Posts

MARIE AND BRUCE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The problem with Shawn’s play is that neither Marie nor Bruce is particularly likable. Marie is a cauldron of hate boiling over. She starts off complaining that “I find my husband so goddamned irritating that I’m planning to leave him” and only lets up her abuse when she becomes sick at a party. Bruce is a much harder character to read, but his relative complexity makes him no more appealing....

Sang approached me at break time. “Teacher, I have problem. My father, he live in Vietnam. He find four dog tag from U.S. soldier. He find bone too. He keep in box under his house.” “He farmer. He cut the tree and he see.” Sang is not the first student with news from the war. I’ve heard lots of other stories teaching English to adult refugees at Truman College. Many of the Vietnamese students in the college’s refugee program arrived just in the last year or two, though they’ve been trying to come here since the war ended....

Photographer Jed Fielding calls his encounters with the people he shoots “short collaborations.” Considering the way he works, the intimate pictures he comes up with, and the fact that his subjects are strangers he approaches in the street, they could hardly be anything else. Fielding’s wide-angle lens, usually positioned less than a foot from his subjects, focuses on a face, a torso, the top of a head, or some other fragment....

THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH Such high expectations were initially confirmed. Upon arriving at the cabaret-style performance space, each audience member was handed a section from the Tribune instead of a program and told to become familiar with it before the show started. My friends and I dove into the task, eager to absorb the nuances behind the headlines. With the remarkable events unfolding in the Soviet Union, and the discovery that Richard III may have suffered from idiopathic pituitary dwarfism, the theatrical possibilities seemed limitless....

THE MATING DANCE Dressed in virginal white, this lonely out-of-towner has never met anyone like hot-to-trot Sandi. An apricot-hued menace straight out of Fatal Attraction, Sandi proceeds to confuse Jeff by repeatedly blowing hot and cold. Urging him to become an “Orange County cowboy” like the pretentious dudes she lays and leaves, Sandi leads Jeff on. Then she pushes him away. Suddenly she shrieks, “Don’t hit me!” Then–she thrives on rejection–she accuses this bewildered stranger of ugly jealousy....

What gives Chicago’s tenor saxophone players their big sound and aggressive energy? Is it our windy city’s lusty, big-shoulders heritage rising from the cement and fog? Whatever the reason, Vandy Harris hits hard; his sound is as clean and solid as stainless steel, and his energy and technical facility are great. Moreover, he’s a violent improviser, shooting off volley after volley of cleanly articulated lines as though he were on fire....

A fascinating if numbing feature-length narrative video by David Blair with remarkable computer graphics and other special effects. The intricate science-fantasy plot, which is narrated in an offscreen monotone by Blair, involves, among many other things, a beekeeper and cinematographer (represented by a photo of William S. Burroughs) who films “the moving spirits of the dead” circa 1914; his grandson (played by Blair), half sister, and brother-in-law; the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, including the Trinity nuclear test site; the moon; the “planet of television”; the Tower of Babel; the “Garden of Eden Cave” (“a town the size of Manhattan beneath the New Mexican desert”); and the gulf war....

An engineer at WFMT for 28 years, most of them good ones, Alfred Antlitz now finds himself running the station during one of the worst. “I never thought I’d be in this position,” he told us. “I almost can’t explain it.” Times used to be nicer. “I remember articles published in national magazines about this ivory tower, how people came here and never left,” said Antlitz, who’s a perfect example. “Today, in some ways, the spirit of the company is the antithesis of the company I remember and I want to get back to it, but with the company on a very secure financial basis, so we’re impeccable in terms of accounting and management and have team spirit again....

Late this week, after ordinary voters had put behind them the issues of the primary election, members of the watchdog group VIADUCT were winding up conferences with experts in the fields of psychology, mythology, anthropology, and political science–part of a far-reaching effort to plumb the meaning of the controversial preelection remark made by State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You want a white mare to sit down with everybody....

At one point in this revue, skinny Will Clinger and Jim FitzGerald make fun of their physiques by posing as “The Buttless Boys,” a pair of British buskers who dance a strutting dance without using their buttock muscles. But in every other respect, these fellows have plenty of cheek, and they exhibit it shamelessly. Clinger is the tall gangly one who looks like a cross between Dick Van Dyke and Bruce Dern; FitzGerald is the dimpled, diminutive pup who recalls 60s folk-music comic Hamilton Camp....

A Baby in Every Crib? “The government steps in and regulates business from time to time,” Hultgren argued. “We regulate business to promote fairness, to promote competition, to eliminate discrimination. We have health policies in the state of Illinois that insure pregnancies, that insure abortions, that insure sterilization. But not for this class of people. It’s estimated that 1 in 12 couples of childbearing age fall into this category.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Until recent uproars over NEA funding, no one questioned very loudly the existence of the NEA. Artist Stan Edwards is hoping that the time is right for a more reasoned discussion of the issue. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His vehicle is a free symposium, entitled NEA Yea or Nay, to take place Saturday, April 20, from 7 to 9 PM in the Edward Crown Center auditorium of Loyola University, 6525 N....

Thanks largely to the efforts of CSO composer in residence John Corigliano, the annual New Music Chicago spring festival features a concert of new orchestral scores for the first time. The Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the training orchestra of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in recent years (again, thanks largely to Corigliano) has taken a committed stand on the performance of new music. The extraordinarily gifted Michael Morgan–recently named principal conductor of the Civic–will conduct the concert, which consists of the most eclectic and interesting program of the NMC festival....

I went searching for a yellow rail this morning. Naturally, it wasn’t there. The bird had been reported from the Lincoln Park Bird Sanctuary on Friday morning. It was hanging around the larger of the two ponds along the eastern edge of the sanctuary. While checking some facts on yellow rails in the Encyclopedia of North American Birds, I came across this intriguing note. Under the heading “Incubation,” it said, “Period of [incubation] and age when young first fly unknown....

MALCOLM X With Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Albert Hall, Al Freeman Jr., Delroy Lindo, and Spike Lee. “Malcolm constitutes the quintessential unfinished text,” notes Marlon Riggs in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image–an excellent recent collection edited by Joe Wood, that is already cited above. “He is a text that we, as Black people, can finish, that we can write the ending for, that we can give closure to–or reopen–depending on our own psychic and social needs....

Selena Johnson lived her final months in mortal fear of her husband. Selena managed to get out of the car, but Ed did too and pursued her. “I turned to see if he was about to shoot me,” she said in the affidavit. “He saw how scared I looked and that’s when he told me he loved me and that he wasn’t going to hurt me. He tried to get me back into the car....

Brendan deVallance has a low opinion of conventional theater. “It’s just so figured out,” he says. “They work it and work it until it’s right, and then they do it 100 times that way. Well, of course they’re going to tell you each time is different, but they’re trying to do it the same way all the time. I’m not.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But in an effort to build a larger audience for both his work and performance art in general, deVallance has incorporated elements of more conventional theater–a set, a narrator, musicians–into his current show at the Randolph Street Gallery, My Eyes Were Filled With Voluntears....

Some of the best performances I’ve seen in Chicago theater during the past five years–the most nuanced, the most focused, the most subtly expressive, the funniest and most touching–have come from Ross Lehman. In roles ranging from a sexual revolutionary headed for a breakdown in Next Theatre’s The Normal Heart to an old Roman slave in the Goodman’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to an egotistical villain in Shakespeare Repertory’s The Tale of Cymbeline, Lehman has consistently displayed a rare mix of passion, puckish humor, economy, and illumination....

This pairing of a grizzled veteran Harlem street singer and a young refugee from the Broadway theater sounds like a PR man’s dream–but they’ve got the chops to live up to the hype. Satan is one-man band Sterling Magee, who’s been playing guitar and percussion on the streets of New York for as long as anyone can remember, but he’s far from the “holy primitive” street-musician stereotype: he lays outrageous percussion explosions–blues backbeats, modern funk, swinging jazz patterns–beneath his urgent, hoarsely passionate vocals, and his guitar playing incorporates everything from traditional Delta flailing to swinging boogie shuffles and swirling, poo-jazz intricacies....

State of the Arts, Part Two Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But not all local arts institutions have been equally shortchanged. Another chart in the report mentions a Chicago Park District tax that goes only to the nine cultural institutions situated on Park District land. The tax took in $30 million in the 1989-’90 fiscal year, a windfall for those lucky arts organizations on park turf–which include the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Field Museum....