Posts

I wouldn’t blame you if you didnt believe a word I said about the Chicago Children’s Theatre production of Wiley and the Hairy Man. I’m lousy with conflict of interest where this show’s concerned. I didn’t realize exactly how lousy until I got to the theater and toted up the number of connections I have with company and cast. (Let’s not go into detail; let’s just say it’s a lot.) So you might be inclined to dismiss me when I say this Wiley’s probably the smartest, strongest, most fully realized children’s show I’ve ever seen....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In “Power Advertising: Com Ed Gets Shocked, Pulls Plug” (Hot Type, Oct. 13), Michael Miner told a very important story about why Commonwealth Edison is angry with Chicago Times magazine. In its September/October issue, CT published an article by Mary O’Connell in which she criticized Com Ed for having abused its monopoly in northern Illinois by pursuing an investment policy in nuclear generating plants that has resulted in Com Ed’s present overcapacity, hence inefficiency, hence high-end electric rates....

Last year the period-instrument movement reached a new peak in popularity when the sound track of a lavishly produced biopic of baroque viola da gambist Marin Marais became a huge hit. The success was surprising but not totally unexpected. For almost two decades the public’s appetite for early music has been whetted by ensembles such as the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra. Founded in 1979 by Ton Koopman and staffed with a multinational cast of period instrumentalists, the orchestra is arguably the best-liked and most-recorded among baroque specialists....

Friday 7 Harry Golden Jr. of the Sun-Times made the city budget his personal beat in the he 21 years he covered City Hall. But when he died last summer, Golden left no heir to his obsession with the way government spends our money. The Citizens Information Service of Illinois knows it can’t fill Golden’s shoes, but it’ll try to unlock a few of the 1989 budget’s secrets when it sponsors The City Budget Process: What You Don’t Find Out at a Public Hearing....

CINDERELLA In 1986, however, CCB disappeared, the victim of rancorous arguments between management and the board of directors. Cinderella also disappeared from Chicago, and Thanksgiving became a balletic desert for thousands of families. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The three-year absence has not withered Cinderella’s charms. She shows no sign of aging. Although the sets have been modified for touring, they still frame the story and the dancing with spectacle enough to delight adults as well as children....

CITY DREAMS, CITY SCHEMES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And yet, directed with deadpan earnestness and plodding inevitability by Harry Silverstein, City Dreams, City Schemes is refreshingly outspoken about its lack of something to say; tenderly and truthfully, it really means every cliche. Returning to a simpler (i.e., cornier) era, it tells the predictable tale of five plucky New York musicians in 1948 who just want to hang out on street corners and play derivative jazz till they’re famous....

Since he returned to the jazz life five years ago, pianist Don Bennett’s fan club has steadily expanded, and for all the right reasons. His playing reflects lots of tradition and personal energy; he manages to boost a bad rhythm section and sail above a good one; and his music most often melds serious improvisation with the pure communication that distinguished the-brainy-yet-soulful pianists who dominated the 50s and early 60s–his stuff is meat-and-potatoes, but the seasonings really add something extra....

For a nearly 20-year veteran of the local jazz scene, Eric Hochberg has seemed sort of invisible of late, probably because he hasn’t been leading his own groups (and possibly because he blends so well into any project he takes part in). This tough, terrific band–which addresses the first point and proves the second–is long overdue. Up front are the versatile saxophonist Steve Eisen and trumpeter Orbert Davis, a crackling improviser who spends most of his time in the commercial studios; lucky for us, he’s now making time for club work as well....

Don’t think for a minute that Robert Seltzner was some hack that Eddie Vrdolyak kept around to hold his coat. Seltzner is a tough guy too, and he was a big shot down on the East Side of Chicago when Vrdolyak was a nobody lawyer hustling personal-injury cases. The East Side of Chicago has never been much for explaining itself to the city. Psychologically, it’s as remote from the Loop as Ulster is from London....

GLASS HOUSES Jeff Helgeson’s Glass Houses, which concerns a dysfunctional family filled with what he must think are a bunch of zany characters, resembles a bad pilot for a television sitcom. The heroine, Barb, is the most normal–an ex-cheerleader and homecoming queen who is living with her family after her divorce. She and her husband, Ken, apparently separated because he couldn’t deal with either her meddling family or her willingness to do whatever they wanted....

When the Evanston-based chamber choir known as His Majestie’s Clerkes teamed up last year with the Newberry Consort, the joint concert was the early-music highlight of the year. Now the Clerkes have combined a collaboration with gifted local players–in this case the new baroque string ensemble founded by Kevin Mason known as Orpheus Band–with another new tradition: the hiring of internationally established guest conductors. This year’s guest is none other than the extraordinarily gifted British organist and choral director Simon Preston, best known for his tenure as music director of Westminster Abbey, which produced definitive recordings known and respected by music lovers throughout the world....

JENNIFER MONSON AND YVONNE MEIER In their combination of dance and performance art Jennifer Monson and Yvonne Meier seem to keep returning to their childhood. What they do looks like terrific fun: splashing in buckets of water, doing cartwheels and wheelbarrows, pouring honey all over themselves. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But I grew bored with their work quickly, just as I grew bored with show-offs when I was a kid....

LOVE, SEX, AND THE I.R.S. But that’s not all. Jon, a chronically underemployed musician, has been making ends meet by claiming a tax exemption for Leslie–as his wife. And now a representative from the IRS wants to come and audit their books. In addition, Jon and Leslie live in an apartment building that does not permit unmarried couples and is run by a nosy landlord who keeps an eye out for live-in females....

ONE AND ANOTHER, PART TWO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I still believe that. However, after having seen Blind Parrot’s follow-up evening of one-acts, One and Another, Part Two, I’m more hopeful. Sure, in losing Perkins Blind Parrot lost a wonderful, talented, inspired artist who was responsible for such successful productions as Oedipus Requiem and Largo Desolato. But the surviving members clearly have not lost their desire to keep making theater–though neither of the two plays that make up One and Another, Part Two ever approaches the standard set by Perkins in Oedipus Requiem....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While Miner may admire Pfaff for his “keen sense of the importance of moral authority in history” (whatever that means), I’m struck by the fact that Pfaff and Miner apparently have no sense of historical perspective whatsoever when it comes to figuring out what’s wrong with this country. All Pfaff and Miner do is restate things pointed out about the United States over the past 200 years by thinkers like de Tocqueville, Henry James, Richard Hofstadter, and Anthony Burgess....

You might argue that the Paul Wertico Special Quintet, established by Wertico in 1990, needs no identifying adjective–that it’s been “readily distinguishable from others in the same category” (Merriam-Webster) from the start. With Orbert Davis’s cool, crisp trumpet leading the way, the band displays a breezy professionalism without masking its impassioned respect for the mainstream jazz library of the mid-to-late 60s, which is the stylistic underpinning for everything it plays (including the uncluttered compositions of the band’s bassist, Eric Hochberg)....

THELMA & LOUISE With Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Christopher McDonald, Stephen Tobolowsky, Brad Pitt, Timothy Carhart, and Lucinda Jenny. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s questionable how much of the credit for this belongs to director Ridley Scott, whose production company made this movie. So far Scott has turned out one eye-popping cult movie, Blade Runner, which was substantially altered from his own cut, and several more or less forgettable features: two respectable genre exercises (Alien and Someone to Watch Over Me), a so-so literary adaptation (The Duellists), a fluffy department-store Christmas window display (Legend), and an offensive anti-Japanese thriller (Black Rain)....

If 64-year-old Roy Haynes sounds rejuvenated these days, you might be tempted to blame it on his youths. Haynes has surrounded himself with players less than half his age, and logic suggests that it must be their influence that makes him sound so fresh; the evidence of one’s ears, however, suggests that the primary source of this band’s bubbling energy is the older gentleman sitting behind the traps. Haynes is worth marveling at....

CHICAGO PERFORMS Michael Zerang’s Hot Sands and Kaja Overstreet’s Moonlight are the two works making up this double bill, and they couldn’t be more oddly matched. Zerang’s piece uses broad, grotesque, cartoonish strokes to indict our country’s swaggering military posture in the Middle East. Overstreet’s work (actually highlights from a longer piece) presents a series of curious dreamlike fragments, charmingly simple and direct. Seeing these two pieces back-to-back–being put through one’s mental paces–made for a challenging, surprising, and ultimately satisfying evening....

SHATTERING MYTHS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the matter of glass-shattering vocalism, Cecil seems to have been led astray by Gunter Grass’s fictional tin drummer, Oskar [May 11]. In fact, there is no authentic record of glass being broken by the unamplified human voice. Dorothy Caruso categorically denied rumors that her late husband had accomplished the feat; a fortiori it was beyond Gigli’s comparatively feeble instrument....