-Armed Swordsman
This month the Gene Siskel Film Center presents a retrospective tribute to Shaw Brothers Ltd., the studio that defined Hong Kong action cinema, and this gory 1971 epic, showing in a handsome new print, is one of the benchmarks. The studio had enjoyed great success in the 60s with wuxia–martial arts adventures based on ancient […]