Posts

John Leguizamo got his show-biz break laying a Colombian cocaine prince on Miami Vice. Now he says that series “did more to denigrate the Latin image than all of Jose Canseco’s speeding tickets”; but he cashed the check. Identity conflicts, part of the baggage of any actor, are especially troublesome to those who, like Leguizamo, are both burdened and blessed by media stereotypes. Having made a name and some bucks in movies like Die Hard 2 and Hangin’ With the Homeboys, the sardonic and volatile comic actor is now focusing on his own work–whose theme is, natch, the ethnic and ethical confusion of being a Latino in the USA....

One more year like this, and we’ll have an institution on our hands. This second annual showcase of avant-garde theater in Chicago is coordinated by Scott Turner, Valerie Turner, James Krulish, and John Oartel–with a bow to Salvador Dali, whose use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big) inspired the event’s name. It runs through August 31 at three different locations: Latino Chicago Theater Company (the Firehouse, 1625 N. Damen); the Curious Theatre Branch (1900 W....

Which toppings? Domino’s Pizza magnate Tom Monaghan “is wonderfully Philistine,” reports James Krohe Jr. in Chicago Times (March/April 1990). “‘The concept of delivering a hot, tasty pizza in 30 minutes or less,’ he has said, ‘is pure and needs no embellishment, any more than a Frank Lloyd Wright design might need a Gothic tower grafted onto it.’ He works in a $2.5 million private office, and when the learned and the powerful gather at his table from around the world, he feeds them pizza....

For a city with a political tradition as rich as Chicago’s, the field of mayoral candidates in the upcoming primaries and the general election beyond is a joke. As far as that goes, this field would be a laughing matter for a city with no political tradition whatsoever. Of course cynicism is all the rage right now, especially where politics is concerned, so that affecting a sharp-witted Roykoesque stoicism appears to be the only way to get through the day....

ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY *** (A must-see) Directed by Paul Mazursky Written by Roger L. Simon and Mazursky With Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston, Lena Olin, Margaret Sophie Stein, Alan King, Judith Malina, and Mazursky. To make matters worse, good adaptations usually compound this problem. As a teenager, I saw the horrific Hollywood versions of The Sound and the Fury and Miss Lonelyhearts shortly before I read the novels, and though ludicrous memories of Yul Brynner’s Jason Compson and Robert Ryan’s Shrike hovered over my initial experiences of those books, the power of Faulkner’s and West’s writing eventually buried them....

Jay Stevens likes to think of himself as a mere chronicler of our recent social history–just the facts, ma’am, you understand. But in this Augustan Age of the new morality, when John Tower is barred from the cabinet for drinking and Judge Douglas Ginsburg’s hopes for a seat on the Supreme Court go up in a haze of marijuana smoke, the author of a book that purports to be a history of LSD in America is more likely to be viewed as a foul-smelling partisan than a neutral scholar....

ADVERSARIES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play’s rapid decline isn’t noticeable at first, because it rides the momentum built up in the early scenes. As Adversaries opens, the ghost of Richard Drury, an attorney, confronts the ghost of William Hillyer, a Confederate soldier arrested as a spy just before the end of the Civil War. The two men step back in time to their first meeting, in Hillyer’s jail cell, where the soldier is trying to persuade Drury to represent him....

AFTER MOUNTAINS, MORE MOUNTAINS: THE HAITI STORIES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Donna Blue Lachman’s current show at the Blue Rider looks at voodoo from a different angle–that of a true believer. After Mountains, More Mountains is Lachman’s autobiographical account of her first visit to Haiti, in 1978, and her initiation into the mysteries of voodoo, told for the most part in the first person (with a little help from Tim Fiori and Salvatore Iacopelli, who play respectively Ghede and Ogoun, two gods from voodoo’s pantheon)....

AMERICAN JAZZ DANCE WORLD CONGRESS ’90 I was curious to see whether these concepts would apply during International Night at the American Jazz Dance World Congress ’90, which featured companies from Germany, Japan, France, and the United States. And despite a few minor surprises, the companies’ pieces did seem consistent with these expectations. What kept them from being boring was that many had enough innovation to provide the “astonishment” that Diaghilev was so fond of....

Friday 6 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A panel on tattooing and piercing, a potentially eye-opening look at the relationship between John Lennon and Brian Epstein, an analysis of lesbian homoeroticism in music videos, and scads of feature films and shorts are on the agenda at the 12th annual Chicago Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival, running tonight through next Sunday at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W....

Friday 6 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tim Miller was one of a gang of four artists who lost their National Endowment for the Arts funds last year because of the sexual nature of their work. This weekend he performs his retrospective work Sex/Love/Stories at Beacon Street Gallery, 4520 N. Beacon. What’s it about? “My dubious goal has been to pull the juiciest, queerest, funniest, and most political stuff from five years of work to share with you, dear audience....

Her voice, bright and sassy, cracks the air: “Butch, hey Butch. Heyyyyyyyyyy!” Butch McGuire’s a mom-and-tot program? Say it isn’t so! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Instead of guys and girls coming here to meet, we’re seeing parents bringing their kids in to see the sight of their old haunts, the scene of their original courtship,” says McGuire. “The so-called ‘singles scene’ popularized by journalists doesn’t exist....

“I’ve only been with this company for four months,” says Balthazar, the clown whose animalistic antics highlight the Cirque du Soleil. “But I’ve been part of its spirit since the beginning.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Twelve years ago, I was in college in Riviere du Loup, Quebec, studying to be a cultural organizer,” Balthazar recalls. “I happened to see a group of clowns....

FLOORSHOW: DONA SOL AND HER TRAINED DOG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sanchez’s mildly surreal, sometimes humorous, sometimes incredibly angry one-act one-woman Fatty Tissue reveals how the protagonist’s obsession with food–so strong she believes her refrigerator is alive and intentionally tempting her–is a way of getting back at her violent father. Though sections of Fatty Tissue seemed too long and the woman’s anger was at times so overpowering it was hard to take, the focus of the work never wavered....

GREATER TUNA A lot of what I would have thought was hilarious in high school seems tedious now. Especially comedies like Greater Tuna that depend so much upon wildly distorted stereotypes for their humor. This kind of mean-spirited, hopelessly intolerant comedy just isn’t as funny as the play’s coauthors–Jaston Williams, Joe Sears, and Ed Howard–seem to think it is. Even when the people they make fun of are the crew of bigots and small-minded folk who populate Tuna, the third smallest town in Texas....

One Sunday in October 1863, a few members of a religious sect called the Spiritual Philosophers headed for a site near Chicago and Western avenues, then the outskirts of town, to check out a prophecy that there was oil on the west side. They brought with them a medium named Abraham James, who walked around for a while, marked three spots with heaps of stones, and finally fell down, apparently in a trance, next to a large tree....

MUD There are three characters in Mud. Mae irons clothes for a living and lives, if you can call it that, with Lloyd. Lloyd is a filthy scum who was adopted by Mae’s father sometime in the distant past. Mae defines her relationship with Lloyd not as family or lovers, but “like animals who grow up together and mate.” Into this squalor enters Henry, an upright twit who distinguishes himself only because he can read and has table manners....

Five Jefferson citations and ten months later, Pegasus Players’ inspired revival of Noises Off is running strong. The cast of Michael Frayn’s combustible backstage comedy has changed almost completely since the comedy opened, and the original Truman College setting has changed to a much more intimate stage in the Theatre Building. Meanwhile, Michael Leavitt’s staging continues to choke laughs from audiences until they can give no more. The play is, in effect, a smarmy little British sex comedy turned inside out: frantic rehearsals and backstage goings-on combined with every ham who ever chewed scenery and every mishap that ever frazzled a director....

For a man who lived almost 800 years ago, Saint Francis of Assisi still has a pervasive influence on the Western world, more pervasive perhaps than any religious figure except Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Many people know him only through pious legends that have him chatting with gentle forest creatures and rebuking wild wolves, or as the ceramic presence that adorns countless backyard birdbaths. But a deeper reason for Francis’s longevity may be the fact that his guileless, open approach to the world and its problems can strike a responsive chord in the people of any era....

Back when the Vietnam war was still a poison dream locked in an ammunition box at the farthest corner of the American basement, a guy who’d returned from those environs with some dire memories described a theme park a fellow vet had envisioned. From the denial-ridden blankness of the 70s, pulp culture has about-faced so maniacally that it out-‘Namlands ‘Namland. Instead of a theme park, though, we have Vietomania, an incredible simulation....