CHICAGO STRING ENSEMBLE at Saint Paul’s United Church of Christ September 22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As such, it was in good hands with CSE music director Alan Heatherington, who was able to elicit a beautiful, full, rich sound from his mere 22 players. The ensembling was tight, the phrasing very musical, and the piece’s inner and outer structure were meticulously revealed....
They went to the fourth annual Cubs Convention at the Hyatt Regency Hotel last weekend to rub elbows with beloved Cubs players, past and present, and to bend elbows with Hall of Fame broadcaster Harry Caray. But 11 miles to the west, at the Hillside Holiday Inn, they came looking for “Fuck Face.” Bill Ripken, brother of all-star Cal, son of former manager Cal Sr. Last year’s stats: .207 batting average, 106 hits, 2 home runs, 54 runs batted in....
Is it only the weather, or have the days actually melted, one into the next, in the same manner that spring has bled into summer? It seems the ivy at Wrigley Field has been green for months, that we are forever under a bleached-out blue sky, crisscrossed by vapor-trail clouds that don’t scud so much as they hang in the same place and wait for the earth to move. In this dreamlike trance, the Cubs have no acknowledged chance at challenging for the division lead, but they are playing well nevertheless....
“I am practically a citizen of Chicago!” declares Valeryi Beliakovich through an interpreter. Indeed, the maverick Russian director is in town for the fifth time in less than two years, as part of an ongoing exchange program between his Studio Theatre of Moscow- Southwest and the theater department of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Moscow, Beliakovich’s unorthodox directing style has earned him and his troupe, in less than a decade, much respect and renown....
California’s William Clarke has become one of the most rapidly rising stars in the new generation of blues musicians. He perfected his shimmering, wide-chorded harp playing studying with the late Harmonica George Smith, and Smith’s distinctive eclecticism is evident everywhere in Clarke’s approach: on a straight-ahead shuffle he bends notes with the raucous abandon of a Chicago juker; on an easy-swinging California lope he warbles sweetly above his band’s jump-blues backing, placing notes into the empty spaces they leave open for him with a precision you’d expect from an improviser many years his senior....
JAN ERKERT & DANCERS It’s possible to see modern dance as a women’s ghetto–and modern dancers as the starving little sisters in a community that’s undernourished anyway–in a country that ghettoizes all art, not just dance. That’s why it’s so heartening when modern dancers, and especially women, get some recognition. At the annual Ruth Page awards for Chicago dance last September, two women–modern dancers–walked away with the two most coveted awards: Jan Erkert for best choreography and Mary Johnston-Coursey for best dancer....
The council at Roosevelt High School followed all the rules last year when they hired two security guards to help keep the peace. They posted the position, solicited applications from a variety of candidates, whittled their choices to three, and eventually selected two nearby residents, to be paid from a pool of discretionary antipoverty funds. The dispute is yet another example of growing struggle between central-office administrators and school activists over how much power local councils–those elected boards of parents, community representatives, teachers, and principals–can exercise in this age of “reform....
Friday 12 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Marc PoKempner, P. Michael O’Sullivan, Art Shay, and Paul Sequeira are among those whose photographs of the Democratic convention and other events of 1968 will be exhibited through August 28 at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, as part of its Chicago 68/88 . . . Visions of Dissent series commemorating the convention and its legacy. Recent work by photographers Loren Santow, Bill Stamets, Deborah Fletcher, and others documenting current political events both local and national will also be on display....
CATHOLICS IN HEAT That’s the premise of Woods’s anticlerical spoof of family and religious values. I say spoof because satire is too strong a word; though the script addresses such hot-button issues as abortion, adultery, suicide, and loss of faith, there’s nothing here remotely resembling keen comic analysis. Farce is the wrong word, too; it suggests far more action and coherent structure than is found in Woods’s play, which is receiving its world premiere at Stage Two Theatre in downtown Waukegan....
MUSIC OF THE BAROQUE at DePaul University Concert Hall Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MOB music director Thomas Wikman did a far more stylish job with The Creation than he has with the Mozart works I have heard him perform, largely because Haydn’s phrases are more choppy than Mozart’s lyrical ones and so they better suit Wikman’s conducting style. The conducting here was still slow, but Wikman was able to make a convincing case for his tempi, and he was not as heavy-handed as he has been with his Mozart....
COUCHPIECE and Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Couchpiece and Coming Back, two one-act plays at the Organic Theater Company Greenhouse, make for an odd double bill. Both pieces are briskly directed, both have moments of pathos wrapped up in irreverence, and both make strong political statements. But they’re also quite different. Couchpiece doesn’t have a word of dialogue, while Coming Back is one massive internal monologue; the humor in Couchpiece is broad and fantastic, while that in Coming Back is more subtle and poignant; and Couchpiece dissects a particularly female experience, while Coming Back is about a situation usually experienced by men....
Who would have thought that Paul Mazursky (An Unmarried Woman, Down and Out in Beverly Hills), defender of middle-class mediocrity, could have brought off this sensitive adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s slyly subversive and emotionally complex novel, an erotic love story and comedy-drama about holocaust survivors living in New York City in 1949-50? Ron Silver plays a man named Herman who works as a ghostwriter for a rabbi (Alan King) and winds up married to three women at once–his original wife Tamara (Anjelica Huston), whom he believed to have perished in a concentration camp; a non-Jew (Margaret Sophie Stein) named Yadwiga, his family’s former servant in Poland, who saved his life by hiding him in a hayloft and who lives with him now in Coney Island; and Masha (Lena Olin), a volatile Jewish woman who lives with her mother (Judith Malina) in the Bronx....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First of all, Zotti offers in his piece a veritable Thanksgiving-Day cornucopia of inconsistencies and contradictions. Examples: He damns Sullivan, then praises him; calls him a modernist, then a Victorian; says he is irrelevant for our time, then insists he is worthy of emulation, etc. As annoying as is all the flip-flopping, it is a minor problem compared to the eagerness with which Zotti embraces the simpleminded antibusiness/antitechnology line espoused by David Andrews, author of one of the books Zotti discusses in his article....
LA CLEMENZA DI TITO The opera fell into virtual disuse during the Romantic era. An increasingly low regard for the work began with hack biographers and critics and was canonized by Wagner. The objections had to do with the speediness of its composition (18 days, according to legend, although the evidence does not support this), and with what critics perceived as Mozart’s lack of interest in the subject matter (in fact, he had been contemplating setting the libretto for two years)....
Lead Story In October Bill Tilney, the mayor of El Paso, Texas, presented residents in the northeast part of the city with the award for having the best neighborhood crime watch, citing the area’s four years of no crime–except for a drug-related double murder two weeks before the ceremony. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » University of Oklahoma law school adjunct professor Annette Prince, apparently to show support for her colleague Anita Hill, stood on her desk during an October lecture and stripped down to her T-shirt, which read “Anita Hill Plus Will Rogers Equals Okie Pride....
Once every year, no matter what it usual line of business, every publicly owned company becomes a publisher. Men in red suspenders sit down with men in ponytails to cook up ideas. Design boards are trotted in and out of conference rooms, executives dicker over copy, the chairman sits for a flatter-or-fail portrait. Type is set and set again. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The rationale for a slick yearbook is the boost it can give to the corporate image, but this is a little tricky: What’s primarily promoted (or defended) in the annual report is not the company and its widgets, but the performance of the incumbent management team....
It is impossible for me to think of the music of Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky and not think of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande’s definitive recordings of those composers’ works, led by Ernest Ansermet. The late Ansermet founded the orchestra more than 70 years ago in order to give the French-speaking part of Switzerland (the “Suisse Romande”) its own permanent orchestra. Ansermet’s 50-year career with the orchestra, well documented on hundreds of recordings that are finding new life on compact disc, is one of the great conductor-orchestra partnerships of all time....
GOAT ISLAND In life and art there are experiences for which we lack a context or frame of reference. But just by asking “What’s that?” and “What’s he/she saying?” we create a name for something that hitherto had no name–and in naming things we brand them, give them form, and make them real. Language puts experience into a context. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Goat Island’s 1989 We Got a Date, directed by Lin Hixson, seems to raise many questions that are answered, if obscurely, in the asking....
SOLOMONS’ CHOICE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Carol and Ben Solomon live with the latter’s mother, Lena, in a Skokie bungalow. Frances and Tim Donahue live on a dairy farm in Kenosha. Paths and swords cross when Mark Solomon and Anne Marie Donahue announce that they are in love and intend to marry. The bride’s mother and the groom’s mother and grandmother voice their disapproval in no uncertain terms (the two fathers bond immediately and get on amiably throughout), but the children remain adamant in their proposal to merge....
THE CENCI Off-Off Loop Theatre Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cenci is accustomed to buying protection from punishment for his crimes by paying off the pope — the authority figure who embodies the hypocrisy Cenci despises; so when Beatrice and her mother and little brother apply to the pope for shelter from Cenci, their petition is refused. Beatrice’s only choice is to murder her father — an act you might think would trouble her after all the praying and Bible-kissing she’s been doing....
