Posts

YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Rassel’s staging offers nothing so bizarre. But this raffish, energetic, very funny production does break from tradition–by avoiding the let’s-pretend-we’re-comic-strip-characters approach this show often falls prey to. Even better, it’s free of the schlock sentimentality that has plagued Peanuts since the mid-1960s, when the strip stopped being a witty entertainment and turned into the bottom-line mass-merchandising phenomenon that has made Charles Schulz (according to Forbes magazine’s estimate) one of the ten richest men in the U....

Sunday starts with somebody yelling under my bedroom window. Usual stuff: motherfucker this and that, I’ll get you nigger, and so on. He’s still shouting out free-form challenges to no one in particular. He comes to a late-model Ford parked at the Marathon station, rummages around in it for a while, slams the door as hard as he can (the force of this almost pushes him over), then goes to the pay phone nearby....

BROADWAY BUBBIES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not that you have to be Jewish to be bored by this show, but it helps to know a few Yiddishisms (schmatte, Oy-vay) and a few words from Jewish culture (Hadassah, kreplach soup, gefilte fish) so that you can understand just how tiresome and old the humor in this show is. Do we really need yet another bit about Jewish mothers and how seldom their children call them?...

Friday 16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michelle Shocked, who’s straight as an arrow, got some nervous laughs from the audience at a New York award show last year when she accepted her trophy for Best New Female Vocalist. “This should have been called the best new lesbian category,” she joked good-naturedly. None of the nominees were actually out of the closet, but a couple of them got their starts in the women’s-music circuit....

Chicago soul music tends to fall into one of two categories: light, danceable pop (Jan Bradley’s “Mama Didn’t Lie,” Dee Clarke’s “Raindrops”) or churchy testifying (the music of Otis Clay, McKinley Mitchell, or Lee “Shot” Williams). Cyrus Hayes combines these extremes and adds a healthy dollop of blues, blowing a boisterous harmonica and prodding his band into a gritty, down-home groove that contrasts with the smoothness of his vocals. He also does soul balladry, dusky and romantic in the urban-contemporary vein....

PATRICE MICHAELS BEDI, JEFFREY COHAN, AND DILEEP GANGOLLI Things had started to change by the time viola da gambist Mary Springfels arrived almost ten years ago and founded the Newberry Consort. Some of her early-music colleagues came to take a look and then stayed. Eventually there were several fine original-instrument groups–the City Musick, the Orpheus Band, His Majestie’s Clerkes. New-music and chamber-music composers and performers also began settling down here, glad not to be part of the east-coast rat race....

THE MUSIC OF ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER IN CONCERT at the Auditorium Theatre October 17-22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oh, yes, I know many opera lovers and serious music buffs will protest that Lloyd Webber appeals to a wide public and that therefore his work represents the lowest common denominator possible. His music is commercial, to be sure, but it has a warmth, vitality, and style that are unmistakably his own....

On my way downtown I asked Barbara downstairs if she’d like to accompany me. I forgot her Sundays are devoted to watching football, but she gave me $100 of her overtime pay to buy her a painting in case I ran into Lee Godie. As I hadn’t seen Lee in almost three months, my hopes weren’t high, but it gave my afternoon more purpose. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Last week former chief justice Warren E. Burger was reminiscing about his years on the Supreme Court before a group of local judges, law students, and law professors at John Marshall Law School. He talked about the time in 1969 when it was his turn to go before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a time when there were no TV cameras to worry about. He only remembers one of the few questions he was asked, which had to do with something Burger felt might come before him on the court....

AFTER TASTE Enlivened by a delightfully supple and melodically rich score by musical director Patrick Sinozich, After Taste charts the rise and fall of a killer craze–a nouvelle-cuisine item called Fatal Food: eat three cans and you’re free of all earthly sorrow. Its inventor is a slimy opportunist named Harvey Lygea (Bob Fisher); this wacko entrepreneur regularly confesses to a pet peanut and cynically believes that “People get what they want....

Nan Charbonneau Exits, but Body Politic’s Drama Goes On Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While the battles raged, some board members feared to speak publicly (and still do), apparently because they were worried that Charbonneau would seek legal redress. Fueling the board’s debate were more than 30 pages of data collected by Body Politic board members and staffers–everything from past-due phone bills to company members’ resignation letters–supposedly documenting mismanagement on Charbonneau’s part....

The “phallic man” must be a really splendid fellow if he wants to feel like a man at all. However, as soon as he has to be something specific and is not allowed to be what he really is, he loses, understandably, his sense of self. He then tries to blow up his self-esteem, which again leads to narcissistic weakening, and so on, ad infinitum. . . . The grandiose person is never really free, first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from the object, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualifications, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail....

The Pravda Records empire spreads far and wide throughout the northwest corner of Wrigleyville, from the label’s almost luxurious corporate offices on Southport to an almost spacious retail store on Clark Street beneath Cabaret Metro. Pravda’s most successful and longest running group is the Service, a hard-livin’, hard-rockin’ outfit whose members include front man and songwriter Rick Mosher, keyboardist (and Pravda capo) Kenn Goodman, and drummer John Smith. The band’s genesis goes back eight years, when all three attended Northern Illinois University in De Kalb....

When gunshots were heard outside a Rogers Park grade school–the guns fired by drug dealers, some barely in their teens–nearby residents were convinced that they had to take control of their community. The call for what activists term “safe school zone” signs goes back to antidrug efforts initiated several years ago by the National Training and Information Center, a national coalition of community groups that’s based in Chicago. Given the increase in drug-related crimes, ranging from robbery to murder, in the summer of 1988 NTIC organized a citywide coalition called Communities Linked for Education and Action Against Narcotics (CLEAN for short)....

Keith Reddin looks like Chekhov on vacation. Chekhov on vacation, as played by Woody Allen. A 33-year-old sometime actor who’s better known for writing plays than for appearing in them, Reddin’s got the Chekhovian head of tousled brown hair and the delicate, boyish, interested face. No pince-nez or beard, though, and no fin de siecle aura of formality at all. Woody-thin and Woody-bookish, Reddin slouches, nearly folded up in his chair, wearing a slouchy sweater over slouchy pants....

During the last school year Roberto, a bright-eyed first-grader, kept a journal of his thoughts and activities at the John Greenleaf Whittier School in Pilsen. At first the journal contained only pictures, but gradually words crept in. In midwinter Roberto* drew a picture of himself holding a tomato with the caption, “I have a tamao.” On May 21 he made this entry: “I sended a leter to my grandma becus she livs in Mexsical so i road her a leter....

THE JUNGLE However, in Lookingglass’s current production, an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle by company member David Schwimmer, this youthful experimentation ends up subverting the text entirely, turning the focus of the project from the story of the immigrant family Rudkos and their horrifying adventures in Chicago’s industrial jungle to the production itself. It’s as if Schwimmer had lost faith in Sinclair’s message somewhere along the way, but was contractually obligated to keep working on the story....

The sixth man is basketball’s version of a military technique dating back to Napoleon: the use of fresh troops, held in reserve, to swing the battle at a critical moment. The Boston Celtics have made a tradition of the sixth man, from John Havlicek in the 60s right up to this season, when Ed Pinckney has started ahead of Kevin McHale, just so McHale can be deployed at those critical moments when the game teeters....

Boxing combines the best elements of sport–its competition, its physical nature, and its pop-culture relevance–in a potion that even the most devoted of sports fans sometimes find too heady. Its appeal is at once easy to explain and as elusive as the silence before the ring of a bell. Great heavyweights, meanwhile, not only reign over a sector of society that prizes competition at its most basic level, but come to epitomize the era to the society in general....

What’s the deal with the historical hiring of Native American Indians to work on skyscrapers? Have they all truly been blessed with a lack of fear of heights? –Robert Wallman, New York Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Mohawks got into the business by happenstance. In 1886 a Canadian company was building a railroad bridge over the Saint Lawrence River near the Kahnawake reservation....