“If you sing the music enough, sometimes you stop realizing how it is that you begin and end together. As a matter of fact, there are many times when I have no idea how we all get off at the same time. It’s just a kind of thinking together–it’s really very weird and wonderful. That comes with familiarity, not only with the music but with each other.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER It’s no mean feat to have headed an American nonballet company that’s into its second generation. And Ailey is a distinctly American choreographer, someone who was combining ballet, modern, and jazz idioms decades ago. The all-Ailey evening was meant to demonstrate his diversity, and it did. Opus McShann (1988) and For Bird–With Love (1984) were originally scheduled but had to be canceled when a dancer broke his leg....
FROM THE SECOND CITY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But when we finally got to see Second City, we were disappointed. Maybe it could never have met our expectations. It was always hit or miss, a hilarious sketch followed by a clunker, an inspired improv followed by a predictable groan. By the time we got there Second Cities were sprouting up all over and seriously diluting the talent pool....
It’s been more than a year and a half since Maurci Jackson’s daughter Maurissa was poisoned by eating lead-based paint. But as far as Jackson knows, her old landlord still hasn’t removed all of the toxic paint from the apartment. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That criticism is unfair, counter the mayor’s health advisers, who contend that more children are being screened for lead poisoning under the Daley reign than ever before, and that further progress is being hampered by budget restraints....
When the Vietnamese government sent word last summer that they would allow Lam Ton to visit his native country, it made at least two people happy. The first was Ton, the owner of Chicago’s Mekong restaurants and a veteran of the South Vietnamese army. He left his country by helicopter from the roof of the U.S. embassy in 1975, and he’s wanted to go back to visit ever since. “I missed my family so much,” he says....
Great Lakes Hot Tubs, 15 W. Hubbard: Kurt and Shari were bobbing in the Polynesian half-light and Kurt, pleased with the VIP suite, was flapping his hands in the water. Shari, meanwhile, felt compelled to think about Kurt’s life when he wasn’t with her: Why did he tell her he was wearing a tuxedo the night before? Where was he? Who was he with? Does he see lots of women or one other woman?...
Sun-Times: Shaking Up… There’s nothing novel about a newspaper vowing to describe the forest as well as the trees–“It’s what editors have been telling reporters forever,” Britton told us. He conceded at the beginning of his pep talk that his staff probably would have heard it all before, and he joked about his own cliches. What makes now different, he said, is the state of the paper. Circulation has leveled off at 530,000 after dropping for two years, Britton said; but unless the Sun-Times seizes a “niche” for itself as the paper that day in and day out delivers local news clearly, concisely, and in the context of its readers’ lives, it’s as good as gone....
Press releases we didn’t feel like finishing: “Homer Formby Has an Engrained Love of Wood.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The crisis over Iraq has reminded the U.S. of several things it has tried hard to forget since 1973,” writes James Krohe Jr. in Illinois Times (September 6-12), “that the world is still running out of oil, that what is left will be expensive to recover and often must be pumped from environmentally precious places, that if we don’t pay at the pump for the full costs of delivering oil safely we will pay it in other ways, with dead seals on Alaskan beaches or dead GIs on Saudi deserts....
STORY OF WOMEN With Isabelle Huppert, Francois Cluzet, Marie Trintignant, and Nils Tavernier. Chabrol based his film on a book about an actual woman, Marie-Louise Giraud, who was executed in France in 1943 for performing several dozen abortions. The title of his film, and of the book, is Une affaire de femmes. “Story of women” is a serious mistranslation; a closer approximation might be “women’s business.” While “story” is bland and neutral, “women’s business” would be truer to the film’s vision, in which men, as a result of the French defeat, are largely absent or negative figures....
BUDDAH HAUS This is a candor as refreshing as it is rare. Instead of wasting time defending the supposed flawlessness of his work (as many young playwrights do, ad nauseam), Anderson apparently devotes his energies to developing his craft. His third play, Buddah Haus, isn’t perfect either, by any means, but if Anderson continues to progress at the rate he has from one play to the next, it won’t be long now....
This is the week Georg Solti bids Chicago adieu. Though he’ll be back occasionally as a guest maestro, the Chicago Symphony’s Solit era–a nearly two-decade span during which both he and the orchestra won accolades, new followings, and numerous Grammys–has effectively come to an end. In these farewell concerts the sleek sound machine he’s fashioned over the years will offer the quintessential Solti program (to be repeated in Carnegie Hall later this month): a new work from the conservative wing of the musical establishment (Michael Tippett’s Byzantium), and, of course, a crowning achievement of Austro-Germanic romanticism (Mahler’s Fifth Symphony)....
FALLEN ANGEL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fallen Angel is about one of those people. His name is Will, and he has a band and a trunk full of songs. The problem is, they all sound like other people’s songs. His unimpressive retreads of 1970s groups like Heart, Cold Blood, Bob Seger’s Silver Bullet Band, Edgar Winter’s White Trash, and Fleetwood Mac aren’t bad, they’re just not very good....
The beginning of a breeding-bird survey is like the beginning of a love affair. You just know that this time it’s really going to work. Other springs may have yielded the banalities of robins and redwings, but this is certain to be the year of Cooper’s hawk nests and hummingbird fledglings. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Return of the Bluebirds is currently feeding my dreams....
Greg Brown is the whiskey-and-sandpaper-voiced troubadour whose worldly wit and unabashed hipness (he inserted a reference to Aretha Franklin into a folk song about caring for a sick child) were such a welcome addition to the preciousness of the longrunning NPR show A Prairie Home Companion. Like Dave Van Ronk, Rosalie Sorrels, and a handful of others, Brown refuses to give in to the sweetness-and-light folkie temptation: vocal grit and deceptively pedestrian phrasing and intonation give his love songs (“I Slept All Night With My Lover”) an aching sense of hard-won sanctuary; when he adds his trenchant, brooding social commentary to the mix, the results can be spellbinding (“One More Goodnight Kiss”)....
At the outset of Mozart’s Idomeneo, re di Creta (1781) the king of Crete, stranded at sea, makes a pact with Neptune. Soon after, back on shore, a Faustian music-drama of love, guilt, vengeance, and redemption unfolds. To Elaine Scott Banks, the artistic director of the City Musick, there is only one logical setting in the city for her group’s period instrument presentation of Mozart’s first important opera: the Shedd Aquarium, “amidst the marine life and nautical motifs and with eerie greenish light in the background,” she says....
LOCAL VISIONS: FOLK ART FROM NORTHEAST KENTUCKY A case in point is the exhibit, open through May 22, at the School of the Art Institute’s Betty Rymer Gallery, “Local Visions: Folk Art From Northeast Kentucky.” The accompanying catalog, by exhibit curator Adrian Swain (head of the Folk Art Collection at Morehead State University in Kentucky, which sponsored this traveling exhibit), includes a lengthy essay–in fact, the bulk of the catalog–exploring what might have inspired these artists....
Love at First Sight Not until now did we realize that Hillel Levin, the old editor, had been not just liked but beloved. “There was really high esprit de corps at the magazine, which was Hillel’s doing,” said a frequent visitor then and now. “Hillel made it this big team effort. People were really shocked at this guy’s attitude. They felt condescended to.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Babcock showed up in mid-April....
We could argue all night about whether or not MC 900 Ft. Jesus (who got his name from Oral Roberts’s infamous yarn about seeing a gigantic Christ) truly is a rap artist. I vote yes, but not without noting that his album Hell With the Lid Off is to rap roughly what Captain Beefheart’s Strictly Personal was to 60s blues-rock: namely, a strange and unexpected extension of an established genre. The album is weird–much weirder than, for instance, De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, which I once considered the weirdest of rap LPs....
The music lives. Mingus Dynasty evolved out of a tribute concert held in 1979, just weeks after the death of bassist and composer Charles Mingus, and quickly grew into a going concern: a pool of his former sidemen from which six- and seven-piece groups could be plucked to perform his complex yet achingly pure music. At this point the Dynasty has become a true ghost band–of the musicians appearing in Chicago, only the leader (trumpeter Jack Walrath) ever belonged to Mingus’s regular working unit–but who cares?...
MODIGLIANI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McIntyre introduces his hero by having him tumble to the street with his trousers around his knees. Modigliani has just wreaked mayhem in a fashionable restaurant–jumping on the tables, scattering china and glassware, snatching food, and finally flashing a general before falling through the front window. In the next scene we meet Maurice Utrillo, who is plotting the murder of his mother’s lover, and Chaim Soutine, who is plotting the theft of a beef carcass–not to eat, though both artists complain of chronic starvation, but to paint....
