BUK: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHARLES BUKOWSKI Tight & Shiny Productions Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Charles Bukowski appeared in Ron Mann’s 1985 documentary Poetry in Motion, one could already see the encumbrance imposed on him by the character he created for himself: Henry Chinaski, all-time loser. The one who never wins the pay raise, the girl, the bet, or the fight....
Friday 10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year, Blue Chicago put the spotlight on the west-side sound. This year, its Blues Women Weekend focuses on the south side. “The west side is more straight Chicago blues, like Buddy Guy’s biting guitar style,” says the club’s publicity director, Linda Gain. “But the south side is a little more polished, it’s more R & B and soul....
COWS IN A SNOWSTORM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seymour is a kvetch. His enduring complaint is that he never earned his father’s respect and appreciation. The play opens at a retirement ceremony for his father, Martin, the high school football coach. Then the play flashes back to Seymour’s 15th year–the year he had his first date and tried out for the football team....
This weekend marks Mozart’s 234th birthday, and what better way to celebrate than with David Schrader performing (with the City Musick) the Piano Concerto no. 21 in C Major on fortepiano in a new edition by Richard Maunder, the famed musicologist who reconstructed the Mozart Requiem an C Minor Mass for Christopher Hogwood. If your notion of “authentic” Mozart is the dreadful set of British recordings currently being released by Malcolm Bilson and John Eliot Gardiner, then this performance will be a revelation; unlike Bilson, Schrader does not treat the delicate fortepiano as a modern piano, but allows the instrument to be heard on its own terms with its softer, woodwindlike timbres and subtle articulations....
Galati’s Year? Not at the Box Office Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It appears that Pablo was a colossal miscalculation on the part of the Kennedy Center, and also to some degree on the part of Goodman Theatre management, which decided to send the show to Washington, D.C. In a year when audiences seem more than ever to be spending their hardearned theater dollars on pure entertainment, Pablo and Galati’s other acclaimed production The Grapes of Wrath demand considerable mental application while offering precious little joyous uplift....
ALCESTE The plot line is of course rather thin for late-20th-century audiences. In act one the noble Alceste, upon learning that the gods demand a life for a life, unselfishly offers her own in exchange for that of her ailing husband, Admete. In act two her husband recovers and is distressed to discover his wife’s sacrifice. In act three the royal pair argue at the gates of hell over who will be sacrificed for whom (as expected, Alceste wins)....
Chicago cabaret audiences in the mid-1970s knew Karen Mason as a young show-tune singer with a lot of bravura (and sometimes bathos). But she’s matured into an artist of depth and subtlety during the last decade, which she’s spent in New York performing on Broadway (Jerome Robbins’s Broadway) and off Broadway as well as in nightclubs. (On the new cast album of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s hit revue And the World Goes Round, she sings a caressing and mercurial “Colored Lights” and belts out a dramatically powerful “How Lucky Can You Get,” among other tunes....
ROBERT LONGO The much-talked-about “Men in the Cities” drawings are life-size images of corporate youth: people in their 30s dressed in the standard business attire of the 80s, in contortions and staggering as if having seizures. The large size of the figures and their placement against a completely white ground make for a stark, potent visual effect. It’s like sitting too close at the movies, or standing a few feet away from a billboard, face-to-face with a person who appears to be suffering uncontrollably....
Lonnie Pitchford may well be the most unique young bluesman active today, totally immersed in the most venerable blues traditions. His forte is the single-string guitar, a homemade instrument of direct African lineage that consists of a piece of baling wire nailed to a wall or post, with one end twined around a snuff can that can be turned to change the pitch of the instrument. (Sometimes he actually constructs it in front of the audience....
CHICAGO STRING ENSEMBLE at Orchestra Hall Late in his life, about the time he was compiling anthologies such as the Musical Offering and the Art of the Fugue, Bach finished the mass by adding the other three movements of the Roman ordinary. The overall scope and scale was so grand and the textual liberties and titling so unusual that any practical or liturgical use would have been virtually inconceivable–there was no such thing as a “concert” mass in the 18th century....
Now that Chicago Filmmakers is mainly neglecting new experimental work in favor of documentaries and other Chicago venues are dealing with this area of cinema only intermittently, occasions to keep abreast of the latest developments in this branch of film art are becoming fewer and fewer. All the more reason to be grateful that the Experimental Film Coalition has been screening all of the film entries of the Onion City Film Festival at a private loft since last week and will be showing the festival winners along with other selections at the Film Center on Monday night....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I must admit that your article in this week’s paper about the “Dead Pets Department” [Our Town, July 7] was amazing to see in print because of the fact that I never hear or see anything on the topic. I see at least six dead animals sprawled in the middle of a Chicago area street weekly....
During a closed Capitol Hill committee meeting in late November 1987, Dan Rostenkowski, Chicago’s most powerful congressman, surreptitiously slipped into a federal budget bill an undebated provision that directly affected the pocketbook of everybody in his hometown. Commonwealth Edison’s franchise to sell electricity in Chicago, last renewed in 1948, expires in little more than a year. Several knowledgeable attorneys and the Mayor’s Energy Task Force, after a year’s study, argue that the city needs to act decisively before the end of this year to give appropriate legal notice to Com Ed and preserve its best options for getting electric power at the lowest cost....
To the editors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Besides something like that, though, it’s even more absurd than the “learned treatise” that you quoted said it was: “thirty-nine places of pi suffice for computing the circumference of a circle girdling the known universe with an error no greater than the radius of a hydrogen atom.” Actually, only 35 digits to the left of the decimal are required....
When the word first came down that Philip Roth was at work on his “memoirs,” it sounded like some kind of bad joke. What else (an ungenerous observer might inquire) had Roth been doing for the 30 years of his literary career but producing an ongoing autobiography, picking obsessively through his own past and recycling his life experiences, slightly transformed, as literature? The Facts begins with a letter from Roth, addressed to Zuckerman....
Heather Stern and Marianne Grierson spend most of their time looking for eligible mates. They work the gallery openings, fund-raisers, fancy parties–anywhere they might come upon attractive people of adequate means, intelligence, and character. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But neither of these two is lovelorn herself–Stern’s married; Grierson’s “involved.” They do their trolling on behalf of others. Both sexes. All ages. For a fee....
THE ADORED AND THE ADORNED Gay and lesbian art necessarily reflects these conflicting agendas and constituencies. An off-night presentation in Bailiwick Repertory’s Pride Performance Series, The Adored and the Adorned is a 50-minute performance piece that fuses music, video, and text in order to show, as press materials put it, how “the gay world both thrives on and is diminished by explicit sensuality, which often serves only to mask or shield the important issues of this life....
Psychotherapy is an institution that has had an abundance of (usually self-interested) celebrants, but only a few serious detractors. Now its first abolitionist, Jeffrey Masson, argues that therapy is an edifice constructed in such a way that it endangers all who enter. In his new book, Against Therapy, he is a one-man wrecking crew of considerable energy and intelligence. Maintaining such views in private was one thing; expressing them in the New York Times quite another....
MESSIAH The first excerpts of Messiah were heard in America on Christmas Eve 1815 at the first concert of the newly formed Handel & Haydn Society of Boston. Three years later, the society presented the American premiere of the complete oratorio, and by 1854 it had begun performing the work as an annual Christmas tradition–one that quickly spread throughout North America and has continued to this day. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
IDOMENEO The current production of Idomeneo indicates that the company is also fighting for its artistic life. In the grand scheme of things Chicago Opera Theater has established its niche as a fish swimming near the maw of the Lyric shark, snapping up the morsels that escape. Its stock-in-trade is mounting productions of moderate size in a more accessible and intimate format than is available from its wealthier cousin. The accessibility comes from the use of English translations and appropriate repertory, the intimacy from the comfortable size of the Athenaeum Theatre....
