Posts

ERNST/WATSON/DANCE It’s great to see talented people stretch. Choreographers Christina Ernst and Sam Watson have been collaborating since 1986, under the aegis of Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble; now they’ve got enough good work for a rich, funny program all their own, with help on the dancing from able-bodied recruits Judy Austin and Richard Havey. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The second couple’s movements are stagy and clunky, sad caricatures of Ernst and Watson’s graceful partnering: Austin clambers onto Havey’s shoulders with painful effort, scaling him as if he were Mount Everest....

HURLYBURLY Cactus Theatre’s revival renews your faith in non-Equity theater–a triumph of casting that yields committed, natural performances worthy of the preinstitutional Steppenwolf. Clearly many well-spent rehearsals have gone into making Rabe’s slice of death stunning and spontaneous. Cactus’s version holds its own even compared to the Goodman’s memorable, star-studded 1984 premiere (a staging that I recall slightly succumbed to the play’s freak-show overkill). Best of Chicago voting is live now....

At about 4:30 AM on the bitter cold morning of Thursday, December 4, 1969, three unmarked police cars and a panel truck pulled away from the 26th Street office of the Cook County state’s attorney and moved like a small funeral procession through the deserted streets of Chicago’s west side. The brief journey of no more than ten minutes brought them to an old yellow-brick two-flat at 2337 W. Monroe. The vehicles parked 50 yards up the street, and 14 officers, clad in civilian leather jackets and fur hats, emerged from the cars....

It’s a dangerous time of year for the Bulls. Their position in the play-offs is secure, but the grueling National Basketball Association schedule grinds away for another two weeks after this weekend. That’s just enough time to allow the team the belief that it can coast awhile before sharpening its game for the play-offs. Thus, the Bulls of late have appeared play-off-ready from moment to moment, displaying sharp execution from time to time, but on the whole they’ve been mentally slack....

TOM AND VIV Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But while Viv was acting the muse she was suffering from an ineptly treated hormonal imbalance; ignorant society doctors (like Sir Frederick Treves, discoverer of the “Elephant Man”) prescribed various starvation diets and mutually potentiating, addictive drugs loaded down with morphine and alcohol. During drug-induced mood swings Viv set fire to hotel curtains, hurled herself onto the steering wheel of a moving car, poured chocolate into a publisher’s letter box (ruining valuable manuscripts), and picketed Eliot’s lectures carrying a placard proclaiming “I am the wife he deserted....

Do you have a favorite Chicago rock band? I sure do, and it’s Tribe, one of the very few acts in this town that truly capture the imagination. Each of their songs is a charge into the unknown, a look into the implications of a few oddly voiced chords, an exhortation to take off one’s blinders and see the world with stunning clarity. Tribe’s music, while enormous in its emotional range, tends to be as nervous as it is optimistic, but the band’s constant jumping from one style to another seems less a centerless eclecticism than an explosive urge to be everywhere at once, to leave no stone unturned in the search for life and newness....

UNSUNG COLE Unsung Cole follows in a growing tradition. In the 70s, Ben Bagley’s revues and recordings reviving Porter proved you can treasure the musicals’ songs without keeping their books. Indeed, only Anything Goes and Kiss Me Kate are regularly revived, and Silk Stockings and Can-Can are better known as films than shows. The world has forgotten Hitchy-Koo, See America First, Leave It to Me, You Never Know, and Red Hot and Blue–at least until show-biz resuscitator John McGlinn decides to revive them....

YERMA A thirsty soul in a dry time, Garcia Lorca wrote poems and plays (The House of Bernarda Alba and Blood Wedding) that seethe with the frustrations of a man poisoned by his soil. Garcia Lorca grew up in Andalusia, a land of blood feuds, barren land, and Catholic ecstasies. Typically, he wrote: “Many Spaniards live between walls until the day they die, when they are taken out to the sun....

An Architect Turns to Words “I went to the museum a year ago, and it was gone. They just erased it. I had done everything you’re supposed to do. I stayed in touch with the museum. When they got a new director, I wrote the director. But in four or five years everyone connected with the project was gone. So they decided to do a new space somewhere else and design it in-house....

It was winter 1980, nearly two years after the people of Iran had surprised even themselves by toppling the shah and then had their brief moment of freedom snuffed out by Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers. Amir (not his real name) and some of his friends had driven out to the huge Behesht-e Zahra cemetery south of Tehran, where tens of thousands of people had gathered to hear a speaker from the Mojahedin, the strongest of the organizations opposing Khomeini’s government....

SOWERS OF MYTH Of course the Communist Party has had a strong influence on artists’ careers in each of these countries. In Poland, for example, until 1989 graduation from a party-approved school was required in order to work as an artist. Abakanowicz has written that though she hated the school’s professors and teaching methods, she nevertheless remained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw because the diploma was necessary for membership in the Polish Artists’ Union, without which an artist could have no career....

SPIC-O-RAMA: A DYSFUNCTIONAL COMEDY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Or will it? The characters in Spic-O-Rama (directed and cowritten by Peter Askin) are Latino, like their creator. Because Leguizamo specializes in offbeat, quirky, even downright weird people who are also Hispanic–Spic-O-Rama depicts six members of a Colombian-Puerto Rican family in Queens, New York, gathered for the wedding of their eldest son–he’s sometimes accused of perpetuating Hispanic stereotypes of thugs, bimbos, and self-degrading Anglo wannabes....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anthony Adler’s review of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (Reader, 3 February) spoils his otherwise astute observations with the throwaway and inaccurate claim for the “futurists’ affinity for fascism.” As a matter of fact, despite Marinetti (the self-declared “leader”) and his ardent imitation of Mussolini, art and culture in Italy at the time were not harnessed to the services of a “Ministry of Propaganda” to the extent that they were in Nazi Germany, where any artistic experiment was immediately denounced as decadent....

Is Kenneth Josephson getting serious? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But since the mid-1980s Josephson has been making periodic trips to England. “I’m really taken with the visualness of the landscape there,” he says. “I’m drawn to photograph it. It’s very compact–things change quite rapidly in the landscape. I especially like the moors.” His latest trip, in 1990, took him to southwest England, to the diverse landscapes of Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset....

You know this voice. Deep and flat, with hollow authority and exquisite timing, it wheedles, whines, pontificates. It moans, chuckles, trembles, pleads, patronizes. In recent months it was hard not to hear it on the radio, selling Edwardo’s pizza (“This man is lying through his flossed teeth”), First American Bank (“I want you to name this the Bob and Maggie Gazinski Bank!”), or Empire Carpets in miniature dramas that left you smiling in spite of yourself....

One doesn’t generally think of the bass clarinet as anything more than bottom-end reinforcement for a wind section within a larger ensemble, and certainly not as a solo instrument that can stand on its own. That was before Dutch bass clarinetist Harry Sparnaay came along. Sparnaay has completely rethought the possibilities of the instrument and the result sounds like a combination of the entire woodwind family. With giant register leaps in a single bound, Sparnaay’s playing at times resembles that of a stride pianist, so quick and effortless are his extreme rhythmic shifts....

The duo House of Freaks is basically the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of Jack Nicholson’s chicken salad sandwich in Five Easy Pieces: Order your basic flaccid rock band, then hold the keyboards and bassist and stick the lead guitarist between your legs. Bryan Harvey and Johnny Hott play guitar and drums respectively, and sing about sex and decay, casual inbreeding, and the impassivity of Fate–the futility of life generally, as perceived by certain luckless denizens of the south....

Last Dance for Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble Chicago’s shrinking dance scene suffered another blow last week with the demise of the 11-year-old Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble. Members of the dance community responded to the news with regret. “I think it’s unfortunate,” says former member Timothy O’Slynne. “My heart goes out to the dancers in the company.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Along with artistic problems, the ensemble faced what its administrative staff considered unwinnable financial and marketing struggles....

MEASURE FOR MEASURE Angelo’s hard-liner rationale is that “We must not make a scarecrow of the law.” Almost casually, he sentences Claudio to death, saying “‘Tis one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall.” But it turns out that the lustful Angelo is as capable of sin as Claudio, When Isabella pleads for her brother, Angelo erupts with a lust he never knew he harbored; once Isabella’s purity has perversely ignited his prurience, he tells her he’ll spare her brother’s life if she’ll submit to him....

To the editors: The “bizarre fantasy” described in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s misguided capsule review of The Navigator [September 15] is in fact one of the more serious attempts to deal with the AIDS crisis on film yet, although this is not apparent from anything that Rosenbaum has to say about the movie in his review. Perhaps Rosenbaum expects his readers to be automatically clued in by the Black Death subject matter, but to ignore in the review the issue of how successfully the director Vincent Ward treats his subject, AIDS, is to betray the whole point of the movie....