INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL Theatre de la Marmaille and Teatro dell’Angolo In the beginning was not the word–it was the image. Mountains arrived aeons before there were symbols for them. This priority of things over thought was also apparent in the creation of drama–the gods were mimed in ritual before they were addressed in person. That priority still holds. Images speak when words fail; they crystallize discoveries that evaporate if literally stated....
The last three days of a four-day festival, now in its tenth year, that highlights film and video shorts as well as features by women, including documentaries, ant, mation, narrative, and experimental works. Tickets for individual programs are $6, $5 for WIDC members, students, and senior citizens with a valid ID; Film Center programs are $5, $3 for Film Center members; festival passes are also available. Screenings will be held at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W....
“I am a spirit of no common rate, The ghost of Elvis came in August and he was always, of course, blue. August is a blue month–red-blue of the carnal sunset slash across the dusk, new-mown scent of sex and dirt in the grass of the vacant lot; electric blue, like the intolerably hot, perfect parking-lot sky at noon; then there was the deepest mystery in the hours after midnight when you know you shouldn’t be out and your chest is tight with fear and excitement so it hurts–that was a very dark blue....
CANDYLAND: THE SAGA OF HELEN BRACH AND HER PET POODLE SUGAR First, a few real-life facts. Helen Brach, the 65-year-old widow and heiress to the Brach’s Candy fortune, mysteriously disappeared in 1977. Her body was never found. Brach’s houseman, Jack Matlick, came under suspicion but was never indicted. With no corpse, or substantial evidence of murder, it’s hard to indict anyone. Nor can Brach’s will be expedited until she’s declared legally dead....
The whirlwind pianist, composer, visionary, and eccentric Cecil Taylor returns to Chicago. It’s ironic that so many fans of mainstream jazz hold up Taylor (like Ornette Coleman) as an example of the “cacophony” and “formlessness” they decry in free music; it’s ironic because few improvisers have been as organized or as concerned with harmony, dissonance, and the rhythmic pulse. Those are musical issues: Taylor’s art also tackles larger subjects–such as revolution, intimacy, growth and decay, the true nature of truth and beauty–as a matter of course....
One of the more felicitous Chicago Symphony appointments of recent years is that of Michael Morgan as assistant conductor. Only 31, the Oberlin-trained maestro has made tremendous strides since joining the orchestra in ’86. Poised, intelligent, and keenly astute, he is starting to fashion his own musical personality–that benchmark of true musicianship. Interpretively, he may lack the finesse, the wisdom, and the emotional depth of his elders, but as he’s shown on several occasions of late, he knows how to shape a performance, making it at once exciting and coherent....
CRIES FROM THE MAMMAL HOUSE Certain questions haunt this play: Are we our fellow creatures’ keepers? Who’s really behind bars in that larger zoo we call the world? And what are our rights and wrongs as custodians of the planet? Similar questions haunted Arthur Kopit’s The Assignment: The End of the World, another Absolute Theatre production. But those haunting questions, even by the end of Cries From the Mammal House, have not really been answered....
Franz Jackson is a living chunk of jazz history, having grown up playing the first jazz as handed down by Louis Armstrong, then working with a rogues’ gallery of the swing era–including Roy Eldridge, Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson, Cootie Williams and (perhaps his most famous association) the Grand Terrace Band led by Earl Hines. Yet for all that, Jackson is no museum piece, as he proves again on the recently issued Snag It (Delmark), in which 60 years of committed music making overwhelm any genre-specific considerations....
This is The 90’s: First you see the cigar, rolling around between his teeth, chewed to a juicy pulp, but rarely lit. Next you notice the voice, which just barely seems to squeeze out from around the edges of his stogie–lazy, slurred, careening from one phrase to the next, rising from a gravel groan to a near falsetto before erupting in a tiny, delighted, high-pitched giggle. Finally you catch the watery, rheumy, unfocused eyes, seemingly dazed from hour after endless hour of watching television....
Sixty years of intermittent worry and warnings about the deleterious effects of coffee have had some effect on consumption. Over the last 30 years, Americans have drunk less and less, and over the last ten years, decaffeinated coffee has taken an ever greater share of the market. Doctors treating hypertension routinely recommend that their patients cut down on or cut out coffee. And faced with complaints of sleeplessness or general irritability, doctors immediately ask what role coffee plays in the patient’s life-style....
JULIUS CAESAR Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a hero of the people, having just emerged victorious from a civil war. The people wish to crown him, when his colleagues in the Roman senate band together and murder him on the senate floor. His assassination is at first accepted by the masses, who buy into Brutus’s speech that Caesar was dangerously ambitious. But their emotions are immediately swayed in the other direction after that famous speech by Marc Antony (“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”), who implants the idea that Brutus murdered Caesar for ignoble reasons....
LOVE LETTERS ON BLUE PAPER A good agnostic, Victor won’t trust in miracles. His delaying tactic is to work on his unpublished essay on art and democracy, the expression of a reformer’s reluctance to leave behind a messy, unfinished world. (Victor feels especially betrayed by what he sees as the English labor movement’s capitulation to management: “Capitalism has created an enemy in its own image, monstrous like its own.”) Inspired by his socialist hero, the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, Victor hopes this manuscript will be his valedictory, an 11th-hour offering to the botched world he has to leave,...
Lead Story Inmates at a prison in New South Wales, Australia, taking advantage of a wardens’ strike in May, broke into an office and telephoned an order for 18 tons of concrete to be delivered as a prank. While they were at it, they called out for 312 pizzas. (The concrete was sent back, but the prison had to pay for the pizzas.) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Camden County (New Jersey) grand jury declined in May to indict a 102-year-old woman for having shot her granddaughter last December in a dispute over a radio....
D. Shigley, a Chicago photograoher who loved his work, his city, his extended family, and the blues, died in his home December 26 of a heart attack at age 46. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A solidly built, tersely articulate man with a quick, devilish grin and small, sharp eyes, D. seemed to know everyone involved in Chicago’s living workaday culture and the city itself from Homewood to 43rd Street, from Austin to the North Shore....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To the casual filmgoer (or critic)–weaned on bland Hollywood formula, conditioned to being a passive spectator–it’s understandable that such an eclectic film should leave them feeling bewildered. But can’t they appreciate a good joke? Coppola and his crew put one over on the Hollywood bigwigs: This is one of the wildest anomalies in the history of American commercial cinema–a $50 million avant-garde movie....
In his preface to Quentin Crisp’s brilliant memoir The Naked Civil Servant Michael Holroyd points out: “To the English, Mr. Crisp has appeared as one of the more flamboyant inventions of Evelyn Waugh; but his world is closer to that of Samuel Beckett.” Therein lies the source of Crisp’s paradoxical appeal: behind the campier-than-camp appearance and the impeccable manners (“All outsiders are polite to insiders because at best they secretly revere them or at worst fear that they may one day need them”), the British humorist has a fascinating bleak streak, a biting, daintily nihilistic wit all the more provocative for being delivered in Crisp’s insinuatingly sweet style....
THE SHOW HOST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Marcelo Ginero (John Carlos Seda), the general manger of a Venezuelan television station, has just been kidnapped by Carlos (Henry Godinez), a television fan with an ax to grind. At first it seems that Carlos is simply very unhappy with the final episode of his favorite soap, “Tear Apart My Life.” Holding Ginero hostage in a chicken coop outfitted with a half dozen television sets, Carlos forces him to play out a happier ending, one that Carlos believes will influence his own unhappy love life....
While scanning the shortwave radio bands recently, I discovered a station broadcasting five-digit numbers in Spanish. Each number was repeated twice before a new one was broadcast. It was a little strange, but I figured I had stumbled onto the Cuban Lotto numbers station. Then last night I picked up a similar broadcast in English. It lasted about 25 minutes, then ended abruptly. A fellow shortwave enthusiast says these “numbers stations” are a big mystery and may somehow be tied into the CIA or drug smuggling!...
Parents, beware. Your kids may have been standing around a nightclub last Wednesday afternoon telling dirty, racist, sexist jokes. And just to get a job. You might think the Baja is going to be a comedy club, with stand-up waiters and waitresses, but no. This was the scene: most of the 30-odd young people (all of legal age, but many just barely) had already been interviewed, deemed acceptable (that is, probably and potentially pert), and prepped for what was to come....
Returning, after two years’ hiatus, under the auspices of producer Doug Bragan’s Douglas Theater Corp., this third not-so-annual event features 16 non-Equity companies in as many one-act plays, organized in programs of four. The selections range from experimental drama to camp melodrama to medieval farce to musical comedy to good ol’ American naturalism. “One might select one of the four packages because of a particular play included in it,” says a press release....
