Did you miss the thrill of Twin Peaks during the mid-season break? Were Saturday nights just a little flat without the anticipation of having your sense of anticipation messed with? When the show resumes this week, do you have any idea what to expect? Don’t you just love it that you have to say “no”? Did you stick to coffee and doughnuts the night Twin Peaks revealed the identity of BOB?...
THE SEAGULL Huge Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These aren’t extraordinary people in The Seagull, just a bunch of Russians, with about a dozen names apiece, killing time on a country estate. Essentially this is a story of unrequited love. Medvedenko (a schoolteacher) loves Masha (a malcontent country lass), who loves Treplev (a would-be writer), who loves Nina (a would-be actor), who loves Trigorin (an accomplished writer), who loves to fish but keeps company with Arkadina (an accomplished actor and Treplev’s mother)....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Firstly, evaluating the bus relative to travel times, traffic congestion and rider comfort is irrelevant if we do not look beyond the way current bus routes operate. If given a dedicated thoroughfare as required by the light-rail system (LRV), any vehicle will perform as well as the railed system and fare even better considering that the costs of track, power cables, and their maintenance have been eliminated....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I think your reviewer, Diana Spinrad must have been elsewhere on the night of December 1 [Theater, December 8]. What Michael Kearns has done with intimacies is to attach an identity to a statistic. Often we hear statistics about all the prostitutes, hustlers and drug addicts affected with AIDS, yet how often have we been faced with their plight on television, movies or theatre?...
PIZZA HOUSE To prepare his parents, Tim has sent ahead the script of his new play, which is about a young man who goes home to the midwest to confess to his parents that he is–oh, you get the idea. Tim has not sent his lover, Arthur, ahead, but Arthur has decided to come out all on his own. Script, lover, and playwright arrive in Ames within 9 minutes of one another, which sets the scene for the surprise party planned to celebrate Tim’s homecoming....
From the moment the thin-lipped, red-eyed, and reedy-voiced Dr. Alfred Carroll steps onto the stage at the top of the show to warn us of the dangers of “Mary Juana,” it’s clear that Some Mo’ Productions’ appropriation of the 1936 cult-film classic is going to be pitch perfect, right down to the way the doctor stands with his soft fleshy hands crossed protectively over his crotch. Part sharp satire, part gentle spoof, part loving homage, this stage version adapted by Sean Abley re-creates the original film’s odd mixture of lead-footed propaganda and over-the-top hysteria (not unlike the recent Republican convention) while revealing its contradictory message: marijuana is bad and marijuana users lead wild, sexy, adventurous lives....
If Charles Addams had been a performance artist, he would have been Matthew Owens. This self-described insomniac fills his work with the kind of terrifying surreal images one usually sees only in nightmares: burn victims, rotting cadavers, recently hacked-off body parts. But his sensibility is more comic than Grand Guignol; his aim is not merely to shock, but to shock and provoke laughter. Which is why in Owens’s world, burn victims lip-synch Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” recently decapitated heads thank us for listening, and first-aid dummies spew quarts of blood during CPR demonstrations....
SCULPTURE AT LAKESIDE STUDIO At Lakeside Studio in Lakeside, Michigan, right behind a big white hotel, a large ceramic fish, a prehistoric-looking thing, nestles into a plinth as if its own weight is forcing it to sink into the ground. The glistening and spiny creature seems exhausted but not yet defeated–gathering strength for one last attempt to flop across a driveway, through a fence, and into an algae-covered pond about 30 feet away....
“Forget about punk. Forget about the new Mods marching to the beat of ‘My Generation.’ In the England of 1980, ska is the word.” That’s how Rolling Stone critic David Fricke began his March 23, 1980, article on ska, the latest music craze to sweep the U.K. A decade later, the record label most responsible for the ska revolution, 2-Tone Records, has commemorated the tenth anniversary of the ska phenomenon with The 2 Tone Story, a double album that highlights the best of the ska movement and leaves you wondering why the hypnotic music never became the word in America....
Tonight the UIC Pavilion is a temple for meditation, introspection. Sri Chinmoy, the spiritual guru, is performing his “Oneness-Happiness Song,” a concert to promote inner peace. His posters have been plastered all over town for weeks. I suppose I’m as much in search of inner peace as the next guy, but I mostly want to see the person who could afford to rent out the Pavilion and put up big video screens and give away all the tickets for free....
Chicago’s reputation as a vital national center for theater has grown over the past 20 years largely on the strength of its actors. The “Steppenwolf-Second City syndrome,” as some call it, has emphasized the performer’s role. Most audiences are drawn primarily by their enjoyment of the people they see onstage, but that’s not conducive to the development of a comparably strong base of writers. And a theater company is likely to find it much less risky to mount productions of scripts that have been tested elsewhere than to spend the time and money to nurture new playwrights here....
At this point in his career, the gifts bestowed by Sunnyland Slim transcend music. At 81 he’s not quite the oldest working Chicago bluesman–that honor would probably go to 83-year-old Jimmy Walker–but he’s easily the most resilient, having rebounded from a series of physical setbacks in recent years that would’ve broken the spirit and energy of many men in their prime, and his joyful, life-affirming presence is a continual source of wonder and inspiration....
I trust you can settle a matter that threatens to create a vast rift between my love and I. What is the absolute, unequivocal straight dope on astrology? My girl maintains that while horoscopes in newspapers may be rubbish, astrology as a whole is not. She believes that a person’s traits are dictated by their astrological chart (i.e., time of birth, position of planets, etc.) and that a person’s zodiac sign may be guessed by simply observing them....
My friend Heather and her hubby just laid out some fairly big bucks to spend a weekend learning how to maximize their total personhood and all that. Highlight of the weekend was a scamper across hot coals. The idea was to impress you with the power of your mind–if you kept thoughts of cool moss in mind as you walked, your feet wouldn’t burn. The coals were in a strip about a yard wide and ten feet long....
ZEPHYR DANCE ENSEMBLE Jimi Hendrix always had a different program than other rock musicians in the 60s. While the Beatles were shaping the blues into classical dimensions and Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, and many others were giving the blues a hammering intensity, Hendrix was moving away from genre forms. Instead he used noise–feedback or the sound of a pick–to push toward concrete music; the howl of feedback was just as good as F sharp on a violin....
Friday 7 In the Sun-Times some time ago, comedy correspondent Ernest Tucker profiled a comedian named Hugh Fink. Fink’s metier, Tucker wrote, is taking on “sacred” targets like Kasey Kasem, who the story said had “cashed in on his celebrity status to start crusading for Arab rights.” (Generally people cash in on something that can make them more money.) That Arab-bashing can even creep into innocuous entertainment coverage indicates how widespread it is in the American media; presumably, that’ll be one of the topics discussed today by a panel on The Media and the Arab World....
On December 2, 1988, 32 Chicago Housing Authority guards and Chicago police raided the high rise at 2822 S. Calumet as part of the agency’s Operation Clean Sweep against drugs and gangs in the housing projects. CHA chief Vincent Lane stood outside the 13-story building and commented, “This will be an ongoing operation until we have made public housing safe for our residents.” But making public housing safe at 2822 S....
One singular virtue of the French cinema compared to our own is the possibility of low-budget, offbeat projects that well-known actors are willing to participate in. Michel Deville’s very theatrical adaptation and direction of a whodunit novel by Franz-Rudolf Falk isn’t especially compelling as story telling, but it allows one to see eight of the best movie actors in France–Fanny Ardant, Daniel Auteuil, Richard Bohringer, Philippe Leotard, Jeanne Moreau, Michel Piccoli, Claude Pieplu, and Jean Yanne–acquitting themselves honorably; Ardant and Piccoli are particularly delightful....
KNUCKLE The searcher is Sarah’s brother, Curly, who after a voluntary exile returns to England to investigate her disappearance. In the 12 years since he left the land he loathes, Curly has become a prosperous international arms dealer. On the cynical assumption that someone has to do it, he’ll sell ammo to anyone. “I go where there’s a war,” he declares, pronouncing death “the axle grease that makes civilization work.” (Curly resembles Andrew Undershaft, the munitions manufacturer in Major Barbara, but without Shaw’s devil’s advocacy....
Politicians vs. Publisher Surely, it is Pfeil’s devotion to the Creed that explains the anguish he exhibited some weeks ago, when two elected public officials importuned the public to think in lockstep. We speak of state representative John Matijevich and Lake County Coroner Barbara Richardson, both of whom took to the airwaves in a bald attempt to manipulate mass opinion. Soon after they began to air, Pfeil ran into Richardson at a public gathering, the topping-off ceremony for a new commercial development....
